On our last away day, the very (!) talented Athina, Jane & Steve came up with a novel way to present their take on the future of elearning: they created a 5 minute sci-fi video.The brief was to come up with a technology which might become the technology that will revolutionise… education, our lives, our society. They chose to explode the premise (& temporality) by offering a historical glance backwards, from a very distant future (in which, intriguingly, Lt. Uhura, and Mr. Spock have teamed up with Princess Leia) addressing the 2020 past. What I liked best was the underlying suggestion that in the distant future in which Stars Trek and Wars conjoin, the concept of learning has given way to (mere) data accumulation and information exchange. Spock, unable to escape his Vulcan psychological make-up, finds it illogical that humans might learn for the sheer enjoyment of understanding, applying and analysing concepts. To us humans (at least of today), information is that about which we will at a final stage be able to make judgments; we learn (by rote) “information”in order to apply our critical thinking in an informed way, ultimately to make sense of the world and us in it. Information has no value for its own sake, and learning is more than merely the acquisition of knowledge. Poor Spock overvalues rationality (or rather: logic) at the cost of creativity. Who’d be a Vulcan, eh…* Watch the video, it’s nicely provocative and entertaining.

*yes, I know he’s half-human.