Coming out of the darkness of the past

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).

,

Technology ,

Education ,

Distance education ,