Media and Information Literacyand Intercultural Dialogue - Nordicom

Divina Frau-Meigsfurther illustrates distributed cognition at work: the learners’ interactions withtheir environment are not the property of a single individual but the resultof multiple finalized activities, including with media artefacts Salomon 1994;Perkins 1995). The learners prove capable of articulating knowledge (contentlevel) and pertinent information search (access, validation...) in such a way asto construct their own understanding. But the learners’ context creates constraintsthat have to be dealt with, as each cognitive act is affected by the levelof agency and finality of the specific activity, and the design of the tools usedto perform it (Legros D. et Crinon 2002; Nicolle 2004; Liquète, Delamotte andChapron 2012;).Observation of eportfolio as a quasi-transliterate situation over time showsthat learners increasingly integrated a number of outputs and editorializedtheir own content, such as media biographies, exchanges of best practices,collaborative outputs, blogs and heuristic charts as part of their collective andindividual learning strategies. Various dimensions of cognitive and social relevanceshow the shift from fragmented competences to a complex aggregationof finalities that are truly enhancing for the learner. These finalities may explainthe motivational drive for learners to engage in strategies that mobilize competencesand tools. They may help bridge the current gap between the variouslevels of literacies as they establish a repertoire of strategies for e-presence andfor making-sense of the learning experience.From Competences to FinalitiesAs vectors of representation and supports for diffusion, e-portfolios are engagingnarratives that learners use for their construction as professionals andsocial people, involved in culture as “cognitive network” (Donald 1991).Cognitive Patterns of Use and Social Relevance ReflectingLearners’ NeedsThe driving force behind the e-portfolio is the learners’needs that motivatesthem for finalized activities of a complex order. According to AbrahamMaslow’s hierarchy of needs (1970), they are not basic or first order needs(survival, safety…) but rather relate to growth or second order needs (self-esteem,aesthetics…). They can be summed up in terms of socialization theory byseveral important trends that show the effective impact of competences whenrecombined with finalities (Frau-Meigs, 2011).178