No 5, January 2021

Education systems, from school to university, are facing a context of profound changes that are transforming teaching practices and formal learning. With the ambition of enabling everyone to learn, do, be, and decide, individually and collectively, in a complex world in perpetual motion, institutions encourage the implementation of collaborative approaches. At the heart of these challenges, digital technologies are also seeing their diversity expand rapidly. New-generation interfaces such as tangible, mixed reality, or robotic interfaces modify interactions with others and knowledge by offering alternative human-computer interaction paradigms to those offered by screen-keyboard-mouse interfaces. The objective of this fifth thematic issue, deliberately interdisciplinary, is to question the impact and place of digital technology - including new-generation ones - in collaborative learning. Interactions with knowledge, with others within learning or teaching communities, and digital systems themselves are in turn at the center of the authors' focus in this issue. Their twelve contributions, through complementary approaches, increase the corpus of empirical and methodological knowledge. They examine collaborative approaches among teachers, the commitment to collaboration among learners in face-to-face or distance learning, and the resulting construction of learning, in light of the systems' influence on it. This allows identifying several directions for further work on new digital interfaces and interactions for collaborative learning.

Recently, many technological innovations have appeared in education. Two of these technologies, virtual reality and augmented reality, interest us particularly. Virtual reality allows oneself to fully immerse in a universe entirely designed with unreal and digital objects using a headset. On the other hand,  augmented reality allows, with glasses or a mobile, to add digital elements to reality, mainly by superposition (Wang, Callaghan, Bernhardt, White and Peña-Rios, 2018). This article is the result of a literature review on virtual and augmented reality in education. Firstly, the article aims to deepen our knowledge of the field to address the relevance and effectiveness of this type of artifact in education and to identify principles that can guide educational artifacts in virtual and augmented reality. The literature review methodology is based on the EPPI (Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Co-ordinating) method. The results are presented by themes such as motivation, immersion, collaboration, and design.

The implementation of a digital pedagogical innovation project led by the library of a University (designated “LR” in the survey) was the opportunity to conduct an exploratory survey on the conditions for implementing interprofessional collaborations between lecturer-researchers and librarians. We wondered why lecturer-researchers deeply involved in their research projects, their teaching responsibilities, and their administrative work could get involved in a collaborative project by definition uncertain and time-consuming. We formulated the hypothesis that we had to reconstruct the schemes of perception and appreciation (Bourdieu, 1992) of their profession because this is where the logic of their professional investments lies. Heuristic hypothesis: the lecturer-researchers' commitment to collaborating takes on meaning as they share the same "professional ethos" (Fusulier, 2011), leading them to implement collaborative professional strategies. The results' presentation first returns to the socio-professional conditions on this ethos's production before describing its content and the correlation between ethos and interprofessional collaboration.

Digital technology is developing, particularly in schools, where educational policies have made it one of the priority levers. The effective use of digital educational technologies is essential for students to achieve their learning goals. Therefore, it is essential to gather the perceptions of the main users, i.e., teachers and students, on the ease of using these new technologies in the classroom. To our knowledge, so far, no usability evaluation questionnaire for French-language digital interfaces was adapted explicitly for young students. K-Uses is a measurement scale to evaluate the perception of usability of young users. This measurement scale is based on the model presented in the ISO 9241-11 standard, to which we have added the Nielsen "learnability" criterion. This article presents the construction and the first elements of the K-Uses with children aged 9 to 11. The method used consisted of reviewing existing usability questionnaires, pre-tests with teachers and students involving three evaluators, and an exploratory analysis of data collected from 127 students. The results are promising and show satisfactory levels of validity and reliability.

This article presents the first online English course on Moodle's learning management system at the University of Paris, which integrates students' informal practices. The use of extracts from films whose plot is set within the professional financial environment (FASP) as teaching material is adapted to students in the first year of an Economics and Management degree and allows us to integrate informal practices in the English course in a more formal context. This familiarity with the content, topics, and online asynchronous interactions means that students become expert learners, while the course's digital format encourages new interactions. Our results are based on students' data regarding their perception of the course and their language learning.

In this contribution, we study a system of assistance for success, driven by the ORE law (Orientation and Success of Students) and focused on students' success and integration in the first year of the License. We are initiating a reflection on this device and - more broadly - on the educational devices by engaging in a dialogue sustained by our respective backgrounds and statuses as Senior Lecturer and Educational Engineer. Through an ethnographic approach, focusing on field materials (educational storyboards, logbook of sessions, reports of educational meetings and sessions), we outline this device's ecosystem based on three aspects: the project, collaborative learning and hybridization. We finally highlight promising lines of thought, inspiring for other learning situations, other educational systems, other disciplines, and even other institutions.

Connected teacher networks have grown significantly in recent years and define themselves as contributing to their members' professional development. However, their effects differ greatly depending on the collective and according to the individuals. This study examined the Twictée network, which brings together several hundred French-speaking elementary and secondary school teachers implementing an innovative system for teaching spelling and exchanging remotely. The analysis covers interviews conducted with nineteen teachers over two school years. Results show that the Twictée network can be defined as a professional learning community and highlights four participants' profiles according to the nature and intensity of their involvement. The dynamics of change, when they exist, relate mainly to methods of educational organization and the integration of digital technology into teaching practices. Identity changes are occurring among the most committed actors in the community.

As part of the e-TAC project "Tangible and Augmented Environments for Collaborative Learning", a questionnaire survey was conducted online among teachers of cycles 3 and 4 in Moselle (France) to better describe their collective work practices peers and in class, with or without digital technology. By analyzing the 972 responses obtained, we address two main questions: What are the categories of practices declared by teachers and the place of digital tools and resources in them? On what depends on the frequency of group work by their students at school and college? Our statistical processing of data on school and college teachers' practices allowed us to identify four categories of variables associated with the groups' practices. Results show they are aggregated along two paradigmatic axes (teacher/learner, self-centred/heterocentric). On the other hand, the analysis of the predictive power of six categories of group work variables shows that the impact of the use of digital tools and resources ultimately proves to be very secondary.

In a context marked by the implementation of educational technologies in schools in France and equipping elementary schools with interactive whiteboards (IWBs), this research aims to study the effect of this device's pedagogical use on teaching practices in elementary schools. Seven teachers in three public elementary schools in Strasbourg were monitored and observed for this research. Two data collection instruments were used: individual semi-structured interviews and direct classroom observations. The results show that the use of IWB induces transformations in the teaching practices of school teachers. These results also show that the IWB is not used to its full potential and that teachers perceive that specific training is a factor favouring the exploitation of all the IWB's functionalities.

This article describes the transposition of a paper prototyping activity for the design of video games initially taking place in a face-to-face mode into a remote setting as part of a blended curriculum. The emergency switch to digital mode led us to mediatize face-to-face tangible communication to a distance mode, without any possibility for a global redesign of the educational scenario.

As part of a graduate course, six students in Educational Studies engaged in a knowledge-building process, in-class and online, using the Knowledge Forum and Google Documents, around the theme of digital equity. Following this experience, one question arose: how can we maximize a hybrid knowledge building community's functioning to foster knowledge co-creation? This reflection includes the different regulation processes, the affordances of digital tools, and the mutual influences of knowledge building contexts. Two digital tools to facilitate regulation within the community are presented.

From our point of view, online education is inherently a mediated collaborative activity, even more so when it is based on active pedagogy and involves student interaction. The tools available to teachers are multiple, sometimes complex, and are organized into a system that must be analyzed in order to understand an activity such as an online debate. In this article, we propose the analysis of such a situation in the framework of the instrumental approach (Lonchamp, 2012; Rabardel & Beguin, 2005; Rabardel, 1995) in order to show how the notion of competence, as proposed in this framework, can allow us to think about the alignment between pedagogical activities, the targeted competencies and the evaluation of them.

Mireille Bétrancourt is a professor of Information Technology and Learning Processes at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Geneva (Switzerland), where she heads the Training and Learning Technologies Unit (TECFA). Her work's general focus is on designing digital educational resources from a cognitive and ergonomic perspective and the uses of digital technologies in different training and teaching contexts. In this interview, she underlines the importance of techno-pedagogical congruence of new sensory-motor interactions with the learning task's requirements and the school context in which they are used to evaluate their real contributions better.