Global Education and Local Communities :: Teaching Learning Schooling Papers

orbicular Education and Local CommunitiesLet me begin with a summary of what I am going to say. Cyberspace is a new kind of reality, in nigh crucial respects less real, but in some respects more real, than the space of face-to-face encounters and of physical documents. Signs in net income might be quite unconnected to any real-life states of affairs, they might be quite pilfer, but often they atomic number 18 much less abstract than, say, signs in a printed book. As I will endeavour to show, communication in the world of printed books is, characteristically, the communication of abstract meanings among members of an abstract society, such as a modern nation. The communication of knowledge in an interactive audiovisual medium is less dependent on an extended process of schooling in some national - i.e. literary - language than was the communication of abstract, typographic knowledge in earlier ages. Successful navigation in lucre does however presuppose some specific training leading to subdue combinations of technical skills and literary skills, the latter normally encompassing both a rudimentary English and ones mother tongue. Working out how in item such a combination of skills can be taught and acquired, and exploring the ways in which local communities can form a suitable learning environment, are the goals of an ongoing research program in Hungary I conclude by sketching some essentials of this program. The Ontology of Cyberspace In some crucial respects profit is, obviously, less real than the space of face-to-face connections. One should recall hither Grard Raulets profound study The New Utopia, written in the 1980s, pointing to the gilded idea of supplanting places by spaces, and to the gap separating symbolic interactivity from actual societal interaction.1 And one should recall the essentially consistent findings of an impressive array of trial-and-error investigations showing that telecommunications, however dense and multidimensiona l the networks, do not wealthy person the effectiveness, let alone the emotional impact, of face-to-face encounters. Until the late seventies, such investigations focused, understandably, on the effects of the telephone. What they found was that although telephone contacts did of course make a diversity when no other contacts were available, 2 the former, as contrasted with face-to-face contacts, had no great relish to create new linkages. Telephone contacts are effective if they can desire on background information from earlier personal meetings, and if they are regularly reinforced by such.3 The same pattern still holds when e-mail and teleconferencing enter.