Ferhat KHENAK - Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail
CREFI, Sciences de l'Education et de la Formation, 5, allées Antonio Machado - 31058 Toulouse
Tel : 05 61 50 36 72. Fax. : 05 61 50 35 89
khenak@cict.fr
Introduction
Time, space and intelligence are all inseparably linked. Man's passion to be more intelligent, to go farther in space and faster in time is not new. What has changed is the fantastic ease and speed of travel and communication now available. We have created a situation where nomadism of people and their possessions is constantly increasing, should it be for reasons of tourism, trade, stock market management, or delocalization of industry.
The School cannot escape this new nomadism. Mobility and distance show how diverse training needs are today and how classical educational systems rigid in time, space and content are no longer able to provide solutions. The current situation is favourable for the elaboration of new models for teaching and learning.
Teaching using intermedia technology
The fundamental question is what kind of improved educational systems are we going to propose for our society of tomorrow given the rapid transformation of information technology? In the past, new technologies were introduced into society by members of the academic community. However, today academies and schools in general lag behind society in the field of new technologies. "How shall we train our students when that which we prepare them for will be out of date before their formal programme has come to its end" (Meirieu, 1992). In other words, how do we transform and fine-tune educational systems in real time, with respect to today's information and communication society?
Nomad teaching site: SEN
This project proposes to offer, through the Internet, a complete licensed Science of Education program for students who are either in remote areas or who are mobile in time and space. Four teams are mobilized to assure these services: technical, pedagogical, administrative, marketing and ergonomy.
The SEN is built to fulfill five principal functions: guided tour and enrolment procedures; Individual and statistical analyses of grades and enrolment for exams; Structure and content of study programs; Examination and validation of acquired knowledge; Support for student and student-teacher relations.
The welcome page of the SEN allows the user to choose their language of preference and one of two paths to explore the site: as a visitor or as an enrolled student. The guided tour allows the visitor to explore samples of the 11 features available on the site and to branch out to the enrolment procedure. The official enrolment procedure consists of three simple steps: registration as a student at the university, a series of entry level examinations, and finally course selection.
The "Logon page" checks the student's access code, verifies current academic credits and updates parameters for the subject programs already installed on the student's computer. This program, which is evolving and revisable, dispatches and reconstitutes course materials that are dispersed across many URLs in order to ensure security and confidentiality. Successful Logon leads to the presentation of a collection of buttons that provide a series of specific study options:
Few of our students are sufficiently rich to be able to afford prolonged connection time with our site. The solution that we have adopted entails reducing connection time by segmenting the pedagogical productions into minimal units. One unit of information is downloaded at a time. Even in the textbook mode, the course is not downloaded as a single document. Our images are displayed in totality during downloading in order to leave time for an experienced user to click on the text that orients his actions. This offers an interesting means of developing economic strategies for interacting with the site.
Towards a pocket school
Technological advances linking mobile or nomadic computer science and telecommunication systems have recently become increasingly important. Thanks to strategies of energy economics and solar energy it is possible to ensure power to computers without cable links. Besides cellular networks, satellite based techniques are used to resolve problems caused by the absence of infrastructure in some regions. Increasing miniaturization of cordless communications allow us to converse with other nomads as we travel throughout the world (Baghdad et al, 1997).
Taken together these advancements authorize all kinds of excesses of imagination (Virilio, 1996). If I was asked to design the school of tomorrow I would describe a little box such as a Walkman with an antenna and a little flat folding down screen and maybe special glasses that zoom on the miniaturized details displayed (they exist already for virtual games). Or we can imagine giant screens placed on walls in the city or in the place of publicity panels that can be commanded from these "boxes". We are able to freely choose a menu of knowledge appropriate to our needs and interests. Even in downtown Toulouse there is already a panel showing the weather around the world. We are now at the beginning of the era of the mobile school, an era where incredible adventures await us!
Conclusion
The SEN has helped us to identify a number of human and technical difficulties inherent in a mobile computerized school. The construction of a pocket school will be quite different from the production of a CD-ROM, which entails a static deposit of information on a medium. The implementation of a web site is a veritable creation of an enterprise with all the demands and all the risks. An effective Web site must be a living thing. It must be a dynamic system, constantly in movement and capable of successive transformations. In this sense, it creates sociological links between its users, and this is especially the case for an educational site.
To respond to this challenge, the notion of constituting a multi-disciplinary task force for the elaboration of Internet Sites, is simultaneously desirable and unavoidable.
References
Meirieu P, Le statut de l'erreur Conférence CDDP du VAR, Association Apprendre (1992)
Baghdad R, T Val & J J Mercier, Delivering Unicast Messages in Local Area Networks with Mobiles Stations Proceedings of the 22nd IFAC-IFIP - Workshop of Real Time Programming WRTP (1997).
Virilio P, 'Cybermonde la politique du pire' in Conversations pour demain (Les Editions Textuel, 1996)
Levy P, L'intelligence collective : pour une anthropologie du cyberespace (Paris: La Découverte, 1994)
Chevalard Y, 'La transposition didactique : du savoir savant au savoir enseigné' in La pensée sauvage (Editions, 1991)
Web sites
http://www.mdc.com.my
http://www.es/extern/web.d/fcampus.html
http://www.univ-lyon1.fr/nte
http://www.psychomedia.qc.ca
http://www.cs.washington.edu
http://www.mcl.cs.columbia.edu
http://liinwww.ira.uka.de
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