Transcription

Socio Economic themes introduced by Barbara Jones:

We ought to start this section now which has been organised by the DELPHI coordinator under the heading of socio-economic and transversal issues. We can continue with Michael Kuhn’s contribution followed by two presentations . I hope this section will contribute to the critical discussion later today on issues about lifelong learning, exclusion, elearning and generally the notion of eLiving, which many national governments and the European Commission are attempting to foster.

Presentation and Comment by Michael Kuhn:
On the user - the user is apparently someone who is not using something, that’s why he is stressed so much to be the user. I’m not using power point and I can promise you my colleagues have tried hard to persuade me that I should become a user of this technology. And they have tried hard by persuading me of the incredible fascinating possibilities I have using that kind of software. I refused, not because I didn’t find that software fascinating, but because I find that the power point presentations are bad presentations. It’s not that I’m not fascinated by the technology, but I think it devalues the quality of scientific discourses. Why? Because it tends to simplify complex and complicated issues into a kind of headline thinking. And I’m very worried about that. It also tends to seduce the attention of people to something that is very visible. And as soon as these power point presentations start to touch on something more than just linear edited headlines they often use something else, also very fascinating, but very poor. You have these images with dot here dot here dot here, and a lot of lines or arrows connecting them. But the interesting thing, of course, is what is the content of these arrows and lines. That is of course what the power point presentations cannot do. I don’t want to exaggerate with what I say, of course you know a Power point presentation could give you some quality points to remind the presenter of the kind of things he wants to present. That’s true. But it tends to simplify what people want to say. Interestingly Atle, you left your presentation when you said the things you were most committed to and you started to talk completely without this kind of simplified structure. So why do I say that? I find your discussion quite fascinating about the user. The user is a strange animal, the user is the creation of a person which, for the hell knows why, does not want to use those fascinating technologies which you created. That’s the user. So the user is a non user. That’s the problem. But I think the reason for that is, that you think, sorry for that generalisation, but the problem is, the people that are creating these new technologies, they try to persuade people, as my colleagues with all fascinating options this technologies provide. But the problem is that it’s hard to persuade a user of the potential in the technology and of the technological possibilities such a technology implies.

What about turning the thing totally the other way round. An interested user does not exist in your reflection. And that’s the needer, if this animal exists. Who is the needer? But you prefer to talk about the user and the user is a construction of something where the technology exists and you ask afterward: how can we persuade that animal to use the thing that we have done? Without asking him before: you really need that? And I have hundred of stories, about these technology failures. The same as you just said. In my university we have implemented a computer based administration system. It is a disaster. Not only for me, but also for all the people working in the administration department. I’m coordinating EU projects, so you know what our administration people do. They do all the administration on that computer software, they do it, because they have to. And in fact you know, this heavy books? They have these books, and they have sheets of paper where they do all this calculations with the calculator. And if the boss is coming, they fit it all in the computer, but if you want a real question answered, like “ how much money you have for travel cost” they look in their books!

You know more about these stories than I do. So the dangerous thing, I think, is if you like, the needer and not the user, but the needer is also a very problematic category, because the needer is per definition a conservative construct. The needer says, well you know, I need what I have, but you want to persuade him to use something new, to create a need for something new. So that’s also a sort of tricky relation. But I just mention this, because we have in fact done something totally different in our company measure project that I have been coordinating during the last two and a half years. And this was about the questions: What do we need? What do we want? And more precisely we have raised the question: What do we want from the project Europe?

I will be more concrete. Since you know, European research is supposed to be applied research due to the fact that the project Europe is a project under construction. It was our intention to look at current and recent research projects, with respect to the question: What have these projects contributed to construct Europe. And in particular we have selected projects which are, lets say, in the field of educational research or we use the term learning related research, for certain reasons which might be quite obvious to you, because education has a strange connotation in some countries. So how does European research continue to construct or to conceptualise Europe? We have looked at projects, and we have tried to find out for example: how is the European citizen constructed? Who is that? Who is that kind of European animal, that colleagues use in EU research projects when they are talking about this kind of things what we are talking about here for example. Who is that elearner ? Who is that person? What kind of assumptions are behind the construction of this kind of creature who is in your context an elearner? We have also tried to find out what are the concepts of knowledge we are using in that kind of elearning debate. What is knowledge, and it’s obvious then, that there is very tricky relation between knowledge and information and all these kind of things. What is learning? And also what is working in these concepts and what is the relation between learning and working and last but not least what is living like in this kind of society we are supposed to be in. Is there a living besides learning and working? And you know very well the whole discourse on a broader level in Europe, about the future of the project Europe. I don’t need to mention this famous Lisbon summit about Europe becoming the most competitive etc. etc. There are also a lot of assumptions about living in Europe, what is Europe, what is it to live in Europe, and we wanted to find out what kind of assumptions and concepts do research projects use when they talk about Europe and when they talk about living in Europe and when they talk about the citizen and his life. It is obvious that this debate, as you all know, is very much dominated by the concepts of employability, which is a kind of sub-concept of an economic driven concept of Europe. In fact the Framework programme six, which no longer talks about the European society, but talks about the knowledge based society and introduces very interesting concepts about Europe which have a lot of things quite suddenly to do with what you are discussing here, because another major feature of European education or learning research is that not just by coincidence, it’s called European learning or European education research and European does not mean that it takes place in this area in a geographical sense. It is also supposed to find answers to the question how to integrate these traditional societies. Don’t forget that, we just had D Day, where you know we just remind ourselves that it is not such a long time ago we were throwing bombs at each other, we hated each other like mad. If you listen to the interviews, you can really see that both, the Germans, the British and the Americans, they really wanted to kill each other. They really hated each other personally and were really moved when their friend died next to them by a German or the other way round. The previous German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, has said about the project Europe: the alternative to the project Europe is war. Very interesting observation. So I’m saying that, because the way the project Europe, the learner, the subjects, the citizens are discussed within this environment of, lets say, elearning. I’m a little bit worried, that all these considerations are suddenly completely deleted from the agenda. That is quite natural, because you know technology is technology and it doesn’t matter if a German is typing on that keyboard or computer or whatever. That is true, but you have to be aware that this is just an extract of our reality, using that kind of technology and the human beings we are dealing with are really more complex and wider then just elearners. They are more. And it was our intention to find out what are the ways, the learners, the subjects, the Europeans are conceptualised in the European research community. So that is what we have done. This is going to be published in our project results which are in the process of publication. . I would like to make a little final remark. I’m very much aware about what I was trying to say, and I was not very well prepared or not at all prepared, because I wanted to respond to the discussion here and not just make of make a sort of presentation on this project. I’m very much aware, that what I’m saying could be sort of easily misinterpreted as some sort of normative or even moralistic or the new version of those kind of fascinating things, and I don’t say that with any sort of irony, but we must be aware that we are dealing with subjects, even then or also when we talk about elearning and all the kind of things you have presented. People are more than users of technologies. It’s always a sort of risk and danger that when dealing with these fascinating technological options, it limits our view, or sort of conceptualises the people we are dealing with to only the little part of their lives we are referring to. This is not a sort of moral contribution or ethical contribution, it is a scientific contribution, because it deals with the questions - who are the subjects, the learners we are dealing with. The user for example, who is that? Is that a correct and complete picture or image or maybe also is that a complete reflection about the people, the persons we are dealing with, as they could working more or less in the field of learning education etc.