Vol. II: Shaping Information and Communication ... - IMA,ZLW & IfU

15
continuous learning processes means to sustain continuous change learning in order to be
able to cope with continuous change (Dassen-Housen, 2002).
Everybody is expected to continuously adapt to new conditions of life and work. All countries
around the world may participate in offering to their people the option of technologysupported
education as well as education in using and mastering these technologies for their
private lives and for professional work.
Several universities have been created to cater for this new need. They make optimum use of
the new technologies for teaching and learning. One example is the University of Delhi with
ist new courses for all science and engineering graduates which are discussed in the chapter
by Rose in this volume.
In addition to formal university courses, there is instructional television available: engineers,
scientists and managers at their job sites can tune in to technical and managerial courses
offered by top faculty and experts of the nations' leading engineering schools and other
organisations and institutions selected because of their special expertise. Several examples of
such developmentsare to be observed around the world (e.g. NTU, 1999).
These examples show how integrating learning, teaching, working and living characterises
the development towards integration of the different aspects of life (Dassen-Housen, 2002).
Such education is constantly being confronted with reality of professional action within the
enterprise world. It has to prove its usefulness inreal professional life: to gain knowledge and
information which is needed in professional work and career. The quality issue in this
conctext means to evaluate such education not along the criteria of traditional education but
rather according to the level of success which the users achieve through this education.
This confrontation of virtuality and reality in education will become extremely important in
the near future when all our children will grow up living, playing, studying and working
within these systems of technology. Education and learning must be founded in real, complex
learning situations including a wide spectrum of non-technical experiences (e.g. real-life
experiences and social issues). Reality does not follow a technical code but it is characterised
by complex, even chaotic structures - as it becomes particularly visible in cross-cultural
cooperation. Human interaction is never restricted to a code of a generated reality. Cooley
refers to this view as to overcome the paradigm of universities as factories (Cooley, 2000).