Procedia Computer Science
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Procedia Computer Science 00 (2009) 000–000
www.elsevier.com/locate/procedia
WCPCG 2011
Sustainable Development: e-Teaching (Now) for Lifelong e-Learning Constantin Opreana, Cristina I. Brumarb* , Maria Canţer c, Boldur E. Bărbatd a
”Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu, Faculty of Engineering, Bd-ul. Victoriei, Nr.10, Sibiu, 550024, Romania ”Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu, Faculty of Engineering, Bd-ul. Victoriei, Nr.10, Sibiu, 550024, Romania c ”Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu, Faculty of Engineering, Bd-ul. Victoriei, Nr.10, Sibiu, 550024, Romania d ”Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu, Faculty of Engineering, Bd-ul. Victoriei, Nr.10, Sibiu, 550024, Romania b
Abstract To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day. LAO TZU, “Tao Te Ching” The paper has three targets: a) Taken per se, it advances the research presented in a series of seven papers about education in a post-industrial (i.e., service-oriented) society broadening the scope from engineering to any kind of education reachable through permanent endeavour. b) Regarded as part of a “EU 2020 research cluster” with the aim to propose affordable approaches to education for sustainable development, the paper reveals bounded rationality (BR) as common denominator of, mechanism for, and connection between the two facets of permanent education: e-teaching and e-learning, the research aiming to model teacher BR (now) in order to exploit learner BR (much later). c) From the perspective of the topic area it is intended to deal with, the paper aims at convincing psychologists to move on from “inter-” to “trans-” disciplinary approaches to permanent education (the main reason to submit it to this conference). Main conclusions: To be sustainable in the long run permanent education must be modelled in line with learner BR, as the only stable dimension involved. Thus, transdisciplinary teamwork is mandatory (the paper should be regarded as a call to cooperation).
Keywords: sustainable development; e-teaching; Computer-Aided Semiosis; cognitive psychology, Eu 2020 strategy.
1. Introduction The paper aims at convincing psychologists to cooperate with computer scientists in permanent education, giving them a general idea about the first objectives of the PhD thesis titled “Nondeterministic e-Teaching for Sustainable Development in Rapidly Changing Environments”. Thus, its objectives are a part of the thesis objectives, adapted to the conference setting: a) Validating the role of e-teaching for sustainable development (SD) in Eastern Europe in line with the Europe 2020 strategy. b) Redefining “e-teaching” as imposed by the temporal hiatus between teaching
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and learning – unavoidable in permanent education – but avoiding any reductionist dichotomy. c) Outlining a first metamodel of teaching within a partially post-industrial Zeitgeist, adaptable to a metamodel of lifelong learning in a future intensely dynamic and uncertain service-oriented society. In fact, the paper core focuses just on the key syntagmata in the title, approached from the stance of a Eu2020 research cluster. SD depends on affordable permanent education; this involves holistic approach and bounded rationality, entailing major paradigmatic shifts in the three domains concerned: cognitive psychology, IT, and higher education. As a result, e-teaching should be thoroughly revisited. Thus, after updating related work in Section 2, the paper tracks the first target in Section 3 investigating the evolution of the concept of “e-Teaching” for SD. On this groundwork, Section 4 is build as paper core: it launches the concept of new e-teaching and “chaoplexic teaching”, highlighting the temporal hiatus between teaching and learning, and trying to create a metamodel of e-teaching. Conclusions and future work (Section 5) close the paper. 2. Related Work Considering the far range target of SD, the milestones are set up by the Europe 2020 strategy: “The European Digital Agenda aims to make Europe a powerhouse of smart, sustainable and inclusive growth on the global stage. The seven pillars in the Digital Agenda all have international dimensions. […] it is also important to benchmark European progress in the Digital Agenda against the best international performance” [6]. “The Digital Agenda is one of the seven flagship initiatives of the Europe 2020 Strategy, set out to define the key enabling role that the use of ICT will have to play if Europe wants to succeed in its ambitions for 2020” [18] “In these seven areas, the Digital Agenda foresees some 100 follow-up actions, of which 31 could be legislative. [It] is the first of the flagship initiatives under the Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth” [17]. Moreover, “The importance of competence development, in all areas of life, for all job profiles and over the whole course of a lifetime, is emphasized by the fact that six of the seven flagship initiatives, in one way or another, address the importance of appropriate and adequate skills training” [13]. As regards the concept of chaoplexity, the excerpt below adds some information to that given in a related paper and is meant to give a flavour of the syntagm “educational chaoplexity”, before introducing it in Section 3: “In association with the respective technologies of the clock, engine and computer, the scientific theories of mechanism, thermodynamics, and cybernetics have all in turn been recruited to shape distinct approaches to the challenges of imposing order on the chaos of the battlefield. Today, it is on the basis of the new sciences of chaos and complexity that the latest regime of the scientific way of warfare is being erected. [...] For all its present flaws, network-centric warfare and its operational concepts of self-synchronization and swarming mark an important step on the path to chaoplexic warfare [5]. 3. Sustainable Development depends on affordable permanent education Higher education is a resource for sustainability. In the Europe 2020 strategy [7], in the section: “Smart, sustainable and inclusive growth” three priorities are underlined: “Smart growth – developing an economy based on knowledge and innovation, Sustainable growth – promoting a more resource efficient, greener and more competitive economy and Inclusive growth – fostering a high-employment economy delivering economic, social and territorial cohesion”. [http://eunec.vlor.be/detail_bestanden/doc014 Europe 2020.pdf]. To have an economy based on knowledge and innovation we have to deal with a higher education complex system that involves students, teachers and administrators. The students should be transformed in graduates who assume responsibilities in society, they have to be skilled. To contribute to sustainability, higher education has to be actualized to the needs of society. To sustain development, we should promote diversity at higher education level and transdisciplinarity because humans are capable to assimilate many correlated dimensions of knowledge. Merging different domains can be seen as first idea towards producing graduates capable of contributing to sustainability. For countries like Romania, an additional condition is affordability. In turn, that involves holistic approach and bounded rationality, entailing major paradigmatic shifts in the three domains concerned: cognitive psychology, IT, and higher education [8] [11] [3]. A pertinent analysis regarding the “Pathways towards sustainability through higher education” is [14], where most key problems are dealt with – albeit not explicitly linked to permanent education: “the lack of information, incentives, experience, interest or financial resources for sustainability education within the university community”
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(affordability); “Barriers to achieving sustainability: limits to human information processing capabilities” (bounded rationality); “At present there are a few university programs designed to educate students to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and solving problems” (transdisciplinarity); “there is an imperative for every academic to consider how their area of expertise relates to other disciplines and how their teaching could contribute to developing graduate attributes necessary for work towards sustainability” (global approach). 4. Redefining e-Teaching Revisiting e-teaching for permanent education entails three developments, all linked to the the temporal hiatus mentioned above: teaching must be operationally separated from learning (4.1), cognitive psychology is the(only) stable educational pillar (4.2) and outlining a metamodel of e-teaching now for e-learning much later (4.3). 4.1. Teaching versus learning Separating the two parts – still in osmotical interference – of any educational process seems strange in a paper with assumed holistic perspective. In fact, it is rather a paradox of “holistic taking apart” since the two processes take place in different temporal frameworks – as shown in the title. The problem of “time as obstacle” (dealt with detailed in [9]) was introduced in previous papers as “baffling paradox” of a temporal contradiction: “how to organize institutional teaching, clearly limited in both time [...] and objectives [...] to meet the expectations of a dynamic and indistinct environment, as implied by the concept of life-long learning. The inconsistency is deeply rooted in traditional perceptions about the educational process itself, seen as requiring a face-to-face relationship between teacher and student. Since it is obvious that the processes of teaching and learning cannot be anymore synchronous, with the student and teacher sharing knowledge in the same space and time, a totally new [...] approach is needed” [10]. Thus, “Our present object of work (teaching) is neither present nor object, since it aims at a future, quite far away, process (learning)” [11]. An interesting stance about permanent education is given in [1]: “For at least two decades, politicians, academics and other stakeholders have advocated cooperation across sectors, administrative layers and other institutionalised boundaries to achieve objectives of what are called ‘learning regions’ and the ‘lifelong learning perspective’. Boundaries between geographical, institutional and sectors are becoming more porous.” 4.2. Cognitive psychology as stable educational pillar Since cognitive psychology – as both phylogenetic achievement and corpus of knowledge – has a lower time derivative than the other fields/disciplines involved in permanent education, it should be the crux of any e-teaching project. A good starting point in line with the paper approach for setting up such a foundation in the context of “human reasoning and cognitive science” is [15], where the following basic quotations come from: “results […] purportedly showing the irrelevance of formal logic to actual human reasoning, have been widely misinterpreted, mainly because the picture of logic current in psychology and cognitive science is completely mistaken”. “Our first aim is to see to what extent the psychology of reasoning and logic (more generally, semantics) are relevant to each other. After all, the psychology of reasoning and logic are in a sense about the same subject, even though in the past century a rift has opened up between them”. “It is a fine irony that professors, of all people, should come to the view that conceptual learning is not a part of human nature, but merely a cultural oddity”. “At the educational level, there are questions about the level of transfer of the learning of classical logic to the students’ reasoning practices”. “Evolutionary psychologists believe that human cognition is in toto a product of adaptation. This claim may seem counterintuitive at first sight, since humans have impressive learning abilities. Certainly evolutionary psychologists would claim that learning abilities are also the result of adaptation and that they are composed of specialised learning abilities rather than generalised ones. The evolutionary psychologists’ view is that human cognition consists of a number of adaptations, which have been useful for survival at one stage or another”. “With very few exceptions [...], psychologists of reasoning have not asked what educational significance their results have. They regard their theories as investigating ‘the fundamental human reasoning mechanism’ which is independent of education”. In short, both kinds of reasoning, serial (based on binary logic) and parallel (based on non-monotonic logics), must constitute the texture of any teaching endeavour dedicated to permanent education.
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4.3. Metamodel of e-teaching now for e-learning much later Why “meta-”? Because teaching (prefixed with “e-” or not, more or less already affected by the obvious crisis of institutionalised education) becomes increasingly chaoplexical. To bring evidence to this claim, a micro-case-study was carried out choosing an application space as significant as possible: teaching nursing. The quotations from [15] that follow highlight the design-space metadimensions relevant for both the metamodel and the conference setting (vital service, new skill-oriented and self-organising profession, transdisciplinary – and yet syncretic – corpus of knowledge, intensely dynamic and almost totally uncertain environment, only qualitative validation, and so on): “The Science of Nursing moved from a deterministic to a postmodern philosophical approach without a transitional period”. “Jean Watson in "Postmodern Nursing and Beyond" wrote: "The art and science of human caring and healing can be considered in some ways autopoietic; that is, it has been and is a discipline that is making itself"”. “Leading the vehicle of the Science of Nursing into the 21st century, nurses need to escape from the barren professionalism, from the critical pathways, from the mechanistic nursing process, in order to discover ourselves through the daily practice, creating through nursing actions as exactly as the artist to create new shapes or expressions of Nursing Art”. “Socialization into nursing profession is the understanding of the world from inside, from our perception, thought, practice and actions interacting with metaholistic knowledge, and resisting the strict fact and deterministic model of the structure of the Human Being”. “If anyone insisted on a deterministic approach to the changes described above, they would fail to adapt. The person using deterministic thinking pursues a vigorous analysis based on laws of foresight, of stability, and certainty, which result in a failure to adapt”[16]. A primitive and unfinished VISON (VIrtual SOcratic Nurse) was described in [3]. In short: current permanent education “must be substituted by a method based on four ideas: a) Keep the e- (IT means are unavoidable because a lasting face-to-face relationship is out of question). b) Replace learning with “metalearning” – having the meaning of “being aware of and taking control of one’s own learning” [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_learning] (because learners are most of their life without their teachers). c) Find a way to quit “the 3rd Order Ignorance” in the meaning of Armour [2]. d) [...] Educator profiles must move from teacher, to trainer, to tutor, to moderator” [9]. Hence, nowadays teachers have to become no less, no more than catalysts. 5. Conclusions and Future Work - The conclusions (some of them yet expectations) are: a) In countries like Romania, sustainable development involves (via a sequence of implications regarding permanent education) thoroughly redefining e-teaching. b) As regards “e-” the answer is obvious: agent-orientation. c) As regards “teaching” it proves quite difficult to solve the “separation paradox” without an intense transdisciplinary endeavour, since it lacks credible performance metrics. d) Any metamodel of teaching should be based on psychosomatic features (first of all on bounded rationality) and can be validated so far through convincing – albeit circumstantial – evidence. e) Unfortunately, cognitive psychology – while consistent and established – seems rather inappropriate as corpus of knowledge because of a predominantly deterministic (left brain hemisphere, serial, “von Neumann-like”) approach. - As regards future work, it is set up by the PhD agenda and – hopefully – will be carried out in cooperation with psychologists. What about a catalyst metamodel based on a first metamodel of e-learning in a service-based society, delineating the teaching-related design-space dimensions?
Acknowledgements This work was partially supported by the Ministry of Education and Research through Contract No. 12080/2008.
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