Learning Environments
The 20th Century

 
Introduction:
The 20th century

During the 1990s schools were under pressure from almost all sectors of the community to purchase large amounts of computer technology to demonstrate their commitment to ensuring that students were computer literate and hence potentially employable in the 21st century. At several conferences during the late 90's we advised against wholesale purchase of this technology as, in our opinion it had not matured sufficiently, nor had it proved reliable enough to be regarded as a consumer based item. It had extremely limited educational value and, in the most cases, was used as a set of expensive electronic colouring pencils which enabled students to make their work look pretty. Rather than helping teachers to teach or learners to learn more effectively, it became in essence one of the greatest barriers to learning and teaching in the classroom.

However . . . . .

Over the past two years a whole plethora of new technologies has evolved, with the result that our understanding of thinking and learning, and the role of knowledge and technology systems within this process have matured dramatically. This paper addresses the transition from the 20th-century education paradigm into an entirely new education framework that promises to be the 21st century model for education. All the elements that make up this framework were in their infancy at the dawn of the year 2001, and in just three years almost all of them have matured to a point where we can start delivering a viable 21st century model today. Our prediction is that the year 2001 will be viewed by education historians as having been THE most important year in the history of education.

When we reflect on the education pedagogy of the 20th-century it becomes clear that we were severely limited in asking clever questions and encouraging the development of conceptual frameworks of understanding, by our lack of access to information rich resources that could assist us and our student to build/understand these frameworks. The information landscape of the 20th century school was encapsulated in the concept of "A library consisting of a collection of physical books which were nominally accorded the Dewey numbers to assist in their placement on a library shelf. In truth the library constituted a set of thematic collections on topics such as space, dinosaurs, volcanoes, famous people the Olympics----the list goes on but I'm sure you see the point.

How can you ask clever questions when the available resources are so limited? The answer surely lies in the dedication of teachers to producing their own resources. However the types of resources that teachers themselves could produce were quite limited and they often struggled to get across to their students the concepts which they themselves often misunderstood. The 90's information landscape set out to remedy the problem by introducing a vast, unwieldy information superhighway resembling a plate load of spaghetti which students tried to untangle by using tools such as Google. Both teachers and students knew that the information was there but the format in which it was presented was often inappropriate. The level of understanding expected was often far too high, the reading level was off the planet and students were reduced to an electronic version of what has happened for the past 200 years, with subtle changes being made via copying/cut and pasting, in the hope that this process alone would enable them to understand other peoples' work. Cutting and pasting from CDs such as Encarta and the use of hundreds of fonts and clipart libraries was the 90's technological "leap forward" and parents were mesmerised at the apparent improvement in learning, when in fact it was exactly what happened in the past but it looked far more pretty.