Global Education and Local Communities :: Teaching Learning Schooling Papers

Global procreation and Local CommunitiesLet me begin with a summary of what I am going to say. Cyberspace is a new kind of reality, in roughly crucial prize little real, but in near respects more real, than the space of face-to-face encounters and of physical documents. Signs in cyberspace might be kinda unconnected to any real-life states of affairs, they might be quite abstract, but often they are 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 acquaintance in an interactive audiovisual culture medium is less dependent on an extended process of education in some national - i.e. literary - language than was the communication of abstract, typographical knowledge in earlier ages. Successful navigation in cyberspace does heretofore presuppose some spec ific training leading to appropriate combinations of practiced skills and literary skills, the latter normally encompassing both a key English and wizards mother tongue. Working out how in fact such a combination of skills can be taught and acquired, and exploring the ways in which local anaesthetic 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 cyberspace is, obviously, less real than the space of face-to-face connections. One should recall here Grard Rau allows profound study The New Utopia, written in the 1980s, pointing to the spurious creative thinker of supplanting places by spaces, and to the gap separating symbolic interactivity from actual social interaction.1 And one should recall the essentially consistent findings of an impressive array of empirical investigations wake that telecommunications , however dense and multidimensional the networks, do not have the effectiveness, let alone the emotional impact, of face-to-face encounters. Until the late seventies, such investigations focused, understandably, on the personal effects of the telephone. What they found was that although telephone contacts did of course make a difference when no other contacts were available, 2 the former, as contrasted with face-to-face contacts, had no great propensity to acquire new linkages. Telephone contacts are effective if they can rely on background information from earlier personal meetings, and if they are regularly reenforce by such.3 The same pattern still holds when e-mail and teleconferencing enter.