1.1. Social Skills within the Digital Context
By considering what commonly identify an education environment based on a Community of Practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991) we must rise the rank of environmental and relational attributes, which, in our case, are totally digital. A fitting observation by Baldacci (2010, p. 93) may guide our investigation line, especially for disentangling ourselves amid the multiple aspects of cognitive processes and knowledge building:
“When we learn something, let’s suppose a knowledge to be used in a certain task, consequently we tend to learn the context of that learning experience. This learning-of-the-context lays on a higher logical level then the knowledge level itself1.”
The digital context is our ground of exploration; thus, it may be useful to ascertain if a sound and established skills-oriented focus can still help us to theoretically and pragmatically frame our work. The European Parliament define skills as “a combination of knowledge, skills and attitudes appropriate to the context” (2006, Annex). Other proposals define what skills are by emphasizing their aspects as “emerging properties strictly linked to the contexts2” (Cepollaro, 2008, p. 30) and highlight the nature of “situated process” (Trinchero 2012, p. 45); therefore, it is appropriate to consider them “within a timeframe and a social context3” (Cantoni, 2014, p. 62). Even the design of a school curriculum is required to deal with “what students learn in formal and non-formal contexts” (Da Re, 2013, p. 27), insofar skills under evaluation “cannot be isolated from the interactions within which they emerge4” (Cepollaro, 2018, p. 50). The idea of skills as a result of situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991), which is inseparable from a social dimension visible in time and space, does not seem to have permeated into the European debate at national levels. Notwithstanding the recommendations of the E+ program aimed at promoting international observations on the skill ground, teachers in the EU still deal with assessment habits and models not yet grounded to correlate the skills with the new digital context5. Indeed, school communities’ habits seem to persist on the traditional teacher-student dichotomy. As revealed by the situated learning approach (Lave & Wenger, 1991), which has driven the debate around communities of practice over the past 25 years, we cannot set aside the educational setting shaped by tangible and intangible elements, a variability of relation, substance, effect, form, number, originality and replicability. Therefore, an epistemological approach should necessarily frame them.
Consequently, in this paper, we will associate the specific SNSs features and affordances to those ‘cognitive skills’ teachers tried to stimulate when imposing those media.