Jenseits der Sprache: E-Learning übermorgen

Über Stephen Downes haben wir hier schon einmal berichtet, genialer Mann, E-Learner der ersten Stunde mit Mega-Erfahrung in Theorie und Praxis. Aktuell seine Rede am Australian College of Educators and the Australian Council of Educational Leaders conference in Perth, Australia, Titel: The Buntine Oration: Learning networks. Einer der niveauvollsten Artikel zum Thema E-Learning der letzten Wochen! Bemerkenswert der folgende Auszug:

“When I say that we must leave language behind, I mean it quite literally. Language must be replaced, is in the process of being replaced, by a mélange of multimedia, of a chaotic mixture of text and symbols, audio and video, of words and images, topics and theses, concepts and criticisms, not neatly stacked into rows and distributed through an orderly process of content management, but blasted aimlessly into the environment, a wall of sound and sensation, not written but presented, not read but perceived.

The idea is as audacious as it is breathtaking. But it is happening today. You have probably heard of the concept of the digital immigrant and the digital native. The idea that the digital native, one who was born with today’s electronic technology, one who got his or her first mobile phone before his or her first pencil (if they got a pencil at all), one who is part of, as some characterize it, the “MTV generation.” The digital native, we are told, operates at “twitch speed,” multitasks, and – quite literally – thinks not in an orderly progression of thought but in multiple parallel threads, associating seemingly at random, communicating not so much through sentences and paragraphs as through a barrage of images and (something like) text …”