bullet">Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2017. "Conceptualizing e-Learning." In e-Learning Ecologies: Principles for New Learning and Assessment, edited by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, 1-45. New York NY: Routledge.

Learning and New Media

The chapter argues that learning is inseparable from the media through which meaning is produced, circulated, and taken up, and that contemporary digital media demand a corresponding transformation in pedagogy. Historically, mass media aligned with didactic schooling: knowledge flowed from authoritative producers to passive consumers, reinforcing hierarchical relations between teachers and students. While new digital media are often assumed to be educationally transformative, the authors stress that technologies alone do not change learning. When absorbed into traditional pedagogies, digital tools merely reproduce transmission-based instruction and standardized testing, a pattern confirmed by decades of research showing limited learning gains from technology use per se.

Instead, the chapter identifies seven pedagogical affordances opened by new media that enable a genuinely “new learning.” These include ubiquitous learning beyond fixed times and spaces; multimodal meaning-making that integrates text, image, sound, and data; and active knowledge production in which learners function as researchers, authors, and designers rather than consumers. New media also enable recursive feedback through continuous formative assessment, collaborative intelligence grounded in social and distributed cognition, and metacognitive reflection on disciplinary practices. Finally, they make differentiated learning more feasible by supporting personalization, adaptive pathways, and productive diversity rather than one-size-fits-all instruction.

Together, these affordances shift education toward participatory, reflexive, and socially grounded learning ecologies aligned with contemporary media cultures. The chapter concludes that the challenge is not simply to adopt new technologies, but to enact pedagogies that transform relations of knowledge, agency, and assessment in ways that keep education relevant to a digitally mediated world.

Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2015. "Learning and New Media." In The Sage Handbook of Learning, edited by David Scott and Eleanore Hargreaves, 373-87. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage.