"The changing of values of education in the transformation between industrial society and the world wide incoming knowledge society"

I* Encuentro Internacional de Educación en Valores –CUBA // 2004 <valores2004@vrd.reduc.edu.cu>

www.reduc.edu.cu/valores/index.htm.

By Paolo Manzelli :

 LRE<EGO-CreaNET “VIA”>FLORENCE UNIVERSITY (IT) LRE@UNIFI.IT ; https://www.edscuola.it/lre.html

PREMISE-

 The changing of values of education in the transformation between industrial society and post-industrial society is a important issues that today world wide generates  a rethinking process about education's ability to respond to the contemporary needs of knowledge management and to reflect about the SWOT analysis among the “ relevance/obsolescence” of new contents and methods, that are necessary for renewing all over the world training programs in a way that they can be useful for the socio economic development in  the Knowledge Society age.

One of the most important changes is a consequence of the possibility to transform “Distance Education to Distributed on line Learning” to organize a “Sharing Knowledge Methodology” in the World Wide Web. .It is important to remember that  “Distance education” is normally working as an extension of the traditional education based on the “transfer of knowledge” in a less distance environment, while the “Distributed learning” is based on a WEB-Editorial approach to publicize new advanced educational resources on line and this can be possible within  the co-operation of Virtual Communities organized for improving the “knowledge sharing in the WWW”, and  for overcoming skill shortage especially in relation to new approaches of knowledge management for renewing socio-economic development through rethinking education values and strategies in an international multidisciplinary dimension. 

It is  easy to understand that today the improvement of the WEB-based education , favour the changing on the division of international working society .In fact  the work world is leaving in a fast-changing of the future knowledge society  age where educational demands of intellectual workers need to be  continually self-correct and adapt to new directions of trans-national socio-economic development.. Therefore the needs of vocational training of individual learners go far beyond traditional “start-up" curricula organized within specific disciplines. Therefore the use of the World Wide Web Portals for improving “Learning WEB-domains” in various advanced fields of education is growing rapidly. Web resources are often included in web-reading seminars and being extended by the use of electronic discussion of collaborative net-learning groups.

Therefore do day the WEB-EDITORIAL RESOURCES is strongly developing  in the WWW, by means various inter –Institutional  co-operation programs, getting used to promote  the development, dissemination,  of advanced educational materials based on  “Educational Web Site or portals” on specific themes, that are freely open on a the world-wide collaboration.

- Integrated methods of knowledge building in changing traditional values of education and developing “Novel Learning Approaches” using the World-Wide Web  

The WEB-editorial environments are building upon the “principle of interactive learning domains” where the individual's learning criteria has been broken down into the following procedures:

a)      Information and cognition innovation, related to the Learning WEB- Activity (revising and refreshing training curricula into a multidisciplinary approach); b) the Learning WEB- Object (procedures and motivation of “team-learning” methods) and the Learning WEB-Outcomes (re-skilling ability for creativity).

These correspond respectively to education innovation activities especially for developing “Lifelong learning” resource-supports as well as to create web-powerful engines and web-educational experts tutoring, for helping the mastery of multidisciplinary subject material and finally to enhance evaluation criteria for assessing interaction between functional, application and contextual learning domains correlated with the requirement of developing an interactive and effective “mutual learning” achievement.

In addition “Virtual WEB-communities” in research educational innovation , will provide the  implementation of such learning WEB-environments, by means  supporting the financing of international projects in favour of developing international co-organization of  Institutions and groups of authors for  sharing  the production and the dissemination of “net-learning”  best practices based on the common principle of “WEB-learning domains collaborative construction”. .

In reality the demands of the contemporary “Knowledge Society Age” are having a profound impact on fundamental patterns and modulation of learning (net. learning or mutual learning), throughout improving the transformation between Distance Education to Distributed Learning. Therefore in this context new values of world wide education are emerging towards holding up co-operation though developing mutual learning methodology based on sharing of knowledge among different types of cultural environments; this new methods and innovative contents of DISTRIBUTED LEARNING, gradually develops into a world wide dimension a better critical understanding how global socio-economic reality can be changed in the near future.

The Educational Research of LRE/EGO-CreaNET of the Florence University Italy,  has also uncovered important principles and methods  for structuring “Mutual learning WEB-based experience” that enable people to share and use innovative integrated knowledge in contents and methods into new settings of  NETWORKING e.LEARNING ( i.e. NET-Learning) strategies..

 As a matter of facts "Net-learning” need to be considered  more adequate for permanent adult education in relation  with the changes in "networking knowledge management innovation" based on growing up Digital or Virtual  enterprises into an extended learning enterprises acting in the WWW  without cultural barriers for improving Knowledge Developmental Society

 In this case the integration among sociological and  economical research has increased the understanding of the nature of competent performances (skills and abilities) reinforcing the principles of knowledge management reorganization that underlies the contemporary growing of the economic value of Intangible Assets ( i.e. human resource and social capital) in relation to “Tangible Assets”( goods, machinery ); this change of the relative proportion in economic value is extremely necessary to solve and or to save problems in a world wide variety of business areas, in a way that can fit the KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY world wide development.

In this way “Education Innovation by Web-Integrated Resources" development is becoming an progressive  world wide necessitate that changes the concept of National Education and therefore transforms the traditional values of learning goals built up during the Industrial Society  into a more scientific one concept of learning acquisition..

In fact in this context of changing educational and economic values it is important to consider that Science from an historical point of view is a “Universal knowledge”, while the construction of social knowledge especially for the duration of the past industrial society epoch, was mainly focused to the “National Identity”.  In spite of this nowadays the separation between social knowledge linked to the National Identity and the Universality of Science understanding go forward a deep modification.

In fact Web-centric experiments in the Digital Communication oriented to build up new KNOWLEDGE INTEGRATED SYSTEM, demonstrate that it will be no possible an homogenization of cultural identity and instead of it can be possible to develop and improve the cultural differences also in Science understanding by means a sharing methodology for implementing the same goal of the construction of the contemporary KNOWLEDGE WORLD WIDE SOCIETY.

The above consideration is no so extraordinary. In fact the neurological scientific advances can be useful to understand possibility of modifying the contents and methods of the multidisciplinary WEB-Learning integration principles and criteria, following the fundamental need to change the old industrial knowledge based education, in a way that that can advance the INTANGIBLE ASSETS economical values. 

The main function of the brain is to develop an adaptive flexible system to the environmental and social changes to be naturally creative. . Therefore the most potent feature of the brain is its capacity to function on many levels and in many ways simultaneously. As a matter of facts the brain is based on a parallel processor that generate different possibility of goal oriented meaning  We get at least two ways of organizing memory. Although there are many models of memory. In spite of this neurological potential of human learning processes the traditional method of instruction of the Industrial society, followed a criteria useful for building up a particular social division of labour and for this objective has utilized an arbitrary disciplinary taxonomy of unrelated contents for the transfer of knowledge

In this way the educational disciplinary methodology restricts only a fragment the brain natural potentialities based on multiple understanding.

Therefore to fully understand the contemporary fundamental change of economic values of education we need to remember and underline that in the past following an industrial criteria of industrial work efficiency all over the industrialized world see the education subdivided in an historical disciplinary taxonomy.

In this manner the learning acquisition during the Industrial society occurred not for improving the potential creativity of the human brain, but for conditioning the society through disciplinary "patterning" and schematic maps and arbitrary categories of subdivision of knowledge, to control the nature of the historical relationship of the social division of labour that was a condition for improving the industrial society.

In spite of this in the current post industrial society new strategy of education must become to develop the requisites of the complex multifaceted nature of the human brain potential for bringing up a new social construction of the world wide knowledge Society.

Hence looking to the future we can see the learning innovation into an evolutionary growth where the successive development can occurs in several creative ways throughout the contemporary times of Information Technology & Communication development.

So that “Distributed Web-Learning” innovative  approaches can be useful to facilitate the fundamental plasticity of the human brain; in fact  neurons continue to be capable of making new connections throughout life so that the search for new meaning  remain innate and permits to introduce a more natural approach for improving human potential creativity.

The integrative multidisciplinary criteria of the new WEB-Centric Education therefore can follow different tasks and the same goal utilizing a sharing interactive methodology of growing up an integrated knowledge in a way that can be possible a progressive knowledge economy development, that will be compatible with existing knowledge, in a way to avoid redundancies and/or contradictions that surely will come from the linear accumulation of old and new knowledge.

Starting from those fundamental considerations the LRE-EGO-CreaNET of the University of Florence , proceed in developing new projects  on “Novel Learning Approaches” using the World-Wide Web” by focusing on the following principles and criteria for changing  values of education:

1) The disciplinary method of knowledge acquisition is obsolete because cannot generate new model of knowledge processing to support new crucial skills for the Construction of the World Wide Knowledge Society. 

2) For this goal the new acquisition of knowledge need to improve a conscious world wide reflexivity upon the changes on knowledge economy for understanding what kinds of integrated contents people need to learn in the next future for developing useful work and for better life. 

3) The acquisition of knowledge need to follow a shared and differentiated tasks convergent to the same goal of the KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY CONSTRUCTION, so that the future learning process innovation cannot be viewed as a process of incorporating new knowledge into the old  disciplinary knowledge structure 

4) The existing knowledge cannot moreover  be a constrain to the innovative educational research developing of new integrated knowledge; this because only the process of integrating the new knowledge with the old one, may identify and generate additional opportunities for overcoming the contemporary skill shortage and realizing the human resources needed for modifying knowledge-based systems (KBSs)

Certainly the intellectual work for modifying (KBSs), following the above principles and criteria is a complex and recurrent activity that need to be gradually experimented through innovative project and procedures aiming to develop an alternative of NET-Learning and WEB-Centric Integrated Methodology. 

For this reason the LRE/EGO-CreaNET develops some International projects as you can see in the annotated short bibliography < https://www.edscuola.it/lre.html>

Looking FUTURE DIRECTIONS of Mutual WEB-Learning starting from this Congress in Camanguey in CUBA and within the Year (2004) the EGO-CreaNET telematic International Association would improve the foundation of EGO-CreaNET "VIA" (Virtual International Agency).

See: > http://www.chim1.unifi.it/group/education/FoundationEGOvia.pdf

Under this open world wide scenario oriented to  grooving up a virtual community of partners, the new “Goal Oriented Project Planning” initiatives of LRE/EGO-CreaNET will be accelerated for implementing a collaborative international projects production both on these issues : a) supporting group ware and learning ware tools for distributed learning and  emerging interactive technologies (for instance ; mobile  devices , and wireless Web- communication)  and b) on innovative educational & cognitive research innovation, aiming to re-designing  "net.learning and e.governmental environments",  within a world  wide  co-operation  yielding new integrated knowledge about the nature and the values of net-learning and mutual teaching strategies, as it takes place in a variety of settings at different levels of educational purposes, looking to the main goal of giving a substantial  contribute to the transformation of Industrial society in the post industrial knowledge Economy.

 PAOLO MANZELLI