CHALLENGES OF LEARNING SOCIETY

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CHALLENGES OF LEARNING SOCIETY

• Professor Tapio Varis
• UNESCO Chair in Global e-Learning
• University of Tampere, Finland
• www.uta.fi/titava

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Globally Distributed Socio-Economic-Environmental
Simulation System
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Trends of the 21st Century

• -Technology digitalization (from analog to
  digital)
• -Globalisation local to global and global to
  local
• -New economy myth or reality
• -The Role of the National State
• -A Fair Globalization Creating opportunities
  for all (ILO 2004)

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21st Century Literacy SummitBerlin, 7-8 March
2002

• technology literacy
• information literacy, contextual literacy
• global literacy
• media creativity
• social competence and responsibility

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e-Learning competences

• General, management, distribution method,
  presentation
• Digital literacy way of thinking, organizing and
  memorizing
• Generation issue?

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Factors Shaping the Future of Education

• The transition from an industrial society to an
  information society
• The dynamics of globalization, mobility and
  pluralism
• A higher degree of individual flexibility in
  combination with the need for tolerance and
  responsibility
• The promotion of higher quality and equal
  educational opportunities

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Basic conceptions

• Awareness
• Consciousness
• Communication (networks)
• Media
• Knowledge
• Truth

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Awareness

• Relation to knowledge
• e-Knowledge
• The context of knowledge is especially critical
  in todays global marketplace. Individuals and
  organizations must deal with multiple contextual
  meanings to an extent that would have seemed
  obsessive only ten years ago
• (Paul Lefrere 2003)

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Consciousness

• the self or individuated mind and its
  orientations to exterior life
• collective consciousness (culture)

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Communication

• Communion, sharing (Debray)
• Mediation (communicating between people)
• Communication, education (Dewey)
• Global network (ICT technology)
• Local network (meanings)
• Space has vanished and time ceased to exist
  (McLuhan)
• Space-biased, time-biased communication (Innis)

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Tools of the Mind

• Sound
• Sight
• Brains
• Touch
• Telepresence

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Media

• each of the so-called media does far more
  than this (moving information) it makes possible
  thought processes inconceivable before (Walter
  Ong 1977)
• Orality and Literacy (1982)
• Secondary orality electronic media (generates
  a sense for groups immeasurably larger than those
  of primary oral culture McLuhans global
  village)

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Mediation The Oral-Literacy Theorems

• Primary oral culture (no literate modes of
  communication) additive, aggregative, redundant,
  conservative (memorized)
• Writing/print brings with it much more than mere
  ways of recording oral speech writing
  restructures consciousness
• Electronic media secondary orality

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University in the 21st century

• European university traditions
• Universities of applied sciences
• Nature of knowledge
• European added value

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The Idea of University

• The University within the Limits of Reason
  (Kantian University)
• The University and the Idea of Culture
• The University of the Market Model
• Corporate University
• The University of the Global Knowledge Society

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The Mission of the University (GUS)
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Educational revolutions

• The phonetic alphabet
• Printing
• Telematics (computers connected to networks)

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E-libraries, media, citizens

• Digital content services
• Ministry of Education, Learning, Skills,
  Knowledge, Competences?
• Public libraries, Internet café, telecentre

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Period of transition

• Traditional print and electronic media were
  introduced within a period of reasonable length
  and with a rough estimation of the economic and
  social impacts
• New media are being introduced with a speed that
  hardly anyone has time or ability to assess all
  of the consequences

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Knowledge management

• Anticipating changes in working life and in
  industrial structures
• Incentives for the development of know-how
  (taxation practices etc)
• Wide-scale cooperation

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Regis Debray (1995)

• Writing logosphere, origin in Asia-Byzantium
  the truth is theological
• Printing graphosphere, centre in Europe the
  truth is aesthetic
• Audiovisual videosphere, centre in New York
  the truth is economic

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Universal vs unique

• Economists and technologists bring the bits,
  social scientists and humanists the wits
  (Kenneth Boulding)
• Global nature of markets
• Universality of values
• Uniqueness of forms

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Awareness and belongingness

• Value crises, identities problem, powerlessness
• Problems of world order politics (leadership),
  economy (how to understand knowledge resources),
  culture (mixing globalization and universalism
  and forgetting the uniqueness of cultures,
  languages, and value systems)
• Technology alternative technology, alternative
  media, alternative culture, etc.

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New Renaissance Education

• The study of complexity has brought science
  closer than ever to art
• Knowledge has gone through a cycle from
  non-specialism to specialism, and now back to
  interdisciplinarity, even transdisciplinarity
• Art deals with the sensual world (media as the
  extension of senses) and the holistic concept of
  human being

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Intercultural communication

• While Christianity and Islam encourage active
  and sometimes aggressive ways of life, Oriental
  religions such as Buddhism, Confucianism, and
  Taoism all encourage passive, quiet and modest
  ways of life
• Youichi ITO, Keio University, Japan (1990)

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Mr. Koichiro MatsuuraDG Unesco

• It is necessary to build up large movement to
  humanize globalization, based on solidarity, on
  the spirit of caring for and sharing with others
• Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative as a
  cooperation mechanism for the open,
  non-commercial use of educational resources

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Global Learning

• ICT and capacity-building
• European Centre for Media Literacy (ECML)

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Challenges

• Ensure access for everyone
• Make lifelong learning the new standard
• Cultural literacy and education
• Information and communication technologies
• Practical and problem-oriented learning
• New competences in dealing with information and
  knowledge

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The illiterates of the 21st Century are not
those who cannot read and write but those who
cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.(Alwin
Toffler)
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