Lifelong Learning in Action: Transforming Education in the 21st Century

Figure 12.1 Active learning

The Stamford experiment involved technology-based learning with disadvantaged learners in California in the 1960s. Professor Patrick Suppé's results showed that, in general, the young people who were confronted with screen-based learning for the first time preferred it 'because there ain't no one telling me what to do'. This is probably not the first intimation that the low expectations of teachers and lecturers can affect learning performance. Pejorative value judgements create poor results.

But it is also an early and powerful reminder that there are alternative ways of teaching to overcome such unarticulated cries for help. Suppé was testing computer-assisted-learning programmes on large IBM mainframes. Computer technology is rather more sophisticated now and, such has been the rate of miniaturization, one of today's laptop computers would have the power of several of those mainframes. Where we will be in another 40 years is open to the imagination. There could quite conceivably be microchip-based implants containing all known knowledge within a subject area for insertion into the human brain.

But, as we have seen, it is not the knowledge that is important-it is more the ways in which we deal with it, interpret it and use it as a basis for action. And even more than that, it is the strategies we adopt to cope with its rapid and massive

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