ADVANCING EDUCATION IN VIRTUAL AND REAL WORLDS BY META- INNOVATIONS NETWORK-BASED EDUCATION 2005, 14th–17th SEPTEMBER 2005, ROVANIEMI, FINLAND
One of the perennial problems in education has been the meaninglessness or lack of relevance of classroom learning, i.e. the dissociation between the learning content and methods of the classroom and the world of experience and practice being taught and/or being experienced by the students. Rousseau (Page, 1990) was an early critic who recognised this problem. In Rousseau’s time the common schooling involved memorisation of the Greek and Roman classics, and he thought this approach stifled children's natural tendencies for activity, and made them deceitful, selfish and pretentious. In his view classical education was boring, mostly beyond the children's comprehension, and simply taught predigested information without much benefit for the students' practical life. The enforced silent motionless student behaviour caused the students to hate education and made them into 'passive, feeble and stupid' citizens. His father devised a ‘cunning plan’ for encouraging Rousseau to read the books in his library by forbidding his son to read the books, but conveniently leaving the key to the book cupboards in an easy place for his son to find and enjoy the forbidden fruits of reading the best of modern thought.
Some of the responses to this perceived problem have been the authentic learning (Clark & Estes, 1999; Corrent-Agostinho, Hedberg, & Lefoe, 1998; Crocker & Fendt, 1998; Dehler & Porras-Hernandez, 1998; Fitzgerald, Standifer,
& Semrau, 1998; Harper, Hedberg, & Wright, 2000; Harrell Jr., 2000; Herrington, Reeves, Oliver, & Woo, 2004; Naidu
& Oliver, 1999), situated learning (Griffin, 1995; Herrington, Oliver, Herrrington, & Sparrow, 1997; Herrington, Sparrow, & Herrington, 2000; Knapczyk & Chung, 1999; Micheller, 1999; Rosenfeld, 1999; Royer, 2001) and
autonomous learning (Clifford, 1999; Kaur, Fadzil, & Ahmed, 2005; Lee, Yamada, Shimizu, Shinohara, & Hada, 2005;
Melzer, Hadley, & Herczeg, 2005; Pahl, 2005; Wang, Wang, & Wu, 2005; Yumuk, 2002) schools of thought. These concepts are often intermingled and in most of the references noted above, they have been implemented via modern technology-enabled educational environments. In fact, technology, particularly the modern information and
communications technology implemented in various ways via the Internet network, has been promoted as a key vehicle for enabling autonomous, authentic and situated teaching and learning.
The problem to be addressed at this point in time is the improvement in the relevance and authenticity of the science education provided in a Middle Eastern country, while giving the students a greater degree of control over their learning, i.e. greater student autonomy. The challenge is to move beyond the classroom, to bring the reality of science in the world to the students linking it with their school curricula, without necessarily interrupting the total fabric of the schools and school systems by huge numbers of excursions or other incredibly expensive and difficult to organise activities.
Let us take the example of chemistry education. One of the key uses of chemistry in Middle East is in oil production.
Most of our cars in the world run on oil products sourced from the Middle East. So an understanding of the chemistry in oil production is of authentic interest to the students of the country. In many schools in the world oil chemistry is taught by formulae, e.g. learning about the long molecules of carbon chemistry. Yet how much do each of us that have dutifully learned our basic organic chemistry understand about how it actually relates to the operations of a typical oil refinery? What better example can these students have of needing to bridge the near and present reality, the operation of the oil refinery, and the study of chemistry at school?
What could we do to bring these two worlds together in a practical and an increasingly student-controlled manner?
Firstly, it seems that we could look to site the relevant organic chemistry topic(s) at a common time in the school year when the oil refineries were accessible for demonstrating their fundamental operational processes. Thus with liaison between the curriculum designers/providers and the oil refinery operations the two aspects could be coordinated to occur at a mutually convenient time. Then the chemistry curriculum of the school needs to re-designed to ensure that it is organised to make use of the oil refinery processes to illustrate by suitable examples the concepts in the school curriculum. The operations from the oil refineries can then be transported into the schools by the magic of the flying carpet of interactive television. We are used to seeing television from authentic locations where disasters, such as the bombing of the London transport system, or major events of international significance, such as the announcement of the next Olympic games city, are broadcast in real time as the event actually unfold. How does this work? It is not at all difficult in these days of outside broadcast (OB) units for all television companies to source content from the field as requested by the program producers in the studios and then broadcast immediately either over free-to-air stations, by cable or by satellite networks.
At the same time it is not at all difficult to combine the live footage with previously captured and prepared footage,
ADVANCING EDUCATION IN VIRTUAL AND REAL WORLDS BY META- INNOVATIONS NETWORK-BASED EDUCATION 2005, 14th–17th SEPTEMBER 2005, ROVANIEMI, FINLAND
schools. However, we can go way beyond simply providing educational television for schools. After all this has been done for decades. Firstly, what is different here is that each television event must link intimately to the chemistry lessons designed for the schools. The students in the schools will be progressing through their chemistry studies in the topic of organic chemistry at the same time in all the schools when the broadcasts from the field are provided. Secondly, what is possible now is to then provide a feedback link from the schools, directly from the students, to the studio controlling the broadcasts via a real-time link to affect the activities of the broadcast. I proposed such a system in 1995 when the World-Wide Web was still in its infancy (Tuovinen, 1995, 1996). Thus the students and the teachers in the schools can request particular views, explanations and discussion about the field events. Just imagine a student sitting in a school hundreds of kilometres away wanting to get a better view of the fractionating column in a refinery, and a better explanation of how the viscous goo found in the ground is separated into the various commonly known components, such as fuels, lubricating oils, etc. Not only can the request be sent to the studio, by the magic of the Internet, but the on-site engineers can be asked by the on-site presenters to explain in more detail the alternatives they need to deal with in designing and maintaining the systems, etc., in terms of the chemistry they are learning at school.
Thirdly, what is then possible is discussion among the students in real time or asynchronously about a whole range of issues, such as the social impact of oil production and use, the environmental issues of oil production, transport and use, etc. In this way organic chemistry becomes a living and topical issue. It provides an example for the students about the societal and democratic nature of decision making processes about the application of chemistry to whole range of possible uses, and shows the students how the modern technology enables them to have an influence on the process. For example, with perhaps hundreds or thousands of students wanting to influence the OB views of the refinery, ways of getting consensus or majority rulings over Internet need to be implemented. Thus once various alternative action proposals have been submitted to the studio the students need a quick way of voting or expressing opinions, which are then quickly collated and the total results displayed very quickly. This is where the Internet shines. There are many systems available for voting and collating information over the Internet, which can be used in real time as the students participate and watch the results unfold.
So in this brief glimpse into the design of an authentic, situated cognition-based system of learning that emphasises student-control of learning, we have an example of a meta-theory-based meta-practice where all the parts of the educational system need to work in harmony to produce improved learning.
I submit that this is the promise and imperative of our education today. To seek to link existing educational theory and practice which individualises education while at the same time providing the scope and scale to provide it to ever larger numbers of students with increasing quality and relevance.
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INTRODUCING ICT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: 1 THE CASE OF SALAHADDIN/HAWLER UNIVERSITY
2005 - NETWORK-BASED EDUCATION 14th-17th SEPTEMBER 2005, ROVANIEMI, FINLAND 1
INTRODUCING ICT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: 1 THE CASE OF SALAHADDIN/HAWLER UNIVERSITY
2005 - NETWORK-BASED EDUCATION 14th-17th SEPTEMBER 2005, ROVANIEMI, FINLAND 1