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In the process of human civilization, the emergence of writing and printing is not only two important milestones in cultural development, but also two qualitative changes in educational methods: the former makes written language join the educational activities that were only conducted by spoken language and action language in the past, which not only expands the content and form of education, but also greatly improves students' abstract thinking and self-learning ability; The latter makes printed books and textbooks the main carriers of culture, thus promoting the spread of culture and the popularization of modern education.
"Multimedia" and "information superhighway" have become two technical levers in the transition from the industrial age to the information age, changing people's working methods, learning methods, thinking methods, communication methods and even lifestyles at an alarming rate. Undoubtedly, the development and popularization of contemporary information technology will become the third milestone in the development of human culture.
How does education meet this cross-century challenge?
First, the impact of contemporary information technology on education
(A) the contrast between the two "destinies"
Education is the field of training talents for the future, but the reform and development of education is always lagging behind, which is an antinomy that society cannot tolerate. Investigating the influence of contemporary information technology on education, we can deeply feel this antinomy.
In the early 1980s, when the first batch of microcomputers appeared in the classrooms of schools in developed countries, some people excitedly predicted that computers would bring a revolution to the field of education. Ten years later, this revolution appeared in the fields of film and television, publishing and printing, national defense department, office automation and so on, but it never happened in schools. Many schools spend a lot of money on computers just to learn simple computer operations and complex programming languages, or to put the contents of books on the screen. In recent years, some computer companies have pushed various "electronic question banks" to tired students for profit, but the results will certainly not be welcomed by teachers and students, especially teachers engaged in subject education, who still prefer their used chalk and blackboard, and are almost isolated from the computer world.
However, contrary to the "cold reception" in the field of education, computers and their twin game consoles are very popular in the game kingdom of children and even adults. In the fast-paced modern society, it is easy to occupy people's precious leisure time and a lot of money. The sudden emergence of the electronic game industry has a huge consumer market of more than 65.438+05 billion dollars in the world, and its scale is even larger than that of the American film industry, and the speed of its technology update is even unbelievable: the latest "virtual reality" technology in the information field was developed by NASA with an investment of 200,000 dollars, and it was not long before Nintendo launched a "virtual boy" with a price of only 654.38+099 dollars. Today's fastest Intel processor executes 6,543.8 billion instructions per second, while Sony's latest electronic "play station" with a price of $200 is 65,438+00 times faster than the former. 〔①〕
It seems that the main reason for the "tragic fate" of computers in the field of education is not technology itself, but outside technology.
(2) Inspiration from the winners
In fact, it is not all a tragedy that computers have trudged in the field of education for more than ten years.
In the mid-1980s, in the market forecast of educational technology, the educators of Apple in the United States were eager to study and understand such a question: When modern educational technology centered on computers is as convenient as using books and paper, what will happen to the teaching activities of teachers and students? So they chose some classes in several schools to carry out experiments, provided each student and teacher with two computers, one at school and one at home, and started an experimental study on education reform called "appleclassroon of Tomorrow". This research lasted 10 years, and accumulated rich first-hand information [②], especially in improving the efficiency of education, and achieved many exciting results.
This experimental research is essentially exploring and creating the learning environment and educational model in the information age, so it is first welcomed by students. At the end of the first school year, students' attention and learning attitude have been obviously improved, and they began to change from passive knowledge acceptance to active exploration and personalized independent learning. Although it takes a certain amount of time and energy to master educational technology, their interest, ability and efficiency in learning are getting higher and higher when they learn and study all kinds of knowledge and skills with the guidance and help of teachers. A fourth-grade teacher wrote in the summary: "Students are not tired of computer work. They actually ask for more work. In my previous teaching experience, I rarely saw students asking for extra homework. " In the past, people often worried that students would become lonely because of lack of communication with their peers when they were dealing with computers all day. The conclusion of the experiment is completely opposite: autonomous learning with new technology can promote communication and cooperation between students more than traditional classroom teaching. This new educational model has promoted profound changes in teachers' concepts and behaviors, and fundamentally changed the traditional teacher-student relationship and communication methods. Teachers deeply feel that they are more like managers and guides than preachers. The efforts to integrate modern educational technology into the classroom make them re-examine the basic principles of education and think about a series of new characteristics of teachers' profession in the information society in the future. New technology liberates teachers from a large number of repetitive educational activities and dedicates creativity to more challenging and personalized communication and exploration between teachers and students. This is obviously an important way to fundamentally improve the effectiveness of education. As a teacher said, "new technology has kept me enthusiastic as a teacher, but now I am different from before." Now I am instructing students. They control their own education, create their own knowledge, and use their creativity to study and express information to others. "
Apple is not the only director of this educational reform comedy. All successful actors and lucky audiences will gain the following knowledge: Contemporary information technology brings not only changes in means and methods, but also a historic change including educational ideas and modes. Therefore, if we can't update our ideas and change our models, the application of educational technology will not only fail to improve educational benefits, but also lead to the waste of educational resources.
How to study the influence of information technology on future education? There is an important methodological problem here. People often only understand the relationship between them on the surface, so they only see two aspects directly related to them: on the one hand, information technology will cause changes in educational technology and even educational means and methods; On the other hand, information technology itself will become an important part of education. These two aspects are good, but in fact, when technology has an impact on education, it often goes through the important intermediary and bridge of culture. Therefore, discussing what changes the contemporary information technology has brought and will bring to human cultural foundation and even lifestyle, and then discussing the impact on future education may broaden our research horizons.
Second, the fission of contemporary information technology in the three cornerstones of culture and education
In the printing age, reading, writing and arithmetic are recognized as the three pillars of culture and the three cornerstones of traditional education. All countries in the world regard the cultivation of these three abilities as the primary task of basic education, and teachers and students have devoted a lot of effort to this. Contemporary information technology has triggered a powerful fission of education, the three foundations of traditional culture.
(A) changes in reading style
Education must ultimately be implemented in students' active learning. Therefore, obtaining data and information in various forms of reading comprehension is the main way for students to learn and develop; Similarly, creating the most favorable information environment for students and teaching students the ability to acquire and process information are the main tasks of teachers' teaching work. Studying and grasping the changes of reading style brought by contemporary information technology is an important window to understand and grasp the educational model in the information age. The changes in reading methods caused by contemporary information technology are highlighted in the following three aspects.
1. From text reading to hypertext reading.
Since the emergence of printing technology, human beings have become accustomed to the work and life style of reading texts and looking for needed information from various books and materials. The knowledge and information in the text can only be arranged in a linear structure, so the speed and efficiency of reading and retrieval have insurmountable boundaries. Facing the severe challenge of "knowledge explosion", how can human beings transcend this boundary? The emergence of "electronic books and periodicals" has brought good news to mankind. In "electronic books and periodicals", the connection between knowledge is no longer linear, but network, and there are many connection combinations and retrieval methods, which shows people a brand-new and efficient hypertext reading and retrieval method.
2. From simply reading words to multimedia e-books.
The traditional reading material is text, but the reading object of e-books has expanded from abstract text to images, sounds, three-dimensional animation and other media. This is the "hypermedia" reading in the information age. This almost "holographic" reading way across time and space combines reading with feeling and experience, which greatly improves the interest and efficiency of reading.
3. Efficient retrieval and reading in dialogue with electronic database.
The biggest change brought by computer to reading mode is the appearance of efficient retrieval reading mode. We might as well give an example to help people understand the significance of this change. Starting from 1985, it took China seven years to input the collated version of Twenty-Five History by Zhonghua Book Company into the computer, and established the "Full-text Retrieval System of Twenty-Five History". When you want to find meteorological information about "wind" from this masterpiece, the time and energy required by traditional reading and retrieval methods can be imagined. Now, using hypertext reading and computer automatic retrieval methods, we only need to type in keywords such as "wind" and "meteorology" to make necessary restrictions (excluding "wind" unrelated to meteorology). After only 6 seconds, the computer will read through 25 historical records. (3) If you still want to simplify, you can talk to the computer again until you get satisfactory information, and the computer will definitely guarantee that you will never bother to ask questions again.
After understanding this brand-new reading and retrieval method in the information age, it is not difficult to imagine the great changes that will take place in the library, teachers preparing lessons and students' learning methods. At the same time, to cultivate this new reading ability, we should not only start from childhood, but also urgently need to make up lessons for adults and even "read". This has become an important mission of cross-century education in China. From 65438 to 0995, the global sales of electronic encyclopedias have exceeded the sales of paper-printed encyclopedias. (4) The information conveyed by this data to human beings is not only multifaceted, but also shocking. Of course, hypertext and hypermedia reading ability should be based on traditional text reading ability, but the latter has distinct characteristics of the times, which reflects the challenge and stimulation of the information society to individual creative learning ability.
(B) changes in writing style
In the wave of computers sweeping the office and even the family, journalists, writers, scientists, secretaries and even leading cadres are "changing pens" in the contradictory mentality of excitement and pain. In contrast, the control and preference of the new generation of school children for the keyboard and mouse "pen" is naturally induced by the "magic" of electronic game machines. This shows that the information age poses a strong and sharp challenge to the traditional writing style. What changes will contemporary information technology bring to writing style and writing education? I think the following four points stand out.
1. From handwriting to keyboard input, mouse input, scanning input and voice input.
The appearance and perfection of computer word processing system has greatly improved the efficiency of human writing, which is not only manifested in the fast speed of text input, but more importantly, the expansion of functions makes electronic writing extremely flexible and can be copied, copied, supplemented and deleted at will, which greatly saves a lot of repetitive work in writing, which is a saving of human energy and even life. Once the human-computer interface technologies such as scanning input, light pen and data board input, voice input, and computer vision systems such as "eye tracker" and machine translation are further matured, a more "friendly" human-computer dialogue interface will appear, which will accelerate the popularization of computer writing mode, which will be even more immeasurable for the saving of human resources and the improvement of writing efficiency in the whole society.
2. Multimedia writing with illustrations, sounds and shapes.
The content and form of writing have also changed. Writing in the printing age is mainly written in words. Only scientific and mathematical writing is mixed with professional symbols, and sometimes there are illustrations in artistic and scientific writing. In the writing of electronic media, symbols, images, sounds and even three-dimensional animations appear and are used more and more frequently. This "multimedia" writing form will be more and more important for the communication, exchange and mutual understanding between writers and readers in modern and future society. In line with this, the writing ability with pictures and texts should be cultivated from an early age. The writing and production of multimedia "scripts" will become more and more popular, and even become a compulsory course in primary and secondary education.
3. The concept and writing of hypertext structure.
The structural changes of electronic texts have brought more drastic changes to the way of writing and even thinking. Traditional writing of articles and works has a fixed linear text structure, while electronic text is a flexible network hypertext structure. Articles written on paper and printed on paper can only list chapter titles, while articles written and read on computer screens need to regard each paragraph and even keywords as an independent unit, and establish various networking channels between them to provide readers with different orders. Select the most appropriate "keywords" for each article or even each chapter to summarize its content, so as to provide readers with a quick and simple retrieval method, which is actually to incorporate articles into the huge "article database" of the information society.
4. Integration of reading and writing in dialogue with electronic database.
When hypertext, hypermedia e-books and the global giant information database established by the network extending in all directions of the "information superhighway" appeared, the gap between authors and readers in the past was broken, and many text structures read and combined by readers according to their own needs were unprecedented. Therefore, reading and writing are integrated in the man-machine dialogue between readers and databases. This is obviously an extremely important reading and writing ability in the information society, which is supported by modern consciousness and modern thinking that are more flexible, open, complex and efficient. This new way of thinking will be externalized into a more intelligent man-machine integrated reading and writing mode, thus opening up a broader creative time and space and calling for a future education model that is suitable for this.
(c) Changes in calculation methods
Traditional computing ability is only related to mathematics and mathematics education. When the application of computer is extended to all fields of social life, people are forced to explore the connection and transformation between digital and numerical calculation and all aspects of social life, which greatly expands the concept of calculation and makes the whole social life more and more "digital".
1. From mathematical calculation to digital simulation, high-speed operation is carried out with "base 2 code" and binary.
The cornerstone of computer design idea is "base 2 code" with "bit" (the smallest unit of information) as the fulcrum. If problems in any field are to be solved by computers, they must first be converted into "computer language", which can be represented by two numbers: 0 and 1. It can be seen that the essence of computer application research is to explore how to use "base 2 code" and binary to represent the problems to be solved in various fields, and to carry out digital simulation in this field. Nowadays, with the amazing development of computer operation speed, especially the maturity of software technology and the emergence of various tool platforms, the purely digital computer language is retreating from the "foreground" to the "background", and the appearance of various "friendly" interfaces has gradually turned the problem instructions entrusted to computers from digitalization and specialization to popularization and popularization. After such a "makeover", computing and computers have entered thousands of households in the form of being loved by the public, easy to learn and easy to use, and penetrated into all aspects of modern social life.
2. Digitalization of characters makes computers rise from language to culture, and integrates the three pillars of traditional culture-education (reading, writing and calculating).
Digitalization of characters can be regarded as an important cornerstone or milestone for computers to enter all fields of human life. Since then, the world expressed and described by words can be transformed into binary computer language, and computers have also started to upgrade from technology to culture. At this point, reading, writing and arithmetic, as the three pillars of human traditional culture, are inextricably integrated in computer language culture, which can be imagined as a challenge and promotion to future society and future education.
3. Digitalization of images, sounds, movies and TV plays has enabled human beings to enter the computer simulation world of "virtual reality", making digitalization an important cultural way, survival way and education way for human beings to grasp history, reality and future.
Computer culture didn't stop there. When she conquered the world of sounds and images more complicated than words, even the world of three-dimensional animation with the arrow of time, the whole world was shocked. It is the digital miracle created by "multimedia" and "information superhighway" that swept the world in recent years that transformed this new development of computer culture into modern technology, thus changing the whole living environment of mankind.
The meaning of "multimedia" technology is not the comprehensive application of various media, but the integration of information recorded and expressed by various media through the development and wide application of digital technology. Nowadays, from the famous books in the library to the pictures, movies, audio tapes, video tapes and other huge databases that express the material and spiritual world of human beings with sounds and images, they can be digitized, condensed and hidden in tiny CDs. These high-density compressed data with light and electricity as carriers are always galloping in the high-speed global "information superhighway" network, waiting for the "networking" and "excitation" with human wisdom across time and space, creating endless wealth and fun, and creating a new world of digital survival with each passing day.
The concepts of "multimedia" and "information superhighway" have appeared in the mass media for less than five years, but they have changed people's communication, study, work and lifestyle at an alarming rate, making the "global village" smaller and smaller, and making the whole world more and more digital, networked and intelligent.
Above, we have discussed the challenges and changes that reading, writing and computing, as the cultural foundation, will face when the printing era is transformed into the electronic information era. It is not difficult to see from this small window that the cross-century cultural and educational changes we are experiencing are sharp and profound. Traditional education pays attention to the inheritance of culture, while modern and future education pays more attention to cultivating people's creativity while inheriting culture, thus realizing the continuous transcendence of culture. Cultural transcendence has both quantitative change and qualitative change. Whenever the foundation of culture changes substantially, the qualitative change of culture is inevitable. From this, we can have a deeper insight into the trend and prospect of educational reform and development in the information age.
Third, how does education step into the information age?
China and developed countries have different material conditions, cultural backgrounds and educational traditions, so China's road to the information society, especially the road of education to the information age, will obviously be very different from developed countries. But we must never emphasize this difference and be willing to lag behind. We should study similarities and differences, foster strengths and avoid weaknesses, and speed up the pace of educational informatization in China.
(A) the important mission and symbol of educational modernization
In the cross-century educational reform, all countries are accelerating the pace of educational modernization. But what exactly is educational modernization? What is its main symbol? So far, this is still a very vague concept and lacks in-depth research. I don't want to comment on this, but I just want to put forward an immature point of view for discussion.
Modernization is obviously a process of continuous development. However, from the perspective of any recognized industry and department that has basically entered the modernization stage in the contemporary world, although the situation is different, they all have a common feature, that is, they have completed a historic transformation: from labor-intensive to capital-and technology-intensive. In my opinion, this can be regarded as an important goal pursued by the department or industry modernization and an important symbol of entering the modernization stage. Because a labor-intensive department or industry is absolutely impossible to step into modernization. Education is a complex systematic project of human reproduction and re-creation. Now, in any country, the education department has developed into the largest department or industry (no matter the number of employees, the number of educated people, the capital investment or the social influence, it exceeds any department in society), so the efficiency and modernization of this largest department are obviously crucial. But today, the education sector is still a labor-intensive industry, and most teachers still rely on a book, a piece of chalk and a mouth to work, especially primary and secondary school teachers, who have to do a lot of extremely heavy repetitive work every day, and students are overwhelmed by a lot of repetitive and inefficient learning. In order to fundamentally change this situation, China's education field must speed up the transformation from labor-intensive industries to capital and technology-intensive industries. This historic change will completely change the traditional teaching mode with high labor intensity and low efficiency, which has been dominated by teachers' lectures and classroom indoctrination for thousands of years, integrate school education with family education and social education (especially the "invisible education" of mass media), and realize the multi-level development and rational allocation of human and material resources for education and teaching. Only in this way can we fundamentally implement the strategic position of education, liberate the productivity of teachers and the creativity of teachers and students, and truly make the post of teacher not only a respectable profession, but also an enviable one. In short, bringing the degree of educational informatization into the target system and evaluation system of school education and regional education development will have a far-reaching impact on accelerating the process of educational modernization in China, better implementing the strategic position of giving priority to education development, getting out of a series of serious misunderstandings and dilemmas in current education, and effectively improving the effectiveness of educational reform. Train a large number of outstanding talents who can adapt to the international environment of information competition in the 2 1 century as soon as possible, and improve the ability and quality of all citizens to adapt to the information society.
Some people may think that developing educational technology and promoting educational technology revolution need to invest a lot of money. At present, the goal of popularizing nine-year compulsory education in many areas of our country has not been achieved, so how to invest in high technology in the field of education? In fact, popularization and improvement complement each other. Without improvement, there can be no high-quality and efficient education popularization. It is particularly noteworthy that contemporary information technology has greatly accelerated the development of distance education and effectively promoted the transportation of educational intellectual resources from developed areas to poor areas. Comrade Deng Xiaoping has always stressed that facing modernization, we must participate in the competition of developing high technology in the world, and pointed out: "The next century is the century of developing high technology." "In the past, today and in the future, China must develop its own high technology and occupy a place in the world's high-tech field. If China had no atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs and satellites since the 1960s, China would not be a big country with important influence and would not have such an international status. " "It still takes some money to develop high technology, and the flowers will be spent. A few years ago, a foreign scientist asked me, why do you want to build an accelerator when you are not rich? I said, we are thinking in the long run. Now it seems that we made the right decision, we made the right decision. We won for at least a few years. In terms of high technology, we must start, otherwise we will not catch up, and the later we will not catch up and spend more money, so we must start now. " ⑤ Comrade Xiaoping's words are of great guiding significance for us to understand the relationship between popularization and improvement in China's current educational development, to catch up with the world's advanced level in the field of educational technology, and to accelerate the process of educational informationization and modernization in China.
(B) Countermeasures for the modernization of education
There is obviously a huge contrast between the prediction and prospect of the future of education and the analysis of the reality of education. Exploring the road from reality to the future belongs to the strategy or countermeasure research of education.
Next, we only think about how China's education can meet the challenge of high technology.
1. At the junction of high-tech and educational reform, we should strengthen the follow-up study of the world's frontiers.
China attaches great importance to the follow-up research of the world's leading edge in high-tech fields, and is willing to invest. However, there is a big gap between China and the world in the combination of high-tech and educational reform and development, which has not attracted enough attention so far, which is an important source of the slow pace of educational modernization in China. Therefore, it is urgent to establish national and provincial research institutions and teams in this joint department as soon as possible, equipped with modern research equipment and conditions. Researchers should have not only technical experts, but also psychologists, educational strategy experts and subject education experts in various fields to form an open and mobile research group. It is suggested that national laboratories and post-doctoral mobile stations should be set up in comprehensive universities with complete doctoral programs, such as Peking University and Beijing Normal University, and they should be open to universities, primary schools and primary school teachers with a certain research foundation.
2. Establish educational software database as soon as possible.
Combined with the national laboratory, the collection, research, development, evaluation and management system of educational software should be established, and corresponding policies and regulations should be established and improved as soon as possible, so as to change the current chaotic state of educational software development and software market in China and the huge waste of manpower and material resources caused by low-level repeated development, and narrow the gap between educational software in China and developed countries.
3. Popularize modern educational technology among teachers and educational management cadres as soon as possible, and pay special attention to spreading educational awareness and ideas in the information age.
At present, the popular computer training mode in China is not only outdated, but also does not meet the needs of teachers and educational management cadres. Therefore, from the actual needs of educational reform and development, it is urgent to establish an advanced and practical modern educational technology training system and a self-renewal competition mechanism. Undergraduate and graduate students in normal universities can't operate optical computers and programming languages. They should understand and master the tool platforms and excellent educational software related to their own discipline education, so that every normal student can understand and study the challenges and opportunities faced by education and teaching in the information age and become the promoters of educational modernization.
4. Gradually establish a number of experimental schools for educational modernization in a planned and selective way throughout the country.
We should not only attach importance to the construction of hardware environment in experimental schools, but also compete and cooperate in software construction and the training of cadres and teachers, especially in changing classroom teaching mode and improving students' learning quality. We should also pay attention to the negative impact of modern information technology and information society on education and put forward practical and effective preventive measures. And gradually realize the networking between experimental schools, especially between experimental schools and related scientific research institutions, and enhance the overall strength of China's educational technology and education reform. Only in this way can we firmly grasp all kinds of opportunities and constantly improve the level, strength and status of China's education in the cross-century tide of world education reform.
The combination of modern education system and abundant human resources will surely make the ancient Chinese nation write a new chapter of the influx of creative talents in the 2 1 century!