Emerging Technologies

Distance Education is the fastest-growing mode of formal and informal teaching, training and learning. Its many variants include e-learning, mobile learning, and immersive learning environments. The series presents recent research results and offers informative and accessible overviews, analyses, and explorations of current issues and the technologies and services used in distance education.

Here's a link to a download for new e-book edited by George Veletsianos, University of Texas. George, of course, has been my lecturer on the MA and a fair few of the postings here have been in response to discussions that I have had with him and comments that he has posted here.

Technology and Peace

It is essential that educational initiatives are directed towards promoting peace within a humanitarian approach to education. (Veletsianos & Eliadou, 2009)

I'm inclined to strongly agree. The whole point of education, I believe, is to take us - the people - and to equip us with the understanding, knowledge, skills and literacy so that we can do our part in this, our shared world.

This is a personal belief, and one that I would hope that is shared by others. My current reading on the subject of peace and technology is of interest - if we miss the opportunity to use the tools around us - in this case, technology, to bring understanding, knowledge, skills and literacy to our shared world, we, ultimately, miss the opportunity for peace.

The academic research out there into the use of technology for peace is, on the whole, fairly limited, so perhaps, I hypothesise. But consider how much of the technology around us has been built or designed with conflict in mind - billions are spent on technologies that keeping the war machinery around the world in continuous operation. The internet has not necessarily joined us all up into one big happy family and of course, weapons technology is exactly that - technology designed to kill. Just think if the same sums of money for development and technology were applied to conflict resolution and sustainable peace.

Peace is Possible

There are some specific uses of technology for peace related outcomes - Peacemaker is a 2005 video game that engages the player in a negotiation for peace within a middle-east context. I've had a personal interest in the One Laptop Per Child programme - a project with that began with an aim to reach nearly two billion children in the developing world with a focus on empowerment. Whilst warblogs seem to run alongside the mainstream media, the antithesis form - peaceblogs are also in existence.

In the paper, Fostering Peace Via Adventure Learning, Veletsianos and Eliadou, return to some of the prime objectives of adventure learning and consider how collaborative learning, cultural exploration, exchange of ideas etc. serve as building blocks for understanding. The initiatives surrounding the technology therefore are important antecedents to peace.

The key, however, is an area that has been explored less by the academics, and that is the how the available technology can continue to foster a long term peace.

Images taken from http://www.kellynewcomer.com/peacemachine.xml

Experience! Explore! Expand!

The reading around Adventure Learning brings up some very interesting points for discussion, but before I get onto those, let's consider the title of this posting.

Experience! Explore! Expand!

As an educator I'm fairly well placed to say that the whole process of learning should go beyond just the experience. Learners need the opportunity to explore a topic to gain deeper knowledge and to expand their understanding. It's quite appropriate therefore, that the motto Experience! Explore! Expand! appears on the GoNorth! website.

Adventure Learning projects, such as GoNorth! have a growing number of global subscribers - (about 3 million annual users, as of 2008), though the research literature surrounding the growth and impact of these programmes is remarkably small. My distance learning tutor, George Veletsianos has invited me to look at this and report back some intial findings. This is an area that is of interest to him, and having read some of the papers that he has co-authored on the subject, something that I feel is worthy of further exploration.

In a previous posting, I introduced some aspects of Adventure Learning. For this example, GoNorth! provides a good illustration - this is because educators have constructed a fully integrated K-12 curriculum with activities that run alongside the Arctic exploration mission. Typically with new technologies, how well Adventure Learning is integrated into classroom practice depends very much on teaching pedagogies and the confidence with which new technologies are taken up. Bearing in mind that most the examples come from the North American samples of their work, I shall look at four models for Adventure Learning integration identified by Veletsianos and Doering:

• Curriculum Based - using the Adventure Learning programme as is (by following the the project's own curriculum programme)
• Activities Based - by selecting key activities from the programme (both in a seemingly ad hoc, unstructured manner as well as a more structured activity approach)
• Standards Based - using the variety of material available through the programme to prepare students for state testing (i.e. tailoring the material to the students' needs)
• Media Based - this is similar to the activities based approach, but is based on a media-rich programme where students are encouraged to explore the media on offer

All aproaches generate their own discussion points, which I hope to explore in a further posting.