Transmedia Skills Education and Learning in the Age of Emerging Competencies. Introduction

Abstract

The use of collaborative media engages people in a continuous process of learning and exchange, favouring the emergence of new skills and competencies that no longer belong only to the traditional assets of literacy, such as schools and families. Every generation develops blended competences under the influence of new tools and communication frameworks. On the one hand, most people have started to define their own social life-streams using the Internet, social networks, and personal (wearable) devices in different environments: at school, at work, at home, for leisure and spare time. On the other hand, technologies and digital-based learning represent just one side of the education process. The comfort that (the uses of) technologies offer often creates a false sense of successful education if technologies are not adopted in a transversal way to properly support learning activities and the growth of transdisciplinary competencies.

This issue of the IJTL observes, describes, and analyses how education, in both formal and informal learning environments, can rethink, reconsider, and reinvent technologies, social practices, traditional environments and collaborative media, in order to offer transversal learning strategies favouring emerging competences and transmedia skills. Six articles approach education and transmedia skills from different points of view presenting experiences, case studies, and practices in Europe, South America, and Asia.