"US school succumbs to paperless madness:
"An Arizona school has dispensed entirely with textbooks and has spunked its entire book budget on student laptops....
'We have a library and we encourage students to use it, but the primary delivery of instruction materials is being done through the laptops.'"
UNESCO's Information and communication technologies in Technical and
vocational education and training
(April 2002, IITE, headquartered in Moscow):
"Subramaian proceeded the second thematic session
presenting IT as a Catalyst for Human Resource Re-engineering in Knowledge
Networked Environments. The expert introduced a professional pyramid of
principal levels and types of vocational skills and described the application of
different generations of computers for IT solutions in re-engineering and
development of these skills.... (page 9)
"Our Institute is a university for professional
education, which means that we want to serve our clients, our students to
develop the competences they need to start a professional career in a specific
job or position, or upgrade their competences, if they are already working. This
implies that we have defined our educational objectives
in terms of professional
competences, a competence being an integrative combination of cognitive, social
and affective elements of job requirements. The choice for this education
approach and philosophy has enormous consequences for the organization of our
education, including the use of ICTs as an educational tool." (Page 24)
"The fast growing attention to multi-modality, full
three-dimensional VR (Virtual Reality) and the avoidance of anisotropy has
partly supplanted the designer's attention to students' conceptual states....
The user feels 'in the middle of another
environment.' Most of the VR
systems allow the user to travel and navigate. More promising for learning
purposes is to let the user manipulate objects and
experience the consequences....
[Skinner]
"... they have helped us to extend our perception,
imagination and manipulation. VR is just an extra step on the long road
bringing the imagination as close and making it
as realistic as reality itself....
"...for many of the today VR proponents, 'Reality'
sounds as the only inevitable physical world, they rather prefer 'Virtual
Environments.' This leaves behind the idea that there is
mainly one real world.
.... Computers are inherently tools to emulate
situational and a fictitious environments. The next generation of VR suggests that you can really walk around
there, and can manipulate and experiment. This
environment does not necessarily
need the same properties as the real world. There can be different forces,
gravity, magnetic fields, etc. ... The properties of a good VR are like those of
a good teacher, it allows the students to explore the basic laws of a new
domain...." 55
See also
Facilitating
permanent social change
Using
Dissatisfaction (a crisis) for social transformation