3.1 A rush for gold or the great hangover?
Although the learning of tomorrow is very likely to be as described above, it is all still up the air. What is needed most for this new educational style are a medium that conveys up-to-date information and a fast and effective means of communication.
The internet is a perfect medium for all these demands. According to Meyers Lexikon in drei Bänden this world-wide network, today mainly used for data exchange via telephone connections, started in 1969 as the so-called "ARPAnet" which simplified the US Army's communication. It then was only used to convey scientific information and became the internet we know today not before the 1990ies. Since the standard WWW (world wide web) was introduced in 1993, also multimedia applications and online services could be offered. Many people nowadays use the internet for their work or in their freetime. Communication has become much easier because of the e-mail (electronic mail) which allows the transfer of electronic letters and data to any destination on the globe within seconds.
Governments and governmental organisations all over the world put a great effort into making people fit for the internet since this is the medium of the future. Recently, a huge campaign was introduced in Austria to relieve people from their fears concerning the anonymity of the internet which opens the door to criminality, as many think. Especially a number of cases of child pornography have strengthened the arguments of people who are against the internet. The internet is a medium like any other, tainted with the same dangers and defects as any other anonymous medium. It should therefore not be condemned beforehand. In the campaigns, however, the internet is presented as the archive of the world's knowledge, as the ultimate store of all kinds of information. Its democratic structure which makes it possible for every user to contribute his thoughts allows a totally different view of our society and makes it interesting also for education and open learning. The speed in which information is provided and can be downloaded makes the internet absolutely unrivalled.
This is all very true and yet it is not. The view of the internet which is promoted by various people because of various intentions is not always what the internet really is. It offers such fantastic opportunities that very soon a commercialisation of the internet could be noticed. This is fair enough as long as the intention is clear and as long as it makes things easier for the consumer. Nowadays, all large companies have got their own homepage which they use mainly as an up-to-date and cheap means of advertising. Especially computer-related firms also offer service there. Users can download the newest drivers for their hardware and easily update their programmes. Virus scanners get the newest virus profiles on the internet and all kinds of freeware and shareware is ready for download. This seems fantastic at first. Users should, however, be careful and only trust companies which they would trust in real life as well.
Some companies do not even have an own shop but carry out their business via the internet. E-business (electronic business), a new slogan which can be read everywhere nowadays, is a very practical thing. Items can be ordered on-line, they are paid via credit card and it is only up to the postal service when the products land in the customer's post-box. Yet, not all people trust the data protection of the internet and are afraid to give away precarious data like their credit card number. Internet shops like the famous bookstore https://www.amazon.com can register large turnovers but not a very high profit. Too few people buy on-line to make the shop, which offers books at retail price but without postage, a profitable institution. Currently, it is in the red.
Looking at homepages without a commercial background, we can find a quite good reflection of our world and of society. Thanks to free offers for homepages and webspace from advertising-financed webservice providers, everybody can nowadays easily publish his views and opinions on the internet. Surfing on the homepages of large homepage-providers like https://www.geocities.com, we can find a rich variety of personal homepages with an ever so different content and orientation. This is positive on the one hand, since information can be made available to the world quite fast and unbureaucratically. It is negative, on the other hand, because there is no guarantee, not even a hint for the quality of the offered information. This is not of relevance when we talk about personal homepages presenting its author. It is, however, of great significance, when we consider the educational value of the internet.
When we go to a library to inform ourselves about a certain topic, we can assume that the books we find there, are of rather high quality. Especially in science and studies, the points of view of the different scholars may differ enormously, but at least we can proceed on the assumption that what finally was published is well-researched and well underpinned. This is guaranteed to us by the readers and the publishers of the publishing house. On the internet, everyone is his own publisher and nobody else than the author himself decides what to make available for the public and what not. Speaking of science and studies, information that has been insufficiently researched or that has yet not been thought through to the end can be easily found on the internet. Not only unknown or even anonymous authors or sources which are not well-known but also traditional and well-known publishing houses offer insufficient information that is sometimes not reliable. Their data is limited just to avoid to compete the books they are publishing. Maybe this unreliable data even makes up the majority of information offered on the internet. It is, therefore, quite risky to fully rely on the internet when looking for important data.
Yet, a trend which is of much greater use to autonomous learners is up-and-coming. Traditional publishers of encyclopaedias and dictionaries which were firstly produced in CD-ROM form, have now made their information available to the public on the internet. Everyone can leaf through the online-versions of high-quality encyclopaedias for free since these webpages are finances through adverts which appear on the top of each page. Excellent examples of this new trend can be found at https://www.britannica.com and https://dictionary.com. Even a web-version of the British National Corpus is available at https://thetis.bl.uk.
It is quite easy to find information from well-known publishers like the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Even if we do not know the exact address of the webpage, the search engines which help users finding data related to the topic they are working on, are very likely to mention it on top of the list of suggestions. Search engines are absolutely necessary for any internet user. Without them, it would not be possible to find any specific data on the internet, which is organised in a decentralistic way. There are no central address books, indexes or catalogues. Services like https://yahoo.com or so-called meta-crawlers like https://www.webcrawler.com, which combine several search engines, ask for the relevant term and give a list of suggested homepages which are in some way connected to that term. The wider we define the term to look for, the more suggestions we are likely to get. This seems to be quite logical and easy but anybody who has ever logged on the internet not just to surf from one homepage to another but to find specific information, will agree that this is not the case. Mario Rieder wrote an interesting article on this topic published in das materialien und ideen heft. According to him, a systematic and planned action is the important basis for successful research work. It is sometimes good to consult different engines and to try it again and again, every time with a slightly different term to look for. Yet, it is also up to a certain amount of luck and coincidence combined with a bit of intuition, if we in the end really find what we are looking for.
To conclude, the internet is a fast and efficient aid in daily working because it makes communication so much easier and faster and because up-to-date information can be very easily downloaded. Yet, this information is not always so easy to find. Additionally, we should pay attention to the quality of the given information and should only trust traditional and well-known companies and publishers. In case of doubt, it is no mistake to consult the printed versions of encyclopaedias or articles in libraries. The internet is the future, there is no doubt about that. We ought to familiarise ourselves with this new technology and should try to profit from it. There is no reason to be afraid of it but whatever we do, this does not only concern the internet, we should do it with open eyes.
3.2 The autonomous learner and the internet
Autonomous learning means to acquire knowledge of one's own accord without support from the outside. Depending on the level of autonomy, material may be provided and there may be tuition available from a teacher but the learning process itself is fully up to the learner. The more independent he is, the more decisions he has to make concerning the material and his preferred learning styles. In autonomous learning, much effort is put into doing practical exercises rather than into learning theoretical knowledge. Anticipatory and participatory learning, two future trends which have been discussed before, are also a matter of today's autonomous learning.
To be able to do autonomous learning successfully, learners must define their role in the learning process and their capability as learners, as Anita Wenden in her book Learner strategies for learner autonomy suggests. Learners have to show willingness to take on responsibility and have to have confidence in their ability as learners.
Everybody learns differently. Some people do better in visual learning, that is to view and to read things, others prefer auditory learning, to listen to lectures and to discuss the topic. Some learners go for tactile learning, learning by handling and touching, and others opt for kinaesthetic learning, that is to do and experience things, are learning styles. The more experienced a learner gets, the more likely he is to find his preferred style and in which way he does best in absorbing, processing and retaining new information and skills.
Learning materials published in any kind of the new media like the CD-ROM or the internet is designed to satisfy all different kinds of learners. Most of the programs are a balanced mix of audio-visual elements. This is especially useful for language courses where not only the correct use of the grammar can be trained in traditional text-based exercises but also the right pronunciation in interactive tasks. A number of pictures and even little films can contribute to learning a language in the most natural way possible.
While learning material published on CD-ROMs is limited in its size, the internet makes up the largest archive of learning material ever possible. Again, money and commercialisation is of significant relevance here. Quite a number of companies offer web-based courses similar to self-contained CD-ROM programmes. Learners just follow lection after lection and pay for what they get. This is, however, not really autonomous learning because the courses are built up like classrooms without a teacher. Autonomous learning does not only do without the teacher but also without self-contained concepts. Autonomous learning can take place following certain guidelines but it is far more open and flexible than any systematically built-up course can offer.
Autonomous learning on the internet means to look for various sources of information, assess them and to combine and make use of them according to one's aim. This is not very easy, especially for inexperienced users. They might be overwhelmed by the mass of information available and are likely to believe everything that is published, similar to the first days of television when everything that was broadcasted on TV was taken for granted. To find one's way around the internet is something which is best learned by doing. Tutors can help learners by showing them a few examples of well-made webpages which are full of relevant information and of poor sites which promise more than they really contain. It can also be quite useful to work out criteria according to which one can assess the quality of a homepage. Most important, however, is to show learners how to deal with the different internet search engines. It can be very frustrating to know that "somewhere out there" the wanted information must be available but because the exact address is unknown, it remains inaccessible to the user.
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