Plenary Lecture

Chances and limits for teaching in the information age -

Walter Oberschelp , Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Universität Aachen

Successful IT-based teaching requires motivation, understanding, training and didactic sugar. The main problem is to adapt the problem structure to the intellectual structure of the learner and to his needs. Moreover there must be results which are useful for the society.

We experience more and more, that the charme of having huge information ressources e.g. via internet is only temporary: The present IT scratches only the surface of the human and social demands. The main need of man is not the consumption of news, but production of and interaction with personal signals on a reliable basis in order to be sure of ones own uniqueness.

Surfing for information through open and heterogeneous nets will loose importance against new types of devices, which guarantee, e.g., security of transmission, legal control of transactions and semantic reliability of information. The task to keep the society in good order is incompatible with unrestricted informational liberalism, and the society needs more than a netiquette without obligations. New problems for jurisdiction arise: Information crimes cannot be judged by simply counting bits like peas.

Some epistemological problems which are connected with the concept of information are discussed. And the realization of a global justice will have to be recognized as one fundamental basis for the global society.

In particular, we investigate, how math-learning will have to develop: The special problems of math-teaching are the alienation by formalism, the lack of personal appeal and the somewhat metaphysical nature of mathematics, whereas its pragmatic value is often invisible.

Since mathematical ideas are often very compact, the abundant information of the internet is hard to combine with mathematical thinking. And yet, mathematical teaching establishes useful tools for the complex existence in the global society.

We exemplify problems in private and global economy and in our real physical world and discuss essential and obsolete material. We sketch, how methods for self-guided instruction may be improved. But we emphazise, that, due to the anthropological situation, personal instruction and care will become even more important in the future. The satisfaction of really understanding an argument from the scratch and the experience of responsibly solving problems without the assistance of non-transparent tools will become a source of creativity and a well accepted motive in the education of indpendent and mature citizens.

http://www-i7.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/~oberschelp/

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