Hybridisation of Education: leaving the Echo room

This paper presents a new systems theoretical model about how we adequately can describe education on the level of the classroom after the introduction of digital media and wireless networks. For centuries school-classes has worked as walled educational interaction-systems, but now under influence of the digital revolution, they are populated with – and invaded by - cyborgs who can interrupt, contribute to, or initiate interaction systems that transcends the room’s four walls, making the educational situation more fragile, vulnerable and complex than ever. The paper discusses the phenomena with departure in the action research project Socio Media Education. We argue that the new cyborg-reality – i.e. complex of digital technology and human beings - turns education into a social hybrid. The main feature of this hybrid is a new nexus of the community (the social system), social networks (the social environment) and mediating technology (the social media). Further we argue that while the old classroom function essentially as an echo room, the new one function as a room of dissonance. The pedagogical consequences of all this is only vague at this point, but one thing seems clear: The farewell to the echo room will have huge educational impact.