Journal Name:
- The Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education
| Author Name |
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Abstract (2. Language):
Technology is helping to reduce the education gap between developed
countries and those that are still developing. The following article gives one
example of an innovative teacher training project where a western university,
in Rome, Italy, is selflessly showing their African counterparts, in rural
Rwanda, how to become fully autonomous in training their future generations.
Schrum and Hong (2002) state that “learners throughout the world are
demanding educational opportunities in an ‘anytime and anywhere’ format
and institutions are responding by devoting substantial resources to develop
online distance learning.” This assertion is fast becoming the reality in every
corner of the globe where the teaching profession is using technology to bring
education to people and places that might never have imagined receiving its
benefits little more than a decade ago.
Such examples include teachers working with blind children in Chile on “a
project called Hyperstories which exposes blind children to a learning
methodology that uses 3D sound interactive software to help them construct
cognitive structures that represents their surrounding space” and “aims to
move these disadvantaged blind children from darkness to what they call
‘aural’ vision” (Gourley, 2004).
This metaphor of technology bringing people from darkness into the light can
be applied to many other contexts where professionals in the field of
education are giving rather than taking from the developing world and
offering hope that we can indeed create a world of shared resources and
international unity, rather than division, in the future.
The benefits of technology are now helping to rebuild Rwanda, the beautiful
‘Land of a Thousand Hills’ and ‘Gorilla’s In The Mist’. Unfortunately, just over a
decade ago, this densely populated, tropical nation became synonymous with
less beautiful things such as ethnic cleansing, genocide and refugee crises.
The war was bloody and divisive and further hindered an already
impoverished nation’s progress. Yet, slowly this beautiful country, in the
highlands of east Africa, is successfully emerging from centuries of colonial
oppression and internecine fighting to take its first steps towards becoming
part of the 24/7 digital age of education.
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