Technosphere of the university: an environment for the teacher’s information culture development

This study is an attempt to analyse the university technosphere capabilities to develop the teacher’s information culture. The university technosphere is considered to be the most important condition to develop the university teacher’s information culture. Having analyzed the essence and structure of the teacher’s information culture, the following hypothesis is put forward: the effectiveness of the university technosphere development has an impact in the development of the teacher’s information culture; the effectiveness of the university technosphere development is also reflected in the teacher’s readiness to apply the information technologies in practice in the educational process. This hypothesis indicates the purpose of the study: to substantiate the model of the teacher’s information culture development in the conditions of the university technosphere creation and functioning. Having substantiated this model theoretically, the authors have built upon the ideas of information and communication, competency-based and cyber-ontological approaches, which are especially relevant in the context of modern cyber socialization. A pedagogical experiment involving 32 teachers from the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University (Kaliningrad, Russia) has been organized to test the hypothesis. The experiment has been carried out in three stages: at the first ascertaining stage the teachers’ attitude to the development of their information culture has been diagnosed. The adoption of the teacher’s information culture development model, which has no analogues in modern pedagogy of higher education (implemented on the basis of the self-developed special course, which is held as a series of training seminars) has been carried out at the second formative stage. The re-diagnostics of the developed components of the teacher’s information culture has been carried out at the third control stage. The dynamics has been observed in all information culture components. The most significant changes have occurred in the indicators of the information culture operational component development (from 5,8 units to 9,1 units), which has indicated the effectiveness of the developed model. Hence, it can be used in the organization of work how to develop the university teacher’s information culture. The novelty of the study is related to the introduction of the developed model into the university educational space, which develops the teacher’s psychological readiness to master the information products and professional competence in the implementation of the innovative information technologies.