An E-competence Profile for Teachers in Higher Education

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324 Int.J.Cont.EngineeringEducationandLife-LongLearning,Vol.20,Nos.3/4/5,2010

Copyright 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

An e-competence profile for teachersin higher education

Andra Belliger* and David Krieger

Institut fr Kommunikationsforschung (IKF),

Morgartenstrasse 7, CH-6003 Luzern, Switzerland

Email: [email protected]

Email: [email protected]

*Corresponding author

Abstract: Competence is normally ascribed to individuals as a qualification on

the basis of the requirements of role definitions and job profiles. Competence,however, can also be ascribed to organisations. Educational institutions, forexample, have the competence to certify, a competence that individual teachersdo not have. In addition to this, competence is increasingly being ascribed totechnologies. Automated knowledge management and e-learning systems arecompetent to evaluate the relevance and quality of information, to assess skills,interpret learning preferences, suggest learning paths and even to assist indecision making. This raises the question of how the complex interaction ofhuman individuals, organisational processes and structures, and intelligenttechnologies can lead to a new understanding of the competence profile ofteachers in higher education. The Actor Network Theory offers a model ofhybrid, network-based forms of social order that can be used to definecompetence as a quality equally distributed among individuals, organisationsand technologies, and which is not ascribable to any one of these alone.

Keywords: e-competence; new media competence; e-learning; knowledgemanagement; Web 2.0; organisational strategies; standards and levels ofe-competence; education; teachers; teaching skills.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Belliger, A. andKrieger, D. (2010) An e-competence profile for teachers in higher education,Int. J. Cont. Engineering Education and Life-Long Learning, Vol. 20,Nos. 3/4/5, pp.324336.

Biographical notes: Andra Belliger is Director of Learning Services of theTeachers Training University of Central Switzerland Lucerne and Co-Directorof the Institute for Communication Research IKF Lucerne, Switzerland. Sheis also Director of the Master Programs in Educational Technology andE-Learning and Knowledge Management offered by those institutions. Shehas published widely on new media, e-learning, knowledge management,Actor-Network-Theory and social communication.

David Krieger is Director of the Center for E-Learning of the TeachersTraining University of Central Switzerland Lucerne and Co-Director of theInstitute for Communication Research Lucerne, Switzerland. He is an expert inthe area of new media and social communication with special focus on systemstheory, semiotics and intercultural communication.


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An e-competence profile for teachers in higher education 325

1 Educational takes place in hybrid, network-based organisations

Digital media play an important role in almost every area of society in business,

politics, art, science and education. The small e can be found everywhere e-business,

e-government, e-health, e-learning, etc. The thesis that digital media are not qualitatively

new, but merely a quicker, more efficient and cheaper extension of traditional media,

fails to take account of the fact that the integration of human beings into technologies and

complex, network-based organisations has brought forth a global knowledge and

information society and has changed social life and working practices in all areas.

New and fundamentally different competencies and abilities are being demanded by

employers and new skills are becoming a condition for success in all professions.

McLuhan (1964) pointed out that the medium is the message and that significant changes

in forms of communication bring with them significant changes in society, culture, forms

of social interaction and institutions. In a society that consists not of human beings, but ofcommunications (Luhmann, 1995), the dominant forms of communication influence all

areas of social activity and demand that individuals change and adapt. Digital media and

automated information and communication systems have changed not only the way in

which organisations function, but also the meaning of competence itself.

Competence is normally ascribed to individuals as a qualification on the basis of the

requirements of role definitions and job profiles. Competence is generally considered

to consist of knowledge, skills, motivation and experience, that is properties that an

individual demonstrably has or can acquire. With regard to teaching staff in educational

institutions, traditional pedagogical competencies have been extended to include

e-competencies. A recent study of the European Union (Dondi et al., 2006, p.24) offers

a typical list of such e-competencies:

Ability to match students learning needs with e-learning models.

Ability to take into account students learning needs to select appropriate learning

resources and media.

Ability to use the internet as a learning resource.

Ability to provide all the necessary administrative support for the different aspects

of e-learning.

Ability to select the suitable medium for the learning programme.

Ability to design the adequate e-learning reference materials.

Ability to prepare real-time session.

Ability to schedule a virtual session.

Ability to design consistent online monitoring and evaluation tools.

Ability to adopt a learner-centric/learner-based approach.

Ability to deliver and manage a real-time online session.

Ability to deliver and manage a virtual session.

Ability to manage virtual classroom tools effectively.


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326 A. Belliger and D. Krieger

Ability to provide learners with technological expertise.

Ability to use consistent and coherent online monitoring and evaluation tests.

Abilitytoretrieverelevantevaluationdatafromtheavailableonlineevaluationdevices.

It is obvious that this conception of competence still is largely oriented toward individual

teachersandnottothecomplexorganisationalandtechnologicalsystemsinwhicheducation

actually takes place. Is it sufficient to still speak of competence as a qualification of

teachers alone and to attempt to address the problem of optimising education by

extending individual skill expectations? In fact competence has organisational as well as

personal aspects. In this context, competence often means certification, authorisation,

jurisdiction, rights, position and responsibility. Competence plays an important

role in defining strategies, initiating and steering processes, allocating resources, hiring,

training, change management and incentive programmes. In addition to this,

organisations have competencies that individuals do not; for example, the educational

institution has the competence to certify, whereas the individual instructor does not.

Companieshaveuniquecompetenciesinresearchanddevelopment,production,marketing,

etc. According to the above cited Study of the European Union (Schneckenberg and

Wildt, 2006, p.33): A meaningful definition of the competence term can only be

reached, when it is applied to, and embedded into, a specific context. In the case of our

eCompetence research this context is set by the conditions in which educational

processes in higher education take place. These considerations lead to the question:

what concept of competence is able to describe competencies of not only a complex

network involving individual knowledge and skills, but also organisational structures and

processes as well as technologies?

With the advent of digital communication and the global knowledge society,

responsibility for competence management has become distributed throughout personal,organisational and technological domains. Successful competence management demands

that the individual attempts to integrate many different kinds of resources into a network

that is at once personal, organisational and technological. The individual no longer stands

alone, as it were, stripped of technological devices and organisational attributes, having

only psychological qualities such as knowledge, motivation and experience to offer.

What use are such qualities independent of complex technologies, institutions, social

structures and much more? According to proponents of Actor Network Theory (Callon,

1986a; Callon, 1986b; Latour, 1986; Latour, 1987; Latour, 1990; Callon, 1991; Law,

1992), social actors should be considered as hybrid networks consisting of human beings,

non-humanartefacts,technologies,institutionsandmuchmore.JohnLaw(1992,p.4)writes:

people are who they are because they are a patterned network of

heterogeneous materials. If you took away my computer, my colleagues, myoffice, my books, my desk, my telephone I wouldnt be a sociologist writingpapers, delivering lectures, and producing knowledge. Id be something quiteother. So the analytical question is this. Is an agent an agent primarily becausehe or she inhabits a body that carries knowledge, skills, values, and all the rest?Or is an agent an agent because he or she inhabits a set of elements (including,of course, a body) that stretches out into the network of materials, somatic andotherwise, that surrounds each body?

social agents are never located in bodies and bodies alone, but rather anactor is a patterned network of heterogeneous relations, or an effect producedby such a network.


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The integration of practically all human activities into automated information and

communication systems, the emergence of network phenomena (Barabsi, 2002; Barney,2004), of context steering in complex, self-organising systems (Willke, 1989), of

decentralised decision making and development oriented management (Klimecki et al.,

1994) direct attention to the dynamic, unforeseeable, self-organising participation of all

actors and, away from top down, hierarchically structured organisations. A new type of

social and organisational structure is becoming apparent. Organisations of all kinds,

companies,associations,schoolsanduniversities,publicserviceadministrations,hospitals,

etc. are taking on new forms. As the proponents of Actor Network Theory have pointed

out, cooperative action, organisation and social life in general can most adequately be

described as consisting of hybrid networks. What appears as the basic unit of society is a

complex texture of different actor networks dynamically interacting and continually

redefining social roles and traditional competence profiles.

What is an actor network? Actors are not only human individuals, but also entities,machines, technologies and natural environments. The basic concepts in which such actor

networks are analysed are: programme, interessement, translation and enrolment

(Belliger and Krieger, 2006). Interessement, according to Callon (1986a, pp.207208),

refers to actions by which an entity attempts to impose and stabilise the identity of

other actors it defines through its problematization. That is to say, every actor has its

programme or goals. On the basis of its programme, an actor attempts to integrate as

many other actors into its network as it can in order to insure that it can attain its goals.

Interessement requires enrolment, that is the marshalling of an array of supports,

entities, mediators and props in order to succeed. This in turn calls for translation, that

is the redefinition or re-identification of already available or given identities and

programmes for the purposes of the actor network that is attempting to organise itself.

Despite a language that suggests manipulation and persuasion, it is important to note that

Actor Network Theory insists upon a generalised symmetry (Callon, 1986a) according

to which intentional concepts usually applied only to humans also describe the

networking activities of non-human actors. Actor networks are self-organising and not

the result of one dominant actor imposing its will upon others. A technological artefact is

not a neutral instrument in the hands of human beings, but also imposes its programme

upon humans. The process of negotiating different programmes into a functioning actor

network is a complex process of self-organising communication. In certain networks, the

context is set by non-human agencies. A computer, for example, enrols people into

users and translates many factors in the environment to fit its programme. Ergonomics

can mean quite the opposite of what usually is supposed, namely that human beings adapt

themselves to computer-like forms of thought, feeling and behaviour and not the other

way around. The automobile, home appliances, smart phones, electricity and many other

technologies have, each in its own way, done the same. By means of the concepts ofinteressement, enrolment and translation, it becomes possible to describe and

analysetheemergenceofcommunicationsystemsinawaythatisnotboundbytraditional

dichotomies such as human/machine, individual/organisation and subject/object. Actor

networks are heterogeneous, hybrid and scalable, that is they consist of various types of

actors, who themselves consist of various actors every actor is also a network and

they can vary in size from small to very large, depending on the programmes they are

involved in. A final important factor is that actor networks are self-organising


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communication systems and thus bound by the conditions making communication at

any time possible. In a digital society this means that digital media influence networkorganisation.

With regard to competence, our thesis is that it is the actor network that is competent.

Since individuals can only act effectively as a network, competence is a quality that must

be ascribed to actor networks and therefore a description of competence should be based

upon the characteristics typical for an actor network. A competency profile for teachers

in higher education describes those characteristics that make such an actor network

viable in the educational system. Typical actors in the educational system are: teachers,

students, infrastructures (buildings, transport, communication and information),

technologies, information resources, colleagues, finances, administration, certification

procedures and regulations, etc. A competence profile for an actor network whose

programme is teaching in higher education would include the ability to enrol such

actors and to translate their different programmes. In order to do this, the teaching actornetwork would need to organise itself within the context of a society largely determined

by digital media. Recalling McLuhan, it is the media that is the message and therefore it

is the characteristics of new media communication that determine the conditions under

which actor networks in todays society organise themselves. The typical characteristics

which make up the basis of any actor network that can be considered competent today

are: virtuality, modularity, automation, variability and networking (Manowich, 2002).

Virtuality is the competence to act independent from time and place. Digital

communication virtualises educational activities for all actors to the extent that learning

is no longer confined to traditional time/space parameters. The virtual actor network is

active everywhere that relevant decisions are made and related to each other. Since this

occurs in real time worldwide, the virtual actor network operates in cyber space. The

virtualising of organisational structures brings with it the digitalising of personal identity

and transforms the question of organisational inclusion/exclusion into a question of

identity management. The inclusion or exclusion of actors in a network, that is traditional

issues of matriculation, access, eligibility in an educational situation, as well as

distribution of roles, the teacher role, the student role, the role of the administrator, etc.,

are determined by access to digital information and decision making. Digital identities

take the place of physical persons. One physical person can have a variety of digital

identities, which can act in different roles simultaneously. Virtuality is therefore a

competence that any educational actor network must have.

Modularity is the competence to act multifunctionally on different scales. An actor

network consists of various actors, who themselves consist of actors and so on, in the

macro as well as the micro dimensions. Each actor can be involved in different networks

at the same time. Each actor can be a module in a larger network. The network is

arbitrarily scalable and can at one moment be visible in one individual, for example ateacher in a classroom using a computer and a projector to present slides for a lecture. Or

the network can at the next moment extend to include an international association of

experts in a particular discipline, a publisher, a library, a university, many different

students from all over the world, etc. All these actors can at the same time play decisive

roles in other more or less extended networks which may or may not intersect with

each other.

Automation is the competence to delegate the acquisition of information, the

evaluation of knowledge, communication and decision making to technical actors and

vice versa, to integrate technical actors into a network and to coordinate activities with


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them. As already noted, the computer has made users out of human beings, and human

beings have come to think and deal with information in a similar way to computers. Incomplex systems, the demand for functionality reduces levels of freedom dramatically.

Cooperation with technical actors has changed human actors. Traditional psychological

competencies like knowledge, skills, motivation and experience must more and more be

seen to be the shared attributes of a hybrid human-technological symbiosis which

functions to the extent that it is automated.

Variability is the competence to change and innovate in all areas by means of actively

supporting creativity, complexity, indeterminability and the forces of self-organisation.

An actor network must be able to adapt itself quickly to a complex, quickly changing

environment. This means that it must be able to quickly develop new strategies and

forms of action. It must be willing to increase internal complexity, to operate with soft

boundaries, with shifting centres and peripheries, and with a variety of goals and

identities.Networking is the competence to distinguish and maintain organisational integrity

and efficiency primarily on the basis of the intensity and the quality of communication

within the network. An example is the Open Content and Open Courseware of MIT in

Boston. An educational institution that makes its learning content publically accessible

can maintain its unique excellence only if what counts is primarily the quality of

its communication and not the content communicated. The quality of educational

communication does not consist of lecture manuscripts and associated documents. The

unique selling point of an educational actor network is not what is said, but how and

with whom communication occurs. For the virtual actor network in the international

educational system, it is not proprietary knowledge, but the knowledge network that

counts. Access to and competence in the participation in a highly selective and exclusive

knowledge network is more important for career selection than traditional certification.

Effective action in a global knowledge society depends on the ability to log into

knowledge networks, share and acquire information, and coordinate activities within peer

communities. The decisive educational competence is to make oneself a hub in relevant

networks.

What do these competencies of an actor network mean for a competence profile

for teachers in higher education? Despite embeddedness in hybrid networks, human

individuals appear for the most part as the primary actors and the networks they rely

upon usually remain in the background. The above-mentioned network competencies

can thus appear as individually ascribable skills and be interpreted as a traditional

competenceprofileforteachers.Itisnotacoincidencethatthesecompetenciescorrespond

to the recommendations for media competency recently made by the New Media

Literacy Project of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. The NML Whitepaper

(Jenkins et al., 2006) lists a series of basic competencies that all can be derived from thenetwork characteristics of present day social organisations. These competencies are:

Play

Performance

Simulation

Appropriation

Multitasking


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Distributed cognition

Collective intelligence

Judgement

Transmedia navigation

Networking

Negotiation.

1.1 Play, game-based teaching and learning

As a competence that a teacher in higher education today and in the future should have,

play refers to the ability:

1 to correctly grasp complex and constantly changing parameters of acting, to react

quicklytounexpectedevents,totakeintelligentrisks,toconstructandtesthypotheses,

and to make decisions collaboratively and

2 to acquire knowledge, to develop and test problem-solving strategies, to take on

challenges and seek to meet them cooperatively, as well as to make decisions and act

under the pressure of high expectations and limited time.

Playisaformofbehaviourthatariseswhenactorsattemptcooperativelyorcompetitively

to attain set goals according to prescribed rules. In actor networks that are determined

by digital culture, where virtuality, modularity, variability, automation and networking

are decisive competencies, actors must enrol other actors and translate them into

programmes in such a way that the network is able to quickly understand and react to

changing parameters of action and unexpected events. Actors must be able to takeintelligent and informed risks, collaboratively define problems and solutions strategies,

as well as be able to make collective decisions. In an educational setting this calls for

virtual collaborative learning, operating in complex learning environments and applying

the advantages of play such as high motivation, intensity of experience, concentration,

attention and emersion for teaching and learning purposes. The boundaries between play

and the seriousness of real life become blurred. One speaks in this context of serious

games (Serious Games Initiative, http://www.seriousgames.org). These developments

indicate that the virtual school operates increasingly in an area where traditional

differences between formal and informal learning, work time and free time are no longer

applicable.

1.2 SimulationAs a competence that can be ascribed to teachers in higher education, simulation means

the ability:

1 to analyse as precisely as possible and to model real-world situations so that acting

on and within the model leads to reliable predictions of real-world effects;

2 to practice and rehearse cognitive and psychomotoric abilities and

3 to configure and restructure knowledge so that problems can be investigated from

different perspectives.


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Simulation, as opposed to the fictive world of play, depends for its effectiveness upon

an exact analysis of real-world conditions and an emphasis upon experimentationinstead of goal-directed, competitive action. Present-day computing power allows the

modelling of complex real-world situations in many areas such as finance, transportation,

communication, energy, urban planning, defence, product development and testing and,

of course, for research in the natural and social sciences. Simulations are also more and

more being used to develop psychomotoric skills, for example, in surgical operation

simulators, and flight simulators are well known. As a competence essential to

educational actor networks, simulation is the ability to construct and apply models that

can be used as learning environments. It is the ability to configure information and

knowledge so that it can be examined from different perspectives and applied to a variety

of different situations.

1.3 Performance

Performance refers to the ability:

1 to convincingly and effectively take on virtual identities and roles and to put them to

work in a variety of different settings and for different purposes and

2 to successfully manage many different forms of authorisation, access to information

and permissions to activate functions on the basis of virtual identities.

The concept of performance is common in socialisation theory and in communication

pragmatics. In these disciplines, performance means the ability to internalise and

convincingly initiate and sustain social interaction. In a digital culture, performance

implies the ability to effectively participate in virtual interaction by means of digital

identities.The ability to invent and take on virtual identities, to understand and correctly

implement a variety of different kinds of authorisations and access privileges, as well as

limitations on access to information, is a key competence not only in an e-society, but

also in educational networks. Educational actor networks are more and more made up of

real and virtual actors and identities. Performing with virtual identities is a useful way to

gain and test knowledge. Different learning situations can be experienced from different

points of view. In any single situation, a learners and teachers can take on and play out a

much wider variety of roles than in traditional educational settings and thus have a richer,

more differentiated learning experience.

1.4 Appropriation and media production

As a competence that teachers in higher education should have, appropriation and media

production refer to the ability:

1 to access and transform data of all kinds, to recombine, scale, convert, reformat and

re-appropriate media objects for educational purposes and

2 to adapt information for different purposes and publish this information across a

variety of media.


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The problem of information overload has created a situation in which selection,

modification and application of information takes precedence over the production of newinformation. A key competency in a digital network culture is the ability to appropriate

and use available information for a specific programme. What pejoratively is referred to

as cut-and-paste is becoming a valuable skill in educational actor networks. Teaching and

learning require the ability to use information that is available in different media and

different formats by reconfiguring, recombining, modifying and republishing in other

media and in other formats for purposes that were possibly not even thought of as the

information was first produced. From the perspective of Actor Network Theory,

appropriation is a form of translation and enrolment in which media become actors

contributing to the success of the programme.

1.5 Multitasking

In the context of teaching within virtual, modular, variable, automatic and networked

educational contexts, multitasking refers to the ability:

1 to quickly scan and monitor different informational environments, flows and formats

in different media;

2 to select relevant information;

3 to transfer this information to a variety of devices and memory technologies and

4 to hold this information ready for use and for quick call up from a variety of devices.

In traditional educational settings, emphasis is laid upon focusing attention upon limited

channels and messages and excluding all other information as distraction. When students

at the same time listen to a lecture, take notes, surf the internet, blog, exchange SMS undsend emails, then this would normally call for disciplinary measures. In a digital culture

such multitasking does not necessarily mean that students and teachers must lose focus

on learning. On the contrary, what is going on is a useful, perhaps necessary, scanning

of different informational channels and a way of reducing information complexity

by applying different criteria of relevance. Multitasking means that an actor network

maximises the availability of information coming in from the environment by increasing

the channels in which information is communicated. At the same time, the network

enrols more actors involved in transmitting, storing and using information, while at the

same time reducing the complexity of the information at any time being processed. The

ability to keep a variety of information devices which process different information in

different ways ready for quick call up all at the same time is a key competence for an

educational actor network in a digital culture.

1.6 Distributed cognition and collective intelligence

As a core competence for educational actor networks, distributed cognition and collective

intelligence refer to the ability:

1 to understand and experience knowledge, cognition, decision making and acting as

specific characteristics of a network;

2 to interact together with automated information and communication systems;


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3 to participate constructively in knowledge communities and

4 to collaboratively define and solve problems.

An actor network in the global knowledge society must be able to experience the

production, distribution, application and evaluation of information as activities of the

entire network and as a cooperative endeavour involving human beings, organisations

and technologies equally. The ability to delegate responsibility to technological actors

and to allow oneself to be instrumentalised by them, and vice versa, is a central

competence in the digital society. Distributed cognition and collective intelligence are

typicalfeaturesofactornetworksineducationaswell.Educationalsettingsareincreasingly

becoming socio-technical networks in which learning is as well an organisational as a

psychological event. Neither the definition of problems, nor the setting of goals, nor the

finding of solutions and the development of products are easily ascribable to individuals,

but are increasingly distributed among all actors in the network. This is, by the way, onereason why property rights and copyright are so problematic in the digital society. The

ability to integrate, that is to enrol, the right actors into the network and to translate their

activities into serving common goals is a key competence without which teaching and

learning will not able to take advantage of the potential of digital culture.

1.7 Judgement

Judgement refers to the ability:

1 to correctly evaluate the meaning, value, usefulness, quality and reliability of

information and

2 to understand the different conditions surrounding and determining the production of

various forms of information and media objects.

Informational overload has put the ability to select and apply information to new

situations above the ability to produce new information. This in turn implies the ability to

evaluate the relevance, reliability and potential of different forms of information.

Distributed cognition and collective intelligence cannot function if the ability to

judge and evaluate the quality of information is lacking. Judgement is a key competence

of educational actor networks. It includes the ability to understand the conditions

influencing the production and distribution of information. Different media and different

formats influence information. The same information means something else in a different

media or a different format. Self-directed learning and problem-based teaching will be

successful only to the extent that all actors involved in the network are competent to

judge the quality of information, compare media and formats, and analyse the conditions

surrounding the production and distribution of information. Wikipedia, for example,

demonstrates not only distributed cognition and collective intelligence, but also the

dependence of these important network phenomena on judgement and evaluation

competencies.


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1.8 Transmedia navigation

As a competence that actor networks in higher education should have, transmedia

navigation refers to the ability:

1 to follow information in different media, to compare media, to design and present

media objects in different formats and media and

2 to understand how different media and formats have different influences.

Without the ability to navigate across a variety of different media, channels and formats,

it would be impossible to judge and evaluate the quality of information and thus achieve

the potential for distributed cognition and collective intelligence that actor networks

need. Information tends to break up into perspectives and fragments that appear in

different media and different formats. The whole picture is a puzzle that must be put

together by being able to follow information through media and formats and influencehow information in a network flows. In educational networks, this refers to the

competence to assign information to specific media and to mix media appropriate to

specific information. This applies not only to media production, but also to media

consumption. Transmedia navigation is the competence to strategically use media and

formats for educational purposes.

1.9 Networking and negotiation

Networking has already been discussed as a key competence of actor networks. In the

educational system, networking has become a key to success and refers to the ability:

1 to find and combine relevant information in many different forms of knowledge

communities;

2 to use it collaborative; which implies the ability and

3 to understand and adapt to different cultures of communication and knowledge and

to respect their customs, norms and traditions.

The global knowledge society is a multicultural society. Transcultural communication is

the ability to effectively exchange ideas and information in different normative contexts.

Networks may have soft boundaries, but they do include and exclude actors on the basis

of normative expectations and prescriptions. The flexibility required to move from

involvement in one network into involvement in another is an important competence

in society made up scalable, overlapping and intersecting actor networks. Digital culture

is radically pluralist and fragmented. Actors participate simultaneously in different

networks at different levels and can communicate effectively only if they are constantlynegotiating roles and functions within and among quickly changing networks.

Negotiation of actor roles and network programmes implies the ability to easily drop old

identities, transform roles and take on new functions. In an educational actor network

teaching staff finds itself changing roles from instructor to tutor to coach to mentor in a

series of transformations that at each turn need to be renegotiated among all participating

actors. Networking is the competence to build and participate in actor networks.


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2 Conclusion

A competence profile for teachers in higher education in a digital culture where

competence is a quality that is not merely psychological, but organisational and

technological as well, can be described from the point of view of Actor Network Theory.

Competence is a network quality. The traditional listing of personal competences, even

e-competencies for teaching staff, must take account of the emergence of digital culture

and the accompanying transformation of what competence means. Following this lead,

a competence profile for teachers in higher education includes characteristics of

the network as a whole. Actor networks are hybrid constellations of human beings,

organisations and technologies. They are virtual, modular, automated and variable. It is

the network that is competent and not the individual. An individual teacher in an

educational actor network is required to embody network competencies such as play,

simulation, performance, appropriation and media production, multitasking, distributedcognition and collective intelligence, judgement of informational quality, transmedia

navigation, networking and negotiation.

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Documents

An E-competence Profile for Teachers in Higher Education