Hermes on Internet wings

information and communication technologies in education and diasporas

Maria Roussou

pp. 173-199

in: Ingrid Lohmann, Ingrid Gogolin (eds), Die Kultivierung der Medien, Wiesbaden, Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2000

Abstract

The aim of the paper¹ is to put forward an optimistic view of an ongoing debate about Information Technology (IT) in Education (and hopefully influence the skeptics) by giving an example of how constraints are turned into opportunities, of using and not being used by the new technologies. This paper takes account of written and public concern over race, gender, and class inequality in cyberspace. It also considers the work of Seymour Papert (the MIT — USA Lego Professor of the Logo computer language), who has demonstrated how computers can change learning. And it is with this seminal thinker of educational innovation that I start developing my argument because he talks about the one, the most important element that greatly facilitates learning within or outside a classroom,² with or without teaching. He talks about the "thrill" that empowers learning, about offering the possibilities to the learner to "fall in love with the subject to be learned". The learners' experiences today are defined by the complex web of shifting relations that evolve around time, space, power, and knowledge in the particular societies they are members of, but they are also defined by the growing presence of cyberspace in both formal and informal educational settings.