The real world

August 27th, 2006

It has already been a month ago since I attended the EU eLearning conference and presented at the EU consultation at the Lifelong Learning Institute Dipoli in Helsinki, Finland. During summer months time simply flyes by!

As project coordinator I gave a presentation about our ambitions and aims of the Bazaar project. I received a lot of enthusiastic responses to my presentation and our project. It would be great if the Bazaar website as a community portal for all kinds of learners, teachers and other facilitators in the field of elearning is seen as a useful place for people to get connected.

On the EU consultation meeting and the EU elearning conference itself, interesting and lively discussions were held about the use of internet and computers for learning and the place where ‘learning’ happens. What struck me was that a lot of the discussion still seems to boil down to whether or not the computer will ever replace the teacher!

And I thought we were already past this…

But it’s important. We cannot discuss the role of computers in learning if we don’t want to discuss the role of teachers.
I had an interesting discussion with a man who said that the use of computers in the classroom should be as small as possible, because children should learn from ‘the real world’.

The real world? The real world! My ‘real’ world has computers in it. The role of computers in the real world is growing faster than ever and I strongly believe that we cannot learn to understand the real world of today if we don’t learn to understand computers.

The real world is filled with computers, but just because you can’t see them, that doesn’t mean they’re not there…

The creators of this website (http://www.realworld.org/) are clearly very concerned about the use of computers for learning, but between the lines I read a fear for the inevitable. Of course ‘computers can gobble up time’, just like watching television and reading books, but we recognize those timegobblers as part of the real world.
I bet that a great majority of people would rather see their children spending a rainy day by reading a book, than by chatting and socialising with their friends on MSN.

I think that the young learners of today, who grow up with access to computers, broadband, new technology understand the real world better than some of their teachers. Maybe it’s time for the teachers to be replaced by learners…

Entry Filed under: Bazaar, Social Software