Where Does Webclass Meet?
S. Yvonne Loveday
UT Community Programs offered its first entirely on-line class last spring.
"Plug into the Wired World: Civilization in the 21st Century" met once a week
on-line in a virtual classroom and explored the economic and social impacts of the
Information Age. Dr. Robert Loest, who heads IPS Advisory Inc., a Knoxville investment
firm, led the class.
Loest posted lessons and other resources on the course website for students to review
before class. During classes, he and the students discussed the material in chat room
format.
Loest also supplied the students with links to other pertinent information on the
Internet.
"It is difficult to overstate the volcanic changes that will overwhelm our
educational system for the generation of children born in the late 1990s, and for our own
personal education, in order to function in an information-based civilization," Loest
says.
"We are now overproducing industrial era workers and underproducing information era
workers, and dramatically so, because parents and the school systems donŐt fully
comprehend the changes taking place."
Students discussed the paradigm shift from a land-labor-capital society to an
information-based one. They also looked at the future of copyright law, communications,
Internet commerce, and digital money.
Recommended reading for the class, which students could order on-line, was The Printing
Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Elizabeth Eisenstein.
"The invention of the printing press set in motion the first information revolution
of our species and literally made possible the world we live in today," says Loest.
"It changed European society so fundamentally that we cannot conceive of how people
thought in the Dark Ages without instruction."
"These changes parallel our own information revolution as a result of the Internet in
such amazing detail that no one who is interested in the future should be without the
knowledge of this earlier revolution."
Participants can register for the non-credit class, which will be offered again during
fall semester, by contacting UT Community Programs at utcommunity@gateway.ce.utk.edu or calling
(423) 974-0150. Cost is $75.
Return to Summer 1998 table of contents.
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