Professor Tapio Varis
University of Tampere, Finland
tapio.varis@uta.fi
http://www.uta.fi/~titava
TOWARDS A GLOBAL LEARNING SOCIETY FOR HIGHER HUMANITY
Keynote at the Sixth and Final Rochester Intercultural Conference, July 19th, 2001, Rochester, New York
In 1995 when K.S. Sitaram and Michel Prosser invited us to discuss intercultural communication, "the last 25 years and the next", the world had changed from what it used to be technologically, economically and politically.
Most dramatic was the accelerating technological change.The dawn of the twenty-first century came with a digital revolution and economic globalization with a New Economy. We have been moving towards a global knowledge society where information skills and competence become the driving forces of social and economic development. Effective learning requires upgraded multimedia educational materials, preferably distributed using broadband Internet applications. According top the current thought the use of these applications for global e-learning and telehealth/telemedicine must be efficient and cost-effective, enabling educational institutions to foster global citizenship and achieve "education and healthcare for all" at anytime, anywhere and at any pace. We believe that the Internet will be the main telecommunication media of tomorrow. Broadband Internet holds great promise for improving multimedia e-learning and telehealthcare capabilities in global scale, especially in rural and isolated areas that are not well served by commercial network providers.
A true revolution in e-learning and telemedicine requires high-speed access to the World Wide Web, and the flexibility to offer a variety of media. These might include two-way audio, full-motion video-conferencing up to MPEG2 quality, television-quality netcasting, and high-resolution image transfer for telemedicine. Such capabilities require medium to broad bandwidth. Developing countries need broadband Internet via international satellite and fiber-optic cable. The objective of increasing quality of audio/video delivery, high interactivity, and system throughput can be seen as a global objective of closing digital divide for improving e-learning and telehealth services (Utsumi - Varis - Knight - Methdo - Pelton 2001, p.4-8).
But the key message of K.S. Sitaram in 1995 was that "the world has become multicultural. Educational institutions and world organizations should give equal importance to individuality as well as responsibility values and strive to develop the ´Higher Humanity in the Third Millenium´." (Sitaram 1998, p.1).
Ten years ago in March 1992 I was invited to give a talk on "Europe 92 - challenges of change" in a colloquium at East Carolina University organized by professor Festus Eribo. At that time my concern was the development of a political union in Europe with the aim of becoming an equal partner with the United States in world affairs. We analyzed Europe as a culture of cultures and the future of national states, neutrality and the role of a superpower.
Now in 2001 the European Union has just held an e-Learning summit which brought together a group of 25 leading companies in the IT, telecommunications, audio-visual, training, broadcasting and publishing industries working together with the European Commission. The eLearning Summit was a working session for the public and private sectors to address the challenge of delivering eLearning as a strategic development across Europe, and to produce a set of goals for delivering eLearning which combine the expertise and resources of the sectors in new Public Private Partnerships. It brought together 250 invited leaders from EU governments, the education and training sector, and a broad representation of companies delivering eLearning services in Europe.
The strategic goal for Europe, set by the 2000 Lisbon Council, is to become "the most competetive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world cabable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion." It is the European response to the U.S. strategic programs like the National Information Infrastructure (NII), and the Global Information Infrastructure (GII) (http://nii.nist.gov/nii/niiinfo.html)
The European eLearning action plans sets a number of ambitious challenges to European education and training systems. These include:
To meet these goals, Europe rapidly needs to expand educational opportunity. However, we can no more look at the world from Eurocentric perspective only. The Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research in the University of Hawaii has identified three megatrends that characterize our own era and perhaps the rest of the 21st century, including globalization, regionalization, and democratization. The evolution of the global system must be clearly studied in the context of these trends.
Globalization is perhaps the oldest of the three trends. It has gone through three phases in human history. The first round of globalization took place along the Eurasian landmass from ancient China to Rome through the Silk, Spice, and Incense Roads. The second round started with the sailing of Columbus to the New World in 1492 followed by massive population movements and colonization of Africa, Asia, and America by the Europeans. The third round has been assuming increasing momentum in the post World War II period by the technological revolutions in transportation and telecommunication. This round has led to the rise of a global economy, communication networks, and cultural ethos.
Regionalization has an equally long history from regional empires to its current form in part responding to the challenges of globalization. Western Europe pioneered the new by establishing the European Economic Community followed by the European Union. Other regions of the world have followed suit, organizing around NAFTA, MERCOSUR, ASEAN, SAARC, CIS, ECO, etc. The trend continues in a variety of modalities in different regions and subregions. The most recent news tells us of the efforts to create an African Union following the model of European Union.
Democratization, by contrast, is a process of broadening and deepening of political participation that has a long history. However, following the fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern European dictatorships in the early 1990s, democratization has become an unmistakable force throughout the world. The modalities of democratization vary enormously from region to region and country to country. Its main features include popular sovereignty, constitutions and rule of law, periodic elections, and checks and balances by increasingly autonomous centers of power in government (legislative, executive, and judiciary) and civil society (political parties, trade unions, media, as well as professional and voluntary associations). Although the three trends are deeply intertwined, there are significant lags and leads among them. While globalization is rapidly moving forward under the leadership of transnational corporations (TNCs) and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) such as the World Bank, IMF, and WTO, regionalization and democratization have a significantly slower pace. Widening of wealth and income gaps within and among countries and regions of the world is calling for new modes of participation in global governance beyond the current nation-state system. Continuation of the growing gaps clearly undermines the social compact within and among nations and threatens global peace and stability.
The Toda research program proposes to bring together a number of peace and policy research centers from seven continental civilizations into a collaborative multi-civilization research project focused on the above three megatrends. Spread over seven imaginary continents, these civilizations include:
The goals is to develop a multi-civilizational conceptual framework focusing on the unity and variety of conditions and institutions for global democracy in an age of globalization and regionalization (Toda annual report 2000).
In his epilogue on "Education for a multicultural world" to the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century published by UNESCO in 1996 Rodolfo Stavenhagen pointed out that most modern nation-states are organized on the assumption that they are, or should be, culturally homogeneous. That is the essence of modern ´nationhood´, upon which contemporary statehood and citizenship are founded. But a truly multicultural education will be one that can address simultaneously the requirements of global and national integration, and the specific needs of particular culturally distinct communities, both in rural and urban setting (Stavenhagen 1996, p.230-231).
The approach by the Toda research project reminds us of the teachings of Muhammad Abdus Salam who passed away in 1997 on science, technology and science education in the development of the south. He wrote that science and technology are cyclical. They are a shared heritage of all mankind. East and West, South and North have all equally participated in their creation in the past as, we hope, they will in the future - the joint endeavour in sciences becoming one of the unifying forces among the diverse peoples on this globe (Salam 1990, p.24).
In 1997 Samuel P. Huntington criticised the attitude that the culture of the West is and ought to be the culture of the world as arrogant, dangerous and false. He studied the distinctive characteristics of Western civilization and identified the following features that make the West Western: the classical legacy, Western Christianity, European languages, separation of spiritual and temporal authority, rule of law, social pluralism and civil society, representative bodies, and individualism (Huntington 1997, p.141 - 158).
Takeshi Utsumi compared in 1998 the basic approaches and philospohioes of the West to that of the East. The West was represented by the United States which Utsumi saw as the champion of the Western culture. The champion of the Eastern culture was Japan.
In Utsumi´s analysis the Western philosophy is characterized by analytical, scientific, objective, rational and critical thinking while the Eastern approach is characterized by synthesis, literature and art with a subjective and emotional thinking (Utsumi 1998).
Following Utsumi´s thoughts the Global University System (GUS) is adopting philosophies and principles that emphasize transcultural and moral values rather than ideologies. The priority is in academic freedom and quality in education (Utsumi - Varis - Knight - Method - Pelton 2001).
Already in 1923 Albert Schweitzer wrote about the tragedy of the Western world-view. In his view our philosophy did nothing more than produce again and again unstable fragments of the serviceable outlook on life which hovered before its mind´s eye. Consequently our civilization also has remained fragmentary and insecure. Our philosophizing became less and less elemental, loosing all connection with the elementary questions which man must ask of life and the world. More and more it found satisfaction in the handling of philosophic questions that were merely academic, and in expert mastery of philosophical technique It became more and more the captive of secondary things (Schweitzer 1967, p.5-6).
Therefore, a demand of a new renaissance education has emerged in Europe and the United States. It would combine science and technology with the art, humanities and religion. In addition to this, new media and digital literacies are needed (Varis 2000a).
BROADER LITERACIES AND COMPETENCIES
Media literacy is a perspective from which we expose ourselves to the media and interpret the meaning of the messages we encounter. We build our perspective from knowledge structures. In the global information and knowledge society the ability to communicate competently in all old and new media, as well as to access, analyse and evaluate the power of images, words and sounds which are an important part of our contemporary media culture, is a fundamental skill and competence for every young European citizen. These skills of media literacy are essential for our future as individuals and as members of a democratic society.
Europe will soon be a 500 million Eurocitizen-democracy with more than 20 different cultures and languages. This requires efforts for a genuinly European approaches to media literacy emphasizing stronly the cultural diversity and historical realities of different countries of Europea. Even though a pan-European media do not exist the goal of European media literacy is to create a pan-European wareness of the role of all media, electronic and print, in the process of building e-Europe.
As noted by Umberto Eco "a democractic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of image into a stimulus for ctitical reflection, not an invitation to hypnosis". We construct the world we see: seeing is believing - visual experiences are tied to our intellectual and emotional ones.
According to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe there is a need for promoting media education in order to create a critical and discerning attitude towards the media and to form citizens who can make their own judgements on the basis of the available information. Media education should be aimed at children, parents and teachers and should be a life-long process which requires a co-ordinated approach also involving non-governmental organisations and media professionals (Council of Europe, Doc. 8753, 6 June 2000).
Different terms are being used in different countries to refer to media education and media literacy. While the educational approaches are discussed in some countries under the title -media pedagogy and traditional literacy is extended to include -media literacy, -digital literacy, -technological literacy, -visual literacy, -cultural literacy etc a more broader approach has been also developed under the title -media competence. "Digital literacy" can be understood as the ability to understand and use of information in multiple formats from a wide range of sources when it is presented via computers (Gilster 1997).
We are facing a third major educational invention in technology. The first was the phonetic alphabet, the second printing and now the third is telematics which means computers connected to networks. These changes were behind the ten recommendations of the European eLearning Summit in 2001. The idea is to remove barriers to access and connectivity, support professional development, accelerate eLearning innovation and content development, address the ICT skills shortage, promote digital literacy and lifelong learning, and explore sustainable public private partnerships (www.ibmweblectureservices.com/eu/elearningsummit).
A most recent demand comes e-media and e-learning which covers a wide set of applications and processes such as Web-based learning, computer-based learning, virtual classrooms, and digital collaboration. It includes the delivery of content via Internet, intranet/extranet (LAN/WAN), audio- and videotape, satellite broadcast, interactive digi-TV, and CD-ROM. The applications of the second generation broadband Internet will emphasise such aspects as multimedia and mobile application.
The Swedish anthopologists have developed an interesting approach to study the media as a social phenomenon and a cultural tool. Culture can be defined as a social phenomenon with two dimensions: awareness and communication:
According to this approach culture is generated when individuals interprete reciprocally and subscribe meaning the the external production of ideas, knowledge, values, feelings, etc. A fundamental condition for culture within society is that this must belong to people in their relationships with other and not be entirely individual and private. The media create and construct external productions using different systems of signs (languages) as a form of expression. These productions of media messages consist of mediating texts of meaning and generators of culture of a great social impact for the development of the individuals´ thinking (Graviz Pozo 2000, p.39-50).
Some basic theoretical questions have to be answered before approaching the issue of media literacy:
In a sense, many of the basic issues where already discussed in ancient Greece by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle´s Poetics is of particular importance to understand the balance between different senses of the human being and the combination of sound, drama, and text like in modern multimedia. Also Aristotle´s definition of rhetoric as the faculty of discovering in any given case the available means of persuasion is a relevant approach to analyse the influence of modern media.
A contemporary communication scholar Walter Ong speaks of secondary orality with the introduction of the electronic media. He asks what are the distinguishing features of media of communication, broadly understood? Ong finds media a troublesome term. Unreflective reliance on models has generated the term media to designate new technological ways of managing the world, such as writing, print, and the electronic devices. The term is useful, says Ong, but it can be misleading, encouraging us to think or writing, print, and electronic devices simply as ways of moving information over some sort of space intermediate between one person and another. In fact, each of the so-called media does far more that this: it makes possible thought processes inconceivable before (Gronbeck 1991, p.11-12).
Current research on media concentrates a lot on the so called new media and combination of many senses in the media culture. For example, the digitalisation and media convergence of telecommunication, copmputer and media have created an entirely new grey area or media gap with such new media that do not fall into the category of traditional mass medium but neither the private medium. The distinction between public and private is being undermined as the access and delivery of digital network media becomes available to small audiences.
The tools to amplify the mind include artificial development of sound, vision, and touch. In sound, virtual worlds can include three dimensional sound that appears to come from specific locations. In vision, computer-generated worlds need to move with the speed of live action so that viewers perceive what they see as real. In touch, gloves or entire body suits, armed with sensors let a participant communicate with the computer and direct objects in virtual space through gestures.
An important research area deals directly with human brain and behaviour. It is expected to shape and design computer-generated worlds so that the information can be presented in such a manner that it can be absorbed and manipulated more easily and quickly. For example, it is known that human mind is genetically programmed to pick up certain visual cues. This is helping researchers design better computer icons.
One of the most challenging areas for e-learning and virtual classrooms and universities is the creation of telepresence. The key to defining virtual reality in terms of human experience rather than technological hardware is the concept of presence. Presence can be thought of as the experience of one´s physical environment it is defined as the sense of being in an environment. The term telepresence can be used to refer to the extent to which one feels present in the mediated environment, rather than in the immediate physical environment. Telepresence is defined as the experience of presence in an environment by means of a communication medium. In other words, presence refers to the natural perception of an environment, and telepresence refers to the mediated perception of an environment (Steuer 1995, p.35-36).
An American professor W. James Potter (1998, p. 4-12) has articulated the fundamental ideas of the definition of media literacy in the following five principles:
In general, the following principles are associated with media education (for more details, see Journal of Communication, Winter 1998, Vol 48, No.1):
In practical work, we have to answer the following types of questions:
What are the goals of media education and media literacy?
What are the problems of applications to curriculum and teaching? Some of the questions under discussion are listed below:
The European Commission´s eEurope initiative is proving to be a great success at both Member State level and beyond. This is the main conclusion of a Communication to the Council and the Parliament on progress towards the eEurope 2002 goal adopted by the Commission. Internet penetration in EU households has risen from 18 % t0 28 % between March and October in the year 2000. The employment and social dimension of eEurope has been strengthened with the Commissions proposal for the Employment Guidelines 2001 strengthening the emphasis on ICT related activities and highlighting the need for lifelong learning for the information society. eEurope has also had strong impact on the hastening of important legislation and promoted research networks in Europe. However, many problems remain like information systems security.
Furthermore, a report from Pro Active International reveals that not only is Internet use in Europe lagging behind the United States, but the European digital divide is much wider. Over a period of two weeks, the study period, in the United States almost twice as many people aged 15 and over (53 %) went online than in Europe (27 %).
In the United States, Internet usage between regions hardly differs. In Europe, however, the figures show that Internet use is considerably greater in northern Europe. In the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands Internet usage is at roughly two-thirds the US level, whereas in Italy, France, and Spain it is below one-third. (http://www.proacte.com/cfnews)
According to a research report from 24 countries Finland ranks very high among world schools in the use of Internet. In 96 % of the Finnish schools Internet is in use and only in Iceland, Singapore and Canada the figure is higher. However, most European schools are far behind in this respect. But even in Finland the teachers think that the biggest barrier preventing effective use of Internet is the lack of teacher skills and competences. As many as 80 % of the teachers in Finland, France and Lithuania think so. (Helsingin Sanomat 20.9.2000).
Our research team at the University of Tampere, Finland, is concluding that media pedagogy (media literacy or media education) should be approached as a wide inter- and transdisciplinary field. The triangle would be composed of media education (faculty of education and teacher education) as one corner, media technology (information technology, computer science, hypermedia) in the second corner, and media culture (media and communication studies, art and design) as the third corner (Kotilainen 2001, and Portimojärvi 2000).
The question of cultural, local, regional and European identities in media, learning and education are becoming central for the national and European strategies The goal is competency in communication and media with the new information infrastuctures on a Pan-European level. The competency includes using modes of thought characteristic of the major areas of thought and knowledge and a knowledge or our basic cultural heritage. Concepts like collaboration or asynchronous education reflect the necessities of the evolution of society than purely educational argumentation.
A whole range of competencies are required in eLearning. The basic question is what knowledge and skills will enable people to do human resource development work? For this, several general competencies are needed - among them communication and media competencies. But in addition to these, management competencies, distribution method competencies, and presentation method competencies are necessay (http://www.learningcircuits.org/2001/nar2001/competencies.html)
Liberal education is used in the United States to describe an educational tradition that celebrates and nurtures human freedom. People educated in this spirit are regarded culturally literate who are supposed to master competency in communication. Liberally educated people listen and they hear, they read and they understand, they can talk with anyone, they can write clearly and persuasively and movingly, they can solve a wide variety of puzzles and problems.They respect rigor not so much for its own sake but as a way of seeking truth, they practice humility, tolerance, and self-criticism, they understand how to get things done in the world, they nurture and empower the people around them, and they are able to see connections (Cronon 1998).
These goals can well be compared with the goals of media education and media literacy in general. There are, however, some threats and challenges in the international level that have been identified, for example, by Unesco World Conference of Higher Education in 1998. These are:
In the UK, a group of researchers have explored the challenges of the communications revolution to e-Britannia, They realise that once digital television offers true web access and combines interactive TV with online services, the population as a whole can plug into this new world. Their recommendations to the European policy context is that the European Commission should explore how world class public service broadcasting is being disseminated through web and wireless platforms and what steps can be taken to facilitate, encourage and support this development (e-Britannia: the communications revolution 2000, p.7-9).
Jürgen Habermas has introduced the term communicative competence. He explains that this does mean the mastery of the means of construction necessary for the establishment of an ideal-speech situation. And so with this notion of communicative competence Habermas refers to the several means of using language to create consensus and agreement between two or more speaking and acting subjects. The attention is directed beyond the syntactical and grammatical rules of this or that (German, English, French, Finnish) language the universal means in which speech is used to create and sustain social relationships. In a sense we are talking about universal skills of communication. We are born with the potential to use them to create a better society (Pusey 1987, p.73).
When looking at the future from a European and more broadly Western perspective it may be instructive to go back to the early writings of Paul Lazarsfeld, one of the founders of modern communication research, when he together with Genevieve Knupfer outlined communication research and international cooperation in 1945. They wrote:
"It is our thesis that in the international field, too, mass media will be most effective when they focus upon positive program of action. Such a focus can only be a world organization of nations, an international authority
The authors continued that once such a development has started, the media of mass communication can be used to build up something like an educational campaign the purpose of which is to make the international authority accepted as part of everyday thinking, to give it prestige, to see that as many people as possible are intimately acquainted with its functions.
Today, questions are asked how should a superpower behave (Business Week, July 16, 2001, p.8). The era of nation-states which lasted more than three centuries, is now crumbling due to the rise of supranational institutions such as the European Union and the processes of globalization.
An increasing attention is given to the civil society, people. When UNESCO was founded in 1945 and the U.S. poet and Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish who drafted the constitution, was asked "can we educate for world peace?", he answered:
"Of course we can educate for world peace. I´d be willing, for my own part, to say that there is no possible way of getting world peace except through education. Which means education of the peoples of the world. All you can do by arrangements between governments is to remove the causes of disagreement which may become, in time, causes of war. But peace, as we are beginning to realize, is something a great deal more than the absence of war. Peace is positive and not negative. Peace is a way of living together which excludes war, rather than a period without war in which peoples try to live together (The UNESCO Courier, October 1985, p.27).
The only thing to add now in the beginning of the 21st century is that education today means a global challenge and dialogue between great civilizations, old and new. Furthermore, it is more and more an open, life-long learning process for all. There may be a technologically integrated world but with too much digital divide and conflicts of values.
The problem can only be dealt with a qualitatively new kind of approach to continuing learning for all generations using new pedagogic, institutional and intellectual solutions in a new renaissance spirit. Also quantitatively we must be able to reach the large, young populations of the developing countries
References:
Aristotle: Poetics. London 1956.
Business Week, July 16, 2001.
Cronon, William: Only Connect, The Goals of a Liberal Education. The American Scholar, Autumn 1998.
e-Britannia: The communications revolution. By Steven barnett et el. The University of Luton Press 2000.
Graviz, Ana Jorge Pozo: The media as a social phenomenon and a cultural tool, in Angel-Pio Gonzales Soto Merce Gisbert Cervera (eds) Media and knowledge for the future. Tarragona 1999.
Gronbeck, Bruce Thomas J. Farrell Paul A. Soukup: Media, consciousness and culture. Sage PublicationsLondon 1991.
Gilster, Paul Digital Literacy, Wiley and Computer Publishing, 1997
Helsingin Sanomat. 20 September 2000.
http://nii.nist.gov/nii/niiinfo.html
http:// www.ibmweblectureservices.com/eu/elearningsummit
http://www.learningcircuits.org/2001/nar2001/competencies.html
http://www.proacte.com/cfnews. 9 December 2000-12-09
Huntington, Samuel P.: Occidente unico, no universal (The West: Unique, not universal). Politica Exterior, Vol. XI, enero/febrero 1997, No 55.
Journal of Communication, Winter 1998, Vol.48, No.1 "Media Literacy Symposium."
Kotilainen, Sirkku: Mediakulttuurin haasteita opettajankoulutukselle (Media culture as a challenge for teacher education). Acta Universitatis Tamperensis No 807, Tampere 2001.
Lazarsfeld, Paul F. - Knupfer, Genevieve: Communications research and international cooperation. In Ralph Linton (ed): The science of man in the world crisis. New York, Columbia University Press 1945.
Parliamentary Assembly, Council of Europe, Doc. 8753, 6. June 2000, Media Education.
Portimojärvi, Timo: licenciate thesis, University of Tampere, Finland, 2000.
Potter, W. James: Media Literacy. Sage Publications. London 1998.
Pusey, Michael: Jürgen Habermas. London 1987.
Salam, Muhammad Abdus: Notes on science, technology and science education in the development of the south. The Third World Academy of Sciences, April 1990, Trieste.
Schweitzer, Albert: Civilization and ethics. London 1967.
Sitaram, K.S.: Introduction: Multicultural communication for a higher humanity. In K.S. Sitaram & Michael Prosser (eds): "Civic discourse: Multiculturalism, cultural diversity, and global communication." Ablex Publishing Corporation , Stamford 1998.
Stavenhagen, Rodolfo: Education for a multicultural world. In "Learning: The Treasure within". Report to UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century. Paris 1996.
Steuer, Jonathan: Defining virtual reality: Dimensions determining telepresence. In Biocca, Frank Mark R. Levy: Communication in the age of virtual reality, Hillside, New Jersey 1995.
The UNESCO Courier, October 1985.
Toda
annual report 2000. Wed, 21 Mar 2001 08:58:35 -1000
From: Majid Tehranian <majid@hawaii.edu>
Subject: Toda Institute 2000
toda-l@hawaii.edu, ace-l@hawaii.edu, ipra-l@hawaii.edudu
Unesco: From traditional to virtual: the new information technologies. ED.98/CONF.202/7.6, Paris, August 1998.
Utsumi, Takeshi, June 24, 1998, http://www.friends-partners.org/GLOSAS/Bookwriting/PART_I/Chapter_III/Contents_of_Chapter_3.html
Utsumi, Takeshi - Varis, Tapio - Knight, Peter - Method, Francis - Pelton, Joseph: Using broadband to close the digital divide. Intermedia, April 2001/Vol.29, No 2.
Varis, Tapio: What is media competence and why is it necessary? Parliamentary Assembly Hearing, Council of Europe, 23 March 2000, Brussels.
Varis, Tapio:Approaches to media literacy and e-Learning. European Commission Workshop Image Education and Media Literacy November 16th, 2000, Brussels (Varis 2000a)