The Future
a) Future role of education
The implications for education of the developments in computer and communication technology are significant. Instant access to text, sound, pictures (both stored and real-time) from around the world can provide a rich, new environment for learning. The flow of information makes it very important for teachers and those who handle education to be increasingly selective in choosing information and handling information. It will also be ever more important to improve information handling skills of the individuals, the skills to access, sort and manipulate information. Individuals will in an increasing manner need to be able to sort through advertisements, consumer group evaluations, energy efficiency ratings and environmental impacts, dealing with complex social issues raised by new technologies, a huge challenge even to the most capable (Hutchinson, 1993).
The educational system will also be faced with growing pressure for debating what is the best future for all humankind. There is significant support by those of varied political, religious and philosophical views that there is a need to incorporate and teach values within the educational system. The scientific/technological machine is “increasing momentum, free of public scrutiny” (Hutchinson, 1993, p. 93). Examples are the engineering of new life forms and changing the genetic characteristics of human beings.
In the chapter on social factors of learning I gave an account of new trends recognized in the social conditions of media audiences, which then reflect the changes in society. These changes relate to the basic human values such as acceptance of diversity, tolerance of other’s view, respect for our planet, others and ourselves.
The position of the teacher and his role is therefore examined in the light of these new dimensions
a) Teacher’s role
At different times and in different parts of the world teachers have had the role of being disseminators of literacy, guardians of culture, vicars of morality, architects of the good citizen and agents of the Gods. In more recent times, schools have been allocated the task of achieving social equality, overcoming material disadvantage and eradicating prejudice. Teachers and instructional designers need to be capable of diagnosing the needs of the individual learner and knowing how to meet these needs when discovered (Wood, 1995).
Teachers have many strong traits that can enhance education greatly:
1. In the lives of their students, teachers often achieve an influence beyond the intellectual knowledge they impart. Adults often look back on a teacher who had an inspiring and positive effect on their lives.
2. Human teachers can make decisions that might be difficult for a machine. For example, a computer can judge grammatical integrity in a paper, but evaluating the worth of original ideas is impossible for today’s machines.
3. Many teachers are extraordinarily creative and develop new and better ways of teaching.
4. By their presence, teachers stress that learning must be integrated into a world populated by people, who are intelligent and have feelings.
5. Teachers, by helping students to understand and accept each other, can ease problems that often develop.
6. Teachers can be the role models that children need (Bennet, 1999).
Technological developments have equipped teacher and instructional designers with a variety of innovative tools to meet the acquired skills of the profession. Westera (1999) identifies three major factors that clear the way for these innovations:
- The convergence of classroom teaching and distance learning;
- The effective technology-push for addressing new ways of collaborative learning; and
- Changing student-tutor relationships.
Traditionally, classroom teaching has been contrasted with distance education, but the ever-rising use of the computer and computer networks in education is changing this notion. Computer – mediated communication has both affected the teacher’s role in the classroom teaching and the social isolation of students in distance education. It offers a meeting point in cyberspace for anyone involved in the educational process and the need for social interaction within the setting of distance education. Classroom teaching and distant education are combining a new educational approach that combines the strengths of both practices. It addresses the individual needs within a collaborative context. Although primarily pushed by technological means for delivery and support, it represents an educational innovation that affects the pedagogical fundamentals of education and learning, supporting new ways of learning and creating a new educational frame of reference (Westera, 1999).
The software available to deliver distance education becomes more and more simple and many programs can be handled without any training. The common ownership of computers means that users are gradually more and more experienced with these tools. Collaborative learning implies that the use of the computer is dependent on the telecommunications facilities. It can be reached either in, an asynchronous way like e-mail, conference tools or news, or synchronous with real-audio/video or videoconferencing. As mentioned before the development of the so-called “groupware” or on-line learning systems offers a number of extended functionalities for the support of collective design. The role of the media changes from being a distributor and presenter of knowledge to that of a flexible, interactive, educational tool in support of all kinds of learning activities more or less in a user friendly way (Westera, 1999).
It has already been said that the availability of a worldwide computer network is assumed to have a tremendous impact on existing social and cultural patterns. It opens up a vast reservoir of information that can be accessed and filtered with the assistance of sophisticated search machines. The Internet also sets up an open (virtual) community, showing only a few barriers for the exchange of ideas of others. Some basic suppositions of educational systems are affected.
First, the position of the teacher is recognizably going through changes from being an absolute expert in the field, while students have an easy access to new or actual information, not even known to the teacher. The teacher will no longer be the one who keeps the information but will be a valuable helper in providing the proper pathway to the needed information and of assisting the student in interpreting what he or she learns and giving it a context.
Second, delicate information like examination assignments and associated elaborations will be distributed among students using the WWW. Any information society tends to be an open society and any information available to one member is bound to become available to all members of the group involved.
Third, remote learning facilities and models for collaborative learning make the contact with the tutor less important.
Fourth, computer-mediated communication is different from face-to-face contact. Emotions are poorly transferred and may easily be disregarded or misinterpreted. In asynchronous communication, speaking skills and assertiveness will become less important. The teacher’s authority, being based on professional communication skills, is seen to be affected by this impoverishment of the communication (Westera, 1999).
All these factors cause the relationship between tutor and student to become more egalitarian; some of the tasks usually made by the tutors are taken over by the students themselves. This is greater than before because of lifelong learning ideas where students are often adult, highly autonomous, mid-career professionals who consider themselves as users of educational services. This means that the common authority and predominance of the tutor is highly undermined, causing the tutor’s role to shift to that of a coach, providing meta-level guidance and support to stimulate and optimise each student’s learning process.
b) Lifelong Education and Cultivation of Knowledge
As we move into the 21st century, the thought of lifelong education is becoming a reality. Markets move so quickly and jobs skills are outdated so soon that the need to continually upgrade one’s skills and education are becoming vital for survival.
The shift from an industrial-based to a knowledge-based society marks our era. In the knowledge-based society what is valued in our work determines what is needed to prepare for life and work. The role of education and learning for cultivating our knowledge and skill is central to this new society. Learning for life is no longer relevant but lifelong learning and education have become the centrepiece of our age. This transition leads to new notions of how we refer to education as the focus of cultivating knowledge and skill to prepare for the Knowledge Age. Traditionally when we consider why education plays a crucial role in society the reaction usually is that education empowers individuals to contribute to society; fulfils their personal talents; fulfils their civic responsibilities and carries tradition forwards (Trilling and Hood, 1999). In the Knowledge Age the implication to these statements change considerably:
1. Contributing to Society. The skills needed for daily work in knowledge-based society have to be based on a set of skills for participating in a complicated web of global economic, informational, technological, political, social and ecological interrelationships. These skills are needed in order to learn new ways to live and work in our very complicated, technological, information–rich world (Trilling and Hood, 1999).
2. Fulfilling personal talents. To a greater extent people enjoy the benefit of the powerful knowledge tools – computers and telecommunications hardware and software. These tools add to our learning, our work, and our play. They can be looked at as amplifiers, storerooms and sensory extensions for our thinking and communications and are becoming “power tools” for our personal development. If a strong social plan to make these tools available to everyone is not made, the existing gap between “knowledge rich” and “knowledge poor” will increase. The darker use of these tools can lead to addictive violence and titillation, feeling of social isolation and even depression from over-immersion in electronic media space. These negative things may play a part in preventing many of our children from fully developing their talents (Trilling and Hood, 1999).
3. Fulfilling civic responsibilities. The Internet and the electronic media have opened a much wider field of issues, facts, opinions, and conversations than ever and the potential for involvement and informed participation has never been greater. This leads to the need to become a “smart customer” of information. To learn how to exercise discrimination and filter the flow of information becomes more and more important. As fewer and fewer international media companies control the source of information we get the need to make careful choices and use critical judgments is greater than ever (Trilling and Hood, 1999).
4. Carrying tradition forward. Multicultural societies are on the increase everywhere due to worldwide mobility, immigration and inter-marriage and growing economic opportunity. This leads to the call for the maintenance of skills to preserve one’s identity as well as to learn compassion and tolerance for the identities and traditions of others (Trilling and Hood, 1999).
These new approaches to education leads to consideration of what kind of skills learners need to fulfil the requirement in the Knowledge Age. Trilling and Hood (1999) here outline what they believe to be the key Knowledge Age survival skills, the seven Cs seen in table 4 (Trilling and Hood, 1999, p. 8):
Table 4. Seven Cs of skills.
Seven CsComponent Skills
Critical thinking-and-doing / Problem-solving, Research, AnalysisProject Management, etc
Creativity
/ New Knowledge Creation, “Best Fit”Design Solutions, Artful Storytelling, etc.
Collaboration / Cooperation, Compromise, Consensus,
Community-building, etc.
Cross-cultural Understanding / Across Diverse Ethnic, Knowledge
And organizational Cultures
Communication / Crafting Message and Using
Media Effectively
Computing / Effective Use of Electronic Information
And Knowledge Tools
Career & Learning Self-reliance / Managing Change, Lifelong Learning
and Career Redefinition.
Although this new set of skills is seen to be necessary to handle the requirements of the Knowledge Age our educational systems do not keep up the pace of the business world. The education of the Industrial Age with learning through facts, drill and practice, is slowly but steadily being modified to the education of the Knowledge Age. Learning through projects and problems, inquiry and design, discovery, and invention, employing new methods based on collaborative learning, problem-based learning and situated learning using the latest expertise in computer and communication technology are more and more to be seen.
Trilling and Hood summarise the major findings of over two decades of progress that educators, developmental and cognitive psychologists, neuropsychologists, learning and instructional theorists, sociologists, academic researchers and others have achieved to what is known about how we learn. They developed a model they call “The five Cs of modern learning theory” (Trilling and Hood, 1999 p. 9):
- Context: Environmental Learning
- Construction: Mental Model Building
- Caring: Intrinsic Motivation
- Competence: Multiple Intelligences
- Community: Learning Communities of Practice
Context is very important in learning and the environmental conditions are considered much more influential than before. The transfer of knowledge from one context to another is not often successful in the case in school conditions as real–world conditions. Therefore there is an increasing demand for more “authentic” learning tasks that match real-world conditions in addition to the need of having rich learning environments that offer a wide variety of contextualised opportunities for discovery, inquiry, design, practice, instruction and constructive exploration. This approach coincides with the need to become proficient in solving real-world problems and to exercise critical thinking and doing in the Knowledge Age (Trilling and Hood, 1999).
Construction refers to how mental models are built. A new experience is assimilated and changes accommodated to our models as we confront experiences that don’t quite “fit” and we even hold important misconceptions about the world as necessary bridges to more “accurate” models. The educational importance of constructing models, both physically and “virtually” are understood. It can be seen how valuable design, simulation, and building activities are in learning, for they match the constructive, modelling and designing aspects of learning and the manner in which they prepare for the methods used to accomplish the future knowledge work (Trilling and Hood, 1999).
Caring about what one is doing is an important factor of learning. Recent project-based and problem-based learning programs where learners define their own projects and set their own criteria for which they will be evaluated have shown that much learning can happen when students genuinely care about what they are doing. These findings coincide with the Knowledge Age need to develop self-reliant and self-motivated learners and workers who have the determination to creatively solve difficult problems and find answers to tough, complex questions (Trilling and Hood, 1999).
Competence comes in a variety of flavours but the debate over what are the inherent “modules of learning” is still ongoing. It is known that it is rewarding to encourage multiple learning approaches to match diverse learning styles and multiple ways of expressing understanding. This supports the Knowledge Age necessity to benefit from multiple talents in the creative solving of problems in diverse teams, and in the delicate design of services and products for diverse audiences (Trilling and Hood, 1999).
Community plays a crucial role in learning as know from the socio-cultural theories of learning. This extends the value of learning in context, as said before, to the social and cultural realms of group interaction, peer and mentor relations, group culture, and the environmental influences of tools, settings, and techniques. All these matters again support the Knowledge Age need to use collaborative, community-based methods to problem solving and to learn from a range of communities of practice in the chase of lifelong learning.
This new learning model of the five Cs shows that the skill demanded of the Knowledge Age are very consistent with the ways we naturally learn, solve problems, find answers to questions, and develop our abilities to think and act. Fortunately, there is a close match between the theory and Knowledge Age needs but unfortunately current educational practice often does not match modern theory (Trilling and Hood, 1999).
c) Computer Technology and the Future Perspective
Computer technology in education has the potential for improving education. Technology innovations are increasing the demand for reforms in teaching and learning approaches. A recent research report (North Central Regional Educational Laboratory) presented conclusions about the most beneficial approaches to technology use in K-12 educational settings of the 21st century. The authors report that (Valdez et al., 1999, p. 1):