Plenary: Universities as Platforms for Learning

For centuries, college student were educated by listening to their professor read aloud selected books taken from the university library ("lesson" comes, in fact, from "lectio", Latin for "reading session"). Gutenberg changed that by making books cheaper and therefore more amenable to individual ownership and private reading, but the typical university lesson ended up not changing much anyway. Thanks to technology, we are now experiencing, at least potentially, a Renaissance of learning methods: from ebooks to podcasts, from virtual worlds classrooms to streaming, from computer-assisted learning to videogames, the avenues of learning have increased dramatically. Are we heading towards purely technology-mediated learning strategies? Is the old Socratic professor-student direct approach completely obsolete? Doesn't the wider spectrum of approaches offer the opportunity to educate those students who have always been uncomfortable with the traditional approach? What about the impact on lifelong learning ? This session will explore how the future of learning in the age of the Net will look like.

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