No 11, October 2022

The purpose of this issue of Mediations and Mediatizations is to examine the dynamics of pole or social hubs in the educational environment and among learners. It addresses the specificities of hubs and social hubs at the intersection of education and communication: identity processes and belonging to a group or an institution, technical and non-technical mediation practices, info-communicational approaches, educational continuity, and lively questions in education and organizations. This issue comprises six research articles, a practitioner article, a discussion and debate article and an interview.

Learning and teaching with digital technology are activities to be studied and compared to the support spaces for these digital practices and the corresponding social fabric. We propose a study of the porosities of digital uses between situated spaces, namely the private and educational spheres, for learners or their teachers. In the end, do teachers with strong digital educational practices in a school contexthave strong personal digital practices to feed them or vice versa? Similarly, are learners with strong personal digital practices more apt to learn with digital at school and more motivated by the instrumentation of educational devices? To answer these questions and study all forms of porosities between private and educational spheres, we use the results of a survey on the uses of digital technology among learners from college to university and their teachers. We demonstrate that several forms of porosities exist, with a direction of transfer most often well defined. Finally, these situated spaces and the related porosities can be indicative of social and educational hubs, as well as a source of prescriptions for a better consideration of digital technology in education.

We are interested in the professional development of teacher trainees in a distance learning environment via a platform that appears to be a social and educational hub (Gobert, 2009, 2020). We approach the question of development by articulating two theories: Bronfenbrenner's ecological approach and Rabardel's instrumental approach. These two theories perceive development as the product of the mutual interactions of the subject with its environment. Beyond the simple mastery of the digital tool, we seek to show how the appropriation of a digital environment contributes to professional development. We study the hypothesis that the subject-learner (here a trainee teacher) interacts with the components of this environment and that it is during these interactions that he learns, builds and constructs himself. The results show that changes in the characteristics of the environment caused by the integration of an external artifact (the video), influence the co-construction of digital culture.

The study of a pedagogical device, known as CurriQvideo (at the Inspé of Nice), gives a prominent place during the primary school teacher pre-service training to natural and cultural heritage. The device integrates creative pedagogical uses of digital technology and artificial intelligence, which allows us to envisage increased spaces of communication around the stakes of sustainable development goals (SDGS)in the classes of the 21st century future teachers  as well as in the Inspé pre-service training campus where CurriQvidéo was developed. We show that CurriQvideo is making it possible to create a crossroads of learning which offers new potentialities in considering the student registered in the MEEF courses and can facilitate the development of a contemporary pedagogy that lies between education and communication.

Our paper presents and analyzes a device, progressively set up, of a digital space of exchanges in a French higher education training intended for the profession of pedagogical engineering answering a fictitious call for project. We try to demonstrate, by relating one year of observations, that this intentional training practice on the part of the teacher shows all the characteristics of a social hub (Gobert, 2009, 2020) in training but also in the six months that follow it. Moreover, we testify that the social hub thus builds professional practices of former students who are now practitioners since the interactions are still effective long after the training.

Since 2019, the Pix online platform has been used to teach "digital skills" in the French school and university curricula. The study of this platform and its characteristics relating to gamification, questions the challenges of these new forms of education. We carried out a survey on two cohorts of students to evaluate their methods of appropriation, observe their results,  and compare these results with traditional teaching. The results of our survey make it possible to analyze the issues raised by the gamified platform of education in the modification of educational content, in relationship with the teaching authority and the new learning posture.

In recent years, special attention has been paid to Personal Learning Environments (PLE), which, due to their characteristics, have emphasized the construction of information, interaction and communication nodes. Considering the extensive bibliography related to the challenges of teaching and learning in times of Covid-19 and PLEs, this research aims to analyze how virtual education students construct their PLE, with special emphasis on creating social hubs in hybrid contexts. This study is carried out in the Mexican context through the validated and adapted CAPPLE questionnaire considering higher education students in virtual education. The construction of a hybrid learning model must consider the balance between virtual and face-to-face PLE, as well as the students' digital literacy level. The results yielded information on the organization and communication that allows the construction of social hubs, which may lead to the creation of communities of practice.

This contribution based on a case study of Mohammed Premier University, Oujda (Morocco), aims to describe and understand the significance of the online teaching-learning experience since the health crisis. It is a phenomenological research that concerns two types of subjects, teachers and learners. In the light of this context, some conditions to implement a university-wide integrated hub that allows systematic and homogeneous incorporation of all the resources, devices and digital solutions emerge.

Many educational institutions  are just like social hubs. On the learning market, these institutions implement social hubbing activities on a massive scale. In addition to networking and communication, they compete  using initiatives to enhance the image of a meaningful meeting place and. Optimistic biases such as illusions of control and competence appear in these contexts where the pedagogical device and situation are inseparable from technical and interpersonal mediation activities.

This interview with Jean-Luc Soret, director of the association "Visa pour l'image - Perpignan", aims to speak about the evolution of a cultural structure in media education since the beginning of its history. By evoking the missions of the structure, the phenomenon of local concentration and global influence, as well as the social integration in the mediation devices, it explains the characteristics of an educational, cultural, and social hub.