ABSTRACT
Educational technologies are advancing rapidly; new solutions and online platforms appear every day. Mobile learning, learning on demand and media-rich curricula are recent buzz words describing the “techno-pedagogical” state of the art. Also, there is an increasing conceptual change towards the formative evaluation and support of learners and a strong orientation to competencies and meta-competencies such as the so-called 21st century skills. There is no doubt that the pace and mode of learning must adapt to and keep up with the rapid, general technological evolutions. Since the 1990s, the progress of media and technology was breath taking; during these decades, we were facing the rise of a serious and broad use of computers at home (although the development started earlier, of course), the rise of the internet and how it revolutionised our society, becoming a “collective unconscious” (in the words of Carl Gustav Jung, 1981). We faced the spread of mobile phones and their evolution from telephones to omnipresent computer and communication devices; we saw the spread of mp3, twitch speed computer games, and TV shows. We saw how our world got closer by changing the bridges over continents and oceans from 56k wires to hyper-speed fibre glass networks. Some say this rapid and pervasive technological revolution will have greater impact on society than the transition from an oral to a print culture. The form of education and teaching it takes to cover such challenges can only occur on a highly individual level, carefully considering individual goals, needs, strengths, weaknesses, learning modes and learning trajectories. Identifying all those variables and adapting teaching measures accordingly, is difficult and time consuming. At the same time, we are facing societal changes which are raising further challenges for the educational systems, for example, an increasing diversity of students in terms of mother tongue, culture and socioeconomic background.
