During the first two decades of the 21st century, innovations have flourished worldwide: internet entering education, smartphones substituting laptops, electronic dictionaries replacing paper ones etc.
I witnessed how education without internet was giving space to education with internet in two European universities – Charles university in Prague, Czech Republic, and the Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National University in Ukraine – in 2007/09. I was a visiting scholar in the former and had been working since 1998 in the latter.
Internet was costly those days in both countries, and while both universities were actively using it in their administrative, research, and international activities, in education it was being done to a different extent.
For example, for ERASMUS students of Charles university in Prague, education with internet first and foremost meant reaching their schedule, administrative staff and professors, and submitting their assignments in the most convenient way. Yet internet was only an additional service for them as everything still existed in the material form too – a schedule on the wall, the translated textbooks in paper, administrative and professors’ offices etc. Students physically visited their lectures in the morning and libraries in the evening as huge funds of the university library had not been digitalized yet. Secondly, internet was a way to keep in touch with relatives and friends, and thirdly, internet provided entertainment. In this, ERASMUS students did not differ much from the general population of the Czech Republic who used internet mostly for reading news, looking for a job, and buying stuff then (Lupáč & Sládek, 2008).
At the same time, for full-time and part-time students of the Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National University of Ukraine, education with internet meant another educational tool that their professor might implement during their organized communication to make it more diverse. There were several computer classrooms, but no free wi-fi or cable Internet available to students on the university premises yet.
As modernization of higher education was a part of common European agenda (Commission of the European Communities, 2008), and the Czech government financed universities well (OECD Reviews of Tertiary Education: Czech Republic, 2009), in addition to internet in its classrooms and dormitories, Charles university in Prague owned computer laboratories in its several campuses all over the capital city in 2007/08. Those laboratories were places for individual studies and entertainment in a free time. They had computers, cable and wi-fi internet available and were open from early morning till late at night – for students, professors, staff, and visiting scholars. I can assume that those laboratories assisted people with work and studying as well as distracted them from libraries, theatres, excursions, night clubs, in-person communication and shopping etc.
Higher education modernization was considered important in Ukraine too, but the concept was not supported by a state budget. As a result, education with internet got most attention at the institutional level, for instance, in 2007/08 the Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National University had several computer classrooms equipped with private university resources, and no computer laboratories with free internet for studies. In 2008/09, when smartphones became more wide-spread, the initiative moved to the individual level of professors to make internet more frequent in education and thus replace computers, CD players, some exercise books etc.
I cannot say that education with internet changed the well-known pedagogical approaches much. There is no doubt that it greatly supported individual studies in various disciplines. Internet was an extremely popular method of education in 2007/09, an additional tool that enjoyed everyone’s (polyphonic, in Citton’s terms) attention and was considered safe, time and resource saving. Despite any misconceptions about internet in that period of transition, it was clear that education with internet would not go away because it was exciting and convenient to every side involved – students, professors, university administrators, ministries of education, ministries of immigration, students’ parents etc. Citton (2016) described that innovative time best: “the materiality of the devices that will condition our attention tomorrow depends on the way in which our attention today selects certain properties offered by the devices produced yesterday” (p. 190). Indeed, computers without internet were useful things from yesterday in 2007/08. United in a global network, those computers became something much better and bigger that I as a teacher wanted to explore and pass to younger generations.
The pace and volume of the shift from education without internet to education with internet depended at first on state funding for computerization, and later, with appearance of smartphones and better availability of internet, – on attention of professors mostly.
To sum up, the example of both universities clearly demonstrates that a technology cannot emerge instantly and everywhere at the same time. It demands collective, joint, and individual attention, and good financing to displace the previous routine.
References
Citton, Y. (2016). The ecology of attention. Oxford: Polity.
Commission of the European Communities (2008, December 16). Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, The European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: New skills for new jobs. Anticipating and matching labour market and skills needs. Commission of the European Communities Publishing. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2008:0868:FIN:EN:PDF
Lupáč, P., & Sládek, J. (2008). The deepening of the digital divide in the Czech Republic. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 2(1). https://cyberpsychology.eu/article/view/4210/3251
OECD (2009). OECD Reviews of Tertiary Education: Czech Republic 2009. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264049079-en