Tapio's essay on e-learning and intercultural conference

<<January 26, 2001>>
Archived distributions can be retrieved by clicking on the top lines of our home page at <http://www.friends-partners.org/GLOSAS/>.

Dr Mir Asghar Husain <ma.husain@unesco.org>

P. Tapio Varis, Ph.D, Professor <tapio.varis@uta.fi>

Marco Antonio R. Dias, T.C.D. (Third Cycle Diploma) <mardias@club-internet.fr>

Dr. Michael G. Moore <mgmoore@psu.edu>

Dear Asghar:
============

(1) During our mtg on 1/12th in your office, you asked me the name of the
book written by Sir John Daniel, now the Vice Chancellor of The U.K.
Open University and soon to be the Assistant Director-General for
Education of your UNESCO.

(2) The book is Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology
Strategies for Higher Education" which was mentioned in my list
distribution "Sincere congratulations on new position at UNESCO -
December," which can be retrieved at
http://www.friends-partners.org/~utsumi/gu-l/mid-2000/index.html

ATTACHMENT I is his reply to this msg for your reference.

Dear Tapio:
===========

(3) Many thanks for your msg (ATTACHMENT II).

(4) I OCRed the printed essay, rather than using the file you sent to me,
since it has many editorial changes. Therefore, you may use the
version in ATTACHMENT II as your final electronic version.

(5) Pls visit our web site which URL is listed in my electronic signature
below.

(a) Click "Correspondence: Mid-2000." Then, you can find "Final
report of Web-based Education Commission - December 30, 2000."

You can then find the URL of the final report in ATTACHMENT I
<http://interact.hpcnet.org/webcommission/index.htm> from which
you can download it in PDF format. I strongly suggest that you read it.

(b) Click "Correspondence: Early-2001." Then, you can find
Contributions to "Handbook of Distance Education" - January 4,"
which I asked your and Marco's write-up on the vision of global
e-learning in the 21st century.

As said in it, this can be the extension of the things Marco did
for the UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education on 9 October
1998, Paris, France but this time, especially for GLOBAL E-LEARNING.

Namely, Marco's vision was for the bricks-and-mortar higher
education. However, as your Nokia mobil phone showed its power
during our attendance at the Information Day Conference in
Luxembourg a few weeks ago, e-learning with the use of such a
convenient device at anywhere, anytime and any pace is now quite
possible in the near future.

Our proposed English as Second Language (ESL) e-learning
program plans to use a notebook (e.g, SONY's PictureBook,
etc.) and a mobil phone (e.g, DoCoMo at 128 Kbps which is
now start experimenting at 36 Mbps in Tokyo, etc.).

The final report of the US Web-based Education Commission
says that only 16% of student body is the regular students
at the ages between 18 to 22, and attending face-to-face
classroom lectures -- the rest of the percentage are other
age groups with family duties so that they prefer to be
outreach students.

The outreach student body of Maui Community College in
Hawaii and of the University of South Pacific in Fiji are
already 35% to 50% and expect to become 75% in a few years
time. This means that we may not need classrooms in the
bricks-and-mortar higher education institutions any longer
which may bring substantial societal revolution.

What kind of global vision should we have in those coming
days?" is the question for you and Marco, and I am sure
that Mike Moore would be very delighted to have it from
you for his Handbook of Distance Education. Because of
the nature of globalization of telecom/Internet, this
vision absolutely necessitates interculture viewpoint for
which you are quite familiar with.

Incidentally, Marco kindly agreed to work on it with you
during my visit to Paris on 1/12th.

(6) Your intercultural conference in Rochester on July 19-21, 2001
(ATTACHMENT III) sounds very interesting. Pls visit the following in
my book draft at
http://www.friends-partners.org/GLOSAS/Bookwriting/Contents_of_Book.html

(a) "Rainbow Bridge Across the Pacific:
Slide show on the comparison of Eastern and Western cultures in
relation with functions of analog, digital and hybrid computers."

in Chapter 3/Section 1

(b) "Acceptance Speech of Lord Perry Award for Excellence in Distance Education"

in Chapter 3/Section 2

in Chapter 3/Section 3

(d) "Personal Recollections on the Inceptions of Peace Gaming and
Global University System"

in Chapter 1.

Should you find them interesting and appropriate for the conference,
pls let me know. I may condense them for the cyberspace age of the
21st century for my presentation (with slide shows) at the conference.

Best, Tak
****************************************
ATTACHMENT I

From: J.S.Daniel@open.ac.uk
To: utsumi@friends-partners.org
Subject: RE: Sincere congratulation to new position at UNESCO
Date: Sun, 24 Dec 2000 07:48:43 -0000

Dear Tak:
Thank you very much for those good wishes. I look forward to working with
you in this new capacity.
John

Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor, The Open University and President, The United States Open University
E-mail: J.S.Daniel@open.ac.uk
Websites: http://www.open.ac.uk http://www.open.edu
For texts of speeches: http://www.open.ac.uk/vcs-speeches/
****************************************
ATTACHMENT II

Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 09:58:06 +0200
To: utsumi@columbia.edu
From: Tapio Varis <tapio.varis@uta.fi>
Subject: My eTampere column

Dear Tak,

Please find enclosed my "Tampere Business" column that you asked in e-form.

BTW, I did not find any message from you from 30th December or January 4th
(asking my contribution to the book). Could you resend it to me. Thank you. I
wish you had a succesful meeting in Paris,

Tapio
========================================
Perspectives, Tampere Business, 2.2000

TAPIO VARIS
Professor and Chair of Media
Culture and Media Education,
University of Tampere, Finland

Learning in the eWorld

The efforts to create pan-European awareness are combined with efforts to
improve basic information society skills for all.

When everything is wired and the key question is "are you connected", we will
have to know the answers. The network media, like the Internet, is opening up
a new channel with all kinds of information distribution and makes a
communicative dialogue possible using almost all of our senses.

What was once called "distance" learning is now known as eLearning. We
can decide ourselves when we want to be connected to learning networks and
when we want to use them for learning. This sounds so radically new that it
is safe to say that nobody from the educational establishment could have
invented it. That is true. Concepts like "asynchronous education" or
"collaboration" reflect the necessities of the evolution of society rather
than purely educational argumentation.

In a Europe with 500 million citizens and more than 20 different
cultures and languages it will be extremely important to become
interconnected with the recognition of the diversity of cultures. eEurope
recognizes the history of the people of Europe. Planning an engine or even a
computer and designing a building are intellectually demanding but they are
quite different processes to creating social reality, communicating with
humans and defining identities. People have their individual and collective
memories, their history and their past, which defines where they belong and
how they are approaching the present day or the future. It is this concept of
"cultural identity" - or collective identity - which is gaining ground in the
present European media debate of the relationship between global media and
different cultural, ethnic and national identities. The concept of national
identity has also been criticized as not being very clear and preventing the
openness needed for positive globalism.

The efforts to create pan-European awareness are combined with efforts
to improve basic information society skills for all. The basic strategy, like
the one followed in Finland, implies three dimensions: basic skills while at
school, life-long learning, and new vocational skills. This philosophy is
based on the assumption that it is characteristic of the information society
that information is available through many different media. A new media
culture is about to emerge in which people need, in addition to the
traditional reading and writing abilities, a new type of ability, "cultural
literacy" - the ability to communicate, handle, understand and interpret
information. It is the task of general education to provide every pupil with
the versatile basic skills in acquiring, managing and communicating
information which are necessary in the information society and essential for,
successful further study.

In early 1996, the Finnish Ministry for Education published a Report
by a small committee on cultural and media literacy. It stressed the
importance of new civil and professional skills and competence in the use of
the media and the Internet. The report, among other things, pointed out that
the media field is integrating and becoming interactive while audiovisuality
becomes a central issue. This cultural change requires reform of traditional
literacy into media literacy, or in broader terms into cultural literacy
where it is of central importance to understand how images and significance
are being created. Now, in the year 2000, there is a lively debate going on
in Finland about what really is media literacy, or media competence.

I have presented my own views of media competence to the European
Parliament and the European Commission during the year 2000. In my view,
media competence may be compared with broader social competence. But, above
all, media competence is the competence to define the Problem, the ability to
communicate competently in all media - old and new - as well as to access,
analyse and evaluate the information in the form of images, words or sounds.
James Potter defines media literacy as a continuum that needs to be
developed. It is multidimensional by including cognitive, emotional,
aesthetic and moral dimensions.

In my understanding, we face three kinds of problems. Firstly, we have
to try to understand what is the learning process of becoming literate and
what do communication competence and media skills mean in the information
society. Secondly, we have to analyse the increasing neo-illiteracy. Thirdly,
we should discuss the skills we should give to citizens now compared with the
earlier skills of writing and reading.

According to research, literacy skills are of central importance to
the psychological and intellectual development of human beings. Traditional
reading of texts and stories to small children seems to be fundamental for
their later development. Consequently, traditional literacy can be seen as a
precondition to becoming media literate.

What is less known is how the cultural frames filter the processes of
reading visual, audible and other signals and messages. Seeing, for example,
is very selective and the power of the dominant media culture is widely based
on the audiovisual power of the images.

In an intercultural world, communication necessarily mediates
different values and cultural behaviours. Great civilizations and cultures
have very different patterns of communication and use different senses in
different ways. As a result, if a truly global information society is to be
created, more attention should be given to the diversity of cultures and the
co-existence of different civilizations and cultures.

eLearning is really about media education, media competence. It is
time to be prepared for that!
****************************************
ATTACHMENT III

Sixth Rochester Intercultural Conference

July 19-21, 2001

"The Intercultural World and the Digital Connection"

Keynoter: Tapio Varis, Ph.D., University of Tampere, Finland

Call For 250 word paper abstracts by March 12, 2001 , MHPGPT@RIT.EDU

Topics are invited which relate to intercultural,
international, and global communication & digital media for
this final Rochester Intercultural Conference.

Outstanding Paper Awards are given annually.

Previous Awardees have included: The 1995-2000 Millennium Awardees:
Kenneth D. Day (University of the Pacific), and William Over (St. John's
University); and annual awardees: Kathy W. Brooks (Pennsylvania State
University); John M. Bublic (Kent State University); Myriam Cabrera
(University of British Columbia); Kenneth D. Day; Sanjay Gupta (Lucknow
University, India); D. Ray Heisey (Kent State University); G. Richard Holt
(University of Illinois-Chicago); Elizabeth P. Lester and Usha Raman
(University of Georgia); Sorin Matei (Southern California University);
Michael L. Maynard (Temple University); Shashidhar Nanjundaiah (Radford
University); David J. Schaefer (Franciscan University of Steubensville);
Douglas Smith (Suffolk University) and Monique Myers (University of Denver);
Chris Stephenson (University of Toronto); William Thornton (National Cheng
Kung University, Taiwan); and Young-ok Yum (Pennsylvania State University)

Previous Keynoters have included: K.S. Sitaram -1995; Nobleza Asuncion
Lande (University of Kansas)-1996; Tapio Varis -1997; Michael H. Prosser
1999-; and Sherry Ferguson (University of Ottawa) and Barbara S. Monfils
(University of Wisconsin at Whitewater)-2000.
****************************************
List of Distribution

Dr Mir Asghar Husain
Director
Director, Division of Educational Policies and Strategies
UNESCO
ma.husain@unesco.org

P. Tapio Varis, Ph.D, Professor
Acting President, Global University System
Chairman, GLOSAS/Finland
Professor and Chair
Media Culture and Communication Education
Hypermedia laboratory
University of Tampere
P.O.Box 607
FIN-33101 Tampere
FINLAND
Tel: +358-3-215 6110
Tel: +358-3-614-5247--office in Hameenlinna
Tel: +358-3-215 6243--mass media lab in Tampere
GSM: +358-50-567-9833
Fax: +358-3-215 7503
tapio.varis@uta.fi
http://www.uta.fi/~titava

Marco Antonio R. Dias, T.C.D. (Third Cycle Diploma)
Vice President, Global University System
Consultant of United Nations University
Former Director, Division of Higher Education of UNESCO
36, Rue Ernest Renan
92.190 Meudon
FRANCE
Tel: +33-1-45 34 3509
+33-1-45-68-3009 (UNU office in Paris)
Fax: +33-1-45 34 3509
mardias@club-internet.fr
marcoantoniodias@yahoo.com
m.dias@unesco.org

Dr. Michael G. Moore
Editor, The American Journal of Distance Education Associate
Academic Director, American Center for the Study of Distance Education
Assoc. Professor
College of Education
The Pennsylvania State University
110 Rackley Building
University Park, PA 16802-3202
(814) 863-3764
Fax: (814) 865-5878
mgmoore@psu.edu
ACSDE@psu.edu
(personal): mgmoore@attglobal.net
http://www.ed.psu.edu/ACSDE/
**********************************************************************
* Takeshi Utsumi, Ph.D., P.E., Chairman, GLOSAS/USA *
* (GLObal Systems Analysis and Simulation Association in the U.S.A.) *
* Laureate of Lord Perry Award for Excellence in Distance Education *
* Founder of CAADE *
* (Consortium for Affordable and Accessible Distance Education) *
* President Emeritus and V.P. for Technology and Coordination of *
* Global University System (GUS) *
* 43-23 Colden Street, Flushing, NY 11355-3998, U.S.A. *
* Tel: 718-939-0928; Fax: 718-939-0656 (day time only--prefer email) *
* Email: utsumi@columbia.edu; Tax Exempt ID: 11-2999676 *
* http://www.friends-partners.org/GLOSAS/ *
**********************************************************************

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