The virtuallum

Mr Marshall E. Gass Waikato University Hamilton, New Zealand

Change is inevitable and often occurs in conjunction with technological change. Technological change is heralded by explosive growth, more abundantly in the last few decades. Within this framework of technological change, information management has introduced a new century of concepts and ideas that occur at the micro level, rather than at the traditional macro level. Though imperceptible, it is palpable and omnisciently present in all facets of social life. The virtuallum has not come about through changes in the traditional school curriculum but, rather, a more complex and intricate external home curriculum that is, as yet, undefined and unrecognised for its content and impact. The virtuallum is limitless, boundless and networked beyond all imagination, bringing to the fore a universal curriculum that is at its conception stage.

Learning is not required to achieve this quantum of understanding for a networked society but it unravels unobtrusively and gradually, drawing everyone under its mantra. In little bits and pieces, the old-fashioned school curriculum that was the architect of learning, for well over a century, is being replaced by this slowly emerging virtuallum that countries have now recognised for its ‘creep’ into academic fortresses of learning. The virtuallum is unwritten. It has struck a balance of its own between knowing and not knowing, between theory and practice and between knowledge and skills. We all live at the beginning of this new radical curriculum. The structure and content is housed in a virtuallum.

On the other hand, curricula written for today must reflect social needs, to meet the progress of change. What was true 100 years ago is no longer relevant today as technology has overtaken the way change occurs and, insidiously, the old curriculum tends to rotate in a groove. The typical hare and tortoise metaphor. The tortoise is now up ahead and very few are able to grapple with the idea that technology has made all curricula prehistoric! No amount of correcting mechanisms on the old traditional curricula is going to make it appropriate for the 21st century. Only the virtuallum can manifest itself. It is an intangible asset to education and has the price of humanity on its shoulders!

The stranglehold on curriculum policy came about because the power to keep pace was invested with the elected few. Governments are, after all, composed of smart people with limited, wide sweeping knowledge and intensive persuasive power to win votes. Once voted into power, each government redeemed its pledge to create change - but really only to lift them onto a higher platform derived from previous policies, chopped and changed with a few meanings, to ‘appear’ progressive. That way the vote bank installed them in power. Within this concept of political continuity, the curriculum underwent cosmetic change. In the meantime, technology had reached the denizens of cyberspace while the slow curriculum was yet finding its way home on a hundred year journey!

The new radical curriculum (the virtuallum) involves the full throated voice of the masses. If we want to grow along with technological change, we must adapt and evolve into a writhing mass of perpetual change. The virtuallum must be a dynamic document that is almost no curriculum at all. It is written every few seconds. Change management is tomorrow’s war cry!

This radical curriculum has no boundaries because it ‘senses and vibrates’ and changes as everyone contributes to it. Is that what makes ‘Google’ a word in the dictionary? YouTube became YouTube because the people followed its daily journey and contributed to it. The number of ‘hits’ dictates how dynamic the site is. A universal schooling curriculum will evolve in the same way and everyone will have access to it. A universal controlling body will know what the trends are and reform the curriculum accordingly. The debate will be universal and all-inclusive. The internet will be a gateway for all educators, students and teachers. From this crucible will be moulded lifelong learners in the perpetuity of achievement.

There will be schools without fences. But are there such things as schools with gates? I doubt the two curriculum schools have yet understood what living in the 21st century is going to be like! It is a virtual world populated by infomorphs and other slick virtual beings carrying links to vast reserves of knowledge and understanding not yet illustrated in a book. The mere click of a mouse can bring this coagulated mass of information to your screen. You pick and choose. You decide and dictate. It is your learning, after all. You did not read a manual to play: Where is Carmen San Diego? Or did you? How many of us merged into Counterstrike effortlessly? Put your hands up those who are web bloggers, YouTubers, Vbloggers, chat roomers, surfers and drowners. Did you need a curriculum to get in and out? How did you learn the rules of the game? Did you ever contribute to Napster, MP3, Limeworks and Kazaa? Oh yes, you did.  We were all part of the emerging virtuallum, at one time or other. We were visitors. We will all be.

Therefore, you cannot capture curriculum. Yet all governments tend to capture curriculum for their own political and personal survival. You cannot capture Google because it belongs to the masses. Neither can you capture the universal curriculum embedded in YouTube! You can, however, tweak and change aspects of it and you can switch it off. The knowledge that was invested in it remains uncorrupted and its distribution cannot be curtailed.

A virtuallum is radical, evolutionary, up-to-the-second and growing. All other curricula stand dwarfed before such a universal curriculum. Only technology can bring about such a dynamic revolution. Will governments adopt this method of contributing curriculum to its educational systems? No, they won’t. The power to control such a powerful tool has been removed and re-invested in the person who needs it - the common person with a computer and an internet connection. So all governments will fight to retain that power. The progressive ones will allow change to occur rapidly. The dictatorial ones will hold on tightly and subjugate its masses to learn - what is not necessary! Look around you to see this wasteland of missed opportunities! Who are the ones who have captivated the cyberspaces with their ingenuity and who now inhabit the virtuallum? Those are the governments that have moved with the growing trends and understood what formless education is all about. Leaders create while bands of followers walk quietly behind. Is our country a leader or a follower? Not hard to know this. The patchwork of curricula available and the analytical debate now raging show how universal the current dialogue really is!

The 21st century virtuallum is one amorphous mass. Like every nation sipping from its knowledge base and every individual contributing their knowledge and culture to it, the virtuallum sustains itself through input. Growth in this form is central, unlike growth in a national mass. In national curriculum, individuals within a confined space decide what is good for their subjects. They do this activity in tandem with international trends, anyway. With little bits and pieces of borrowed material, they hack up some semblance of logic and lay claim to its construction as one of its own. A deep study will reveal from where all the flotsam and jetsam washed ashore!

In a situation like the radical curriculum, a brave new micro-world will be born. Maybe a billion individualised curricula that any person, every person with a basic knowledge of cyber reality, can access and capture for themselves. These situations, which absorb billions of dollars in policing a national curriculum, will now be utilised for an international common curriculum available to the masses from all the corners of the earth. When we reach that universal platform, the 21st century is equipped with the brightest minds of all time. Is it then time to discard the old coat for a brand new suit?

Yet again, none of these giant knowledge machines are permanent. Just as change occurs, even the giant knowledge bases will morph into other strange new giant creatures of immense knowledge. The permutation and combinations of such vast knowledge bases will change to become newer and better understood masses of knowledge. There is a point in this evolution of curriculum when the government curriculum will be discarded (or ignored) and the newer radical curriculum is adapted and adopted. We can then say that the 21st century virtuallum is alive and kicking!

The compartmentalisation of subjects into categories is no more relevant. A hundred subjects cannot be handled by the one individual or the one teacher. So specialisation sets in - automatically! Economic inter-dependence is a must. Every nation that permits its masses to enrich their learning through a common platform will walk away from primitive columns of curriculum structure once designed to capture them. Knowledge will be truly available to all. Such utopias do exist and the proof lies open and accessible on the internet. Think ‘research’ and the student always ‘thinks’ internet. What has happened to books? We live in a virtual society - not even knowing we are enmeshed in it!

In a self-serving society, there can be no one single subject that must be learnt in order to be educated! A school cannot survive on just maths, science and English. A school cannot cater to the thousand subjects that must be taught (or learned). The end result of such a radical curriculum that mandates itself will be the introduction of a truly seamless education system that has no age or boundary and no more time-tables or teachers. Teacher’s maybe, but no class of students, books or homework. You learn what you need to learn and you go the specialist virtualist who will teach you what you need to know. A school day could be just the one day or every day.

Motivation will come from such a change. I would like to call this ‘moultivation’ because the perpetual student metamorphosises into a learning being driven by the desire to know! The learner ‘moults’ into a learning being.

That horizon is arriving gradually. But it will arrive sooner than later. The penetrating thrust and thirst for knowledge has left the classroom and all its shackles and has now gone global. There is no point in keeping students in line anymore. There is nothing to learn in standing in a line. Uniforms are meant to be equalisers-but are really sore economic points of stress for families. Is homework meant to keep a student at the desk – at home. So what did the student learn for eight hours at school each day? Why homework, when it can be so boring! Let him or her learn something that is ‘moultivating’ and time will trace a different learning trajectory for each individual.

The nexus between business and education has been struggling for many years. The link is tenuous and fragile. Academics think business should not be embroiled in education yet I think the partnership is inevitable. Business and education are jointed permanently. Business in technology needs clients, and the more clients the better. Imagine if the browsers and search engines were not available to educational institutes. You would still be in the dark ages. Imagine a school without an internet line. Imagine students not skilled in internet use. How would they survive the 21st century? Imagine a school that prohibits cell phones, iPods, memory sticks, restricts internet use, prohibits email and browsing, disregards communicative learning and returns to books and libraries of books! That school is churning out a school of illiterate 21st century children. Each day that such a school exists and does not open the floodgates of learning, the entire nation is being fed a disservice. Somebody will bear a cost to such future-illiterate students. It will be you, of the same age, not keen to ‘future proof’ yourself.

In my many letters and journals, I have railed against technology censorship at the school level and abhorred the stifling rules and regulations that schools employ to subjugate student learning. They advocate a return to books and pencils and white boards and chalk and talk. The old curriculum tells them to do one thing the new unwritten one tells them the opposite. So what do students do? They take the road that channels them into the 21st century, while discreetly ignoring the old trodden pathways where old curriculum dinosaurs lay bleeding with poor information nutrition. Students don’t need school to tell them to learn outside of it. They just go off and do it! The old curriculum invested power in the upper echelons of school and management, the new empowers them. Do they have this uncanny feeling of what lies ahead? Is there a virtuallum already established in their mental structures and they are being driven relentlessly in that direction. Do they have a sense of foreboding?

We must change and step into pace with our learning community. They are no more freckled-faced teenagers but dynamic learning machines, each one programmed to hook into the ICT century and make the best of it. For them, schools are just places you go to, eat lunch, go home and begin serious learning once home! The roles have inverted?

The future lies in teaching about the future. The future lies not in teaching about the past. All education hurtles to the future, where the future lies. The past is but a reflection; the future is a mirage and one must be equipped to wade through the mirage with a steady gaze and firm walk. The reflection is solid but the mirage is moving and dynamic. Only a robust internationalised virtuallum will guide our students through the mirage!

Welcome to the virtuallum!