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INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES OF LIFELONG EDUCATION
Y. V. Taravskaya
Radical reform of the educational system should be the basis for reproduction of people’s intellectual and spiritual potential, the move of national science and culture to the international level, national revival, establishment of national identity and democratization of society in Ukraine. We need to realize that at the present time - a time of information technology - a person meets a shower of information in the postindustrial period of development in many countries. A person literally swallows information through publications and electronic media, primarily the Internet and CD-ROMs. To be qualified today it is not enough just to graduate from a higher institution and to do one’s job well. The new generation faces the problem of lifelong education more and more seriously. This problem is transferred from the area of theoretical understanding to a purely practical area: how a person can have free access to education throughout his/her life, to receive a profession, and to enhance his/her qualifications. The State National Program “Освгга” (Украша XXI столття) focuses on solving the priority tasks - “creating a viable system of lifelong training and education to achieve a high level of education, to ensure the opportunities of a person’s constant self-improvement of, and develop intellectual and cultural potential as the highest value of the nation”.
This global problem should be solved by pedagogical and information technologies. This issue is closely linked with priorities in the field of didactics. The fact is that, when we consider the prospects of education development, it is not sufficient enough to be focused on the need to transfer and master the experience gathered by mankind, as it is noted in didactics. It is important to get knowledge independently, to work with information, to analyze it, to see and solve problems that arise in various fields, in other words, to ensure an individual’s intellectual and moral development. Not just the assimilation of knowledge, but its creative application for the purpose of acquisition of new knowledge, and development of independent thinking - that's the problem, the resolution of which requires a fundamentally different view of both the technology of training and theory.
Personality-oriented teaching technologies should be a priority. This view of the educational system involves changing the paradigm of education. Our former educational system was based on the paradigm “a teacher - a textbook - a pupil”. This paradigm does not meet contemporary requirements, or focus on a personality-oriented approach to education, which is being developed within the framework of the humanistic direction in philosophy, psychology and pedagogy. The former paradigm must be replaced with a new paradigm of education “a student - a textbook - a teacher”, according to which independent student research activities should be a priority. However, the role of the teacher in this case is not diminished.
It is obvious today that Ukraine needs new technologies that would support mass training of specialists with the use of modern communication and information tools. Use of new information technologies will require improving the efficiency and quality of training of specialists by creating conditions for lifelong education -
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education “throughout one’s life”. It is useful for the above-mentioned educational tasks to determine the means that will contribute to their successful solution. If we are talking about educational technologies, we should talk about those that would be, in terms of their functions, adequate to the specificity of a personality-oriented, humanistic approach, for example, such technologies as education of cooperation (cooperative learning), project method, multi-level education, and module-based education. This does not mean that the methods and techniques of traditional education are completely discarded. In pedagogy and didactics, one should always exercise special care and principle of relevance, and look for the most productive ways to achieve the set goals. I would like to draw readers’ attention to the fact that there is a significant difference between a project, including the academic, cognitive one, and project method, i.e. the way to achieve a result that predicts the technological processing of the whole path.
Project method involves availability of a problem that students solve in joint creative, research, search and gaming activities, depending on the type of the project, as well as the certain way of achieving the result. New information technologies can and should play a specific role. These are global telecommunications that help to open a window to the outside world, to organize a dialogue between cultures, when conditions are developed for integration of the information space (using the global Internet, Microsoft technologies, Netscape). Students have access to a variety of data banks around the world, and can work together on a project of interest by means of a teleconference, thereby discussing problems with people almost anywhere in the world. Distant learning on the basis of computer telecommunications expands the integration opportunities. A person has the ability to remotely receive a new profession, improve his/her skills, and expand his/her worldview, practically in any scientific or training center of the world.
Borders can be overcome with the help of the global networks. A person enters the integral information space. Lifelong training and education becomes one of the main elements of the European higher educational environment. In the future Europe, lifelong study of educational strategies will be a prerequisite to meet the challenges of economic competition and new technologies, as well as to strengthen social cohesion, to ensure equal opportunities, and adequate quality of life. For higher educational institutions that use telecommunications and information technologies in the training process, it is advisable to introduce the concept of “information space”. It reveals the relationship between such information environments as a region, a country, and the world community. The information space should to the fullest extent satisfy the information needs of students and teachers. The information space of a higher educational institution is an educational system that has self-regulation and solves the problems of development of lifelong education.
Translated from Russian by Znanije Central Translations Bureau
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