One of the problems we have with the use of new media in education is the problem of teachers. It is often said that the students know more about the new media than the teachers. What is the situation in the United States, and what do you think can be done to encourage teachers to use the new media in education?
David Kolb - It is a difficult problem in the States too. I think it is true that many of the younger students do know much more than the teachers, particularly students about 12 to 13 years old, not yet in university, who seem to have grown up with computers in a way that even people three or four years earlier did not. My experience is - and I think this is pretty general - that many teachers use word processing and perhaps e-mail and perhaps they surf the Web for various purposes and they are comfortable with these things, but it is not clear to them how they would use them in the classroom because they are mostly receptive activities or versions of things that were done before in other ways. What we’ve found is that the best way to encourage the teachers to experiment is to provide examples and to show what other people perhaps in the same school or nearby or in another university are doing, so that teachers can imagine. They won’t necessarily duplicate the examples, but they’ll begin to think: Oh! Maybe I could find a way to do something like that. The difficulty of course on the university level is that teachers have different subjects and there aren’t always examples to be found in some subjects. They are more in the sciences, for instance, and fewer in literature, and very few in philosophy. So teachers can shrug and say" Well, it works over there but it won’t work here. We need to work on that by providing examples and better communication of examples from other locations. As for motivation, I think you have to deal with the question of what the teacher gets out of it. There is someone who has done a great deal of work on hypertext in the classroom and he said: Using new media in the classroom does not make the teacher’s task easier but it makes it much more fun, more spirited, and much more satisfying. I think that is the kind of motivation we have to work with. Not that you’re going to ease the burden of the teacher but rather that you’re going to inspire and encourage and give the teachers more fun and spirit in what they are doing.
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