View Thread > Development and the Internet > Learning - Question 2 > Role of education and technological progress
The numerous and varied experiences with the integration of ICT and learning suggest great promise as well as great challenges. As we move forward and these technologies become more widely accessible and appropriate in developing world contexts, however, we will need to make decisions about how best to adapt to these new tools and approaches to learning and each other. Should technology adapt to fit the current dominant educational models? Or should educational approaches be redesigned to fit better with these technologies? Are some approaches better suited to certain kinds of communities? Do you think it is likely that education will undergo significant change over the next decade?
It is important to really asses the scope of the change going on with ICTs. As I pionted out in one of my contributions, when cinema and other medias appears at the beginning of the century, many person said they were going to transform the nature of things and that nothing were going to be as before.
It is important to understand that the initiaves going on today in the sector of education must not be technology centered. Technology must adapt to the need of education, and the contrary is also true, but at a lower extend.
The objective of education is to provide knowledge to learner, and ICTs ust help achieving this goal.
I am sitting here at a keyboard in California responding to a point made by a fellow student--or female student, I cannot tell because of this technology which minimizes gender--who may be next door or a continent away taking a course sponsored by a university in New England with students from all over the world. Whether or not one wants to call this kind of education a "revolution," an "evolution," or a minor variation of a familiar pedagogy seems less important than looking hard at the possibilities this kind of instruction offers for extending and enriching educational opportunity.
Yes indeed the role of education is to provide knowledge to learners; but it is also important to remember that education is a medium that should provide this knowledge in directive and pro-active ways.
We have to really integrate these perspectives within the full spectrum of empowerment and the role of social constructs in the dynamics.
Moreover, technology itself can facilitate these transitions; but the main concerns being certainly displayed around the contents of educational/pedagogical frameworks and their direct perception or encounters with different socio-economic, cultural and technological variables.
Within this debate, I do see education and technological progress moving in symbiotic patterns with the implementation of sustainability frameworks. The real challenges being to provoke this departure with new visions attached to change and sustainability, in order to yield succinct efforts by promoting the relevance of plural attention and continuity to catalyze this process.