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EDUCATION DIGITALIZATION ASTIGMATISM: PROBLEM SETTING FOR SEMIOTIC DIAGNOSTICS OF CONSEQUENCES // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2023. Issue 3 (37). P. 90-110

The specificity of the task — diagnostics — makes it justified to resort to medical terminology. At the same time, the semiotic nature of this diagnostics justifies an appeal to the etymology of some medical terms, which goes back to ancient myths. Astigmatism is a diagnosis of such a deviation from the norm of vision, one of the symptoms of which is the perception of a circle as an oval. The reason for this deviation from the norm is the syndrome of the defective crystalline lens of the eye, leading to focusing features. Here, a chain of associations may arise, caused by the plots of the myth. In the ancient Greek version, Hestia was the keeper of the hearth, and the hearth was the pivot of the fire which, in the Roman version, was called “focus”. Hestia is present by her name and purpose in yet another medical term: the gestational period. This term denotes (formerly more often, now rarer) the state of pregnancy. This chain of associations serves to set the problem: to find a way to diagnose the consequences of the forced digitalization of teacher education during the pandemic. In other words, the search for an answer to the question: does the stay of a future teacher in the “belly” of a pedagogical university during the gestational period, passing with “complications”, require measures to replenish the norm of a specialist “born” by the university? Or, does digitalization burden the anamnesis of a future teacher? The procedures of the diagnostics themselves are based on the symptom/semantics, syndrome/syntactics, anamnesis/pragmatics correspondence. The listed correspondence is included in the operationalization of the basic concepts of the questionnaires. Two groups are selected for the pilot survey of students. The first group (I) includes the students for whom the period of total digitalization included the entire last year at high school and the first semester at the university. The second group of students (II) consists of those for whom total digitalization occurred during the third and fourth years of the university program. This selection fixes the extreme positions (I and II) in the distribution of digitalization by significant stages in the curriculum. In full-time mode, a survey of lecturers and teachers working with contingents of student groups (I and II) has been conducted on specially formulated points to find out the pros and cons of the digitalization of education; confirmation or refutation of the hypothesis of the authors of the article about the norm deformation. The pilot survey involves 60 students and 12 of their teachers. The article gives a general description of the survey tools. The questionnaire for surveying students combines verbal and visual methods of diagnostics. Teachers record the transformation of the norm, associated with only two aspects: a decrease in the quality of education and student-teacher communication. The relevance of the procedures of the semiotic diagnostics to the search for answers to the research question posed is confirmed by the revealed circumstance which was eluding under the use of different optics when the effects of education digitalization were discussed in the scientific literature. For the first time, the identified defect in the digitalization of education is the gap in student-student communication. This defect has consequences also established on the basis of the application of semiotic diagnostics procedures. Among these consequences, there is the lack of understanding of the essence of teamwork, leadership, professional competition and ethical principles of subject-subject communication. Such an effect of “educating Robinson Crusoe” does not correspond well to the competencies of a teacher. In whose “eye” is there the lens with a distorting defect? Students? Teachers? Operators of digitalization in education? We have found that digitalization in education implemented during the pandemic is subject to astigmatism. The fact that this situation belongs to the past requires two measures. First, the correction of “vision” among graduates. Secondly, the introduction of precise compensatory actions in the environment of distance education.

Keywords: norm, student-student communication deformation, completion of norm