THE CULTURE AND NATURE OF MEDIA: LEARNING THE UNKNOWN
Kommers Piet
University of Twente, The Netherlands
Many schools now undertake the World-Wide Web to improve the efficiency of teaching and learning. The dominant practice is to make the information delivery and communication more easy and flexible. Comfort, easiness, pleasure and the reduction of costs are the main themes. Besides efficiency also the quality of the learning process is at stake here.
The more important changes are that through the WWW
learners are enabled to learn on topics based on their interest, prior experience and existential needs. This fits into the recent trend that "learning as hunting the certificate" is certainly not the best attitude and motivation in the long term. The better condition for learning is to develop curiosity and the growing confidence that one can understand complex issues; the quick jump forwards learning "just-in-time" is a fallacy that makes citizens too dependent from others who just pretend to know. The didactics to let students explore and experiment models in physics, engineering and economy with new coming cognitive learning tools, is the right approach to let students learn on the base of intuition and experience rather than descriptions. During the presentation some recent learning tools will be demonstrated.
new learning communities are emerging for those who have no access to regular schools, for reasons of distance and or finances. Another reason is that many domains cannot be covered by curricula, instruction, teachers and institutions in time as the speed of change in the domain is too high. Programmers, social workers and persons in industrial jobs need peer consults in order to tackle day-to-day practical problems; it is not a realistic solution to wait for schooling facilities. As it comes to socially and politically important topics like emancipation and multicultural tolerance, the schools as an institution is not always the best answer as it urges teachers and school leaders to risk their careers. Here the "learning network" can take a much more autonomous position. Also its members are initiators rather than subjects who undergo a certain pre arranged program. In terms of consciousness the learning community elicits a more active and aware attitude and thus deeper learning effect
parents, policy makers and teachers are forced to chose more deliberately what and how they want the younger generation to learn. Standard national curricula consolidated the knowledge and skills of the past. As students can now witness the newest practices via the WWW there is not any excuse to let schools lag behind in its methods and subject matter. Students who have a real learning mood have the opportunity now to taste the "presence" of being online with those who have a similar interest and style of learning. Language is still a critical skill for those who want to learn in a synchronous way. Asynchronous communication now allows better translator agents every day. The question now becomes tangible if parents and teachers allow students to reorient themselves in learning networks with a different cultural orientation. In fact one might say that the real learning occurs if the student needs to change him/herself. The WWW in its enormous width promotes self-reflection and critical thinking. It illustrates that learning and knowledge emerges between persons rather than in individuals.
The presentation will illustrate the dynamics in conceptual and metaphoric design that is needed to learn by new media. Virtual Reality is one of them. It allows the learner to travel through unknown areas like the virtual human body, large organic molecules etc. The added value is not only the so-called spatial didactics. Even more intriguing is the experience of immersion; the full experience of being in a different reality that forces you to think about constants in your real world. Like you learn yourself by meeting other persons, VR allows you to learn about reality by being confronted with the fictitious.
