make your world

00 Introduction

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Introduction

A net is a collection of holes, tied together with string.
(Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot)

Teaching culture is a tricky business, at best. Teaching culture in secondary (or higher) education has always been a very complex issue, especially in a multicultural society where the question no longer sounds like "what culture are we teaching?", but rather "whose culture are we teaching?"

Grammar schools have always been concerned with teaching Latin & Greek, modern languages, history, and a couple more subjects which together tried to uplift mankind through a Bildungsprocess via art and culture, and where the original idea of culture was very often narrowed down to 'literary culture'.

Historical, socio-economical and technological (r)evolutions - WW II - democratization, fast developping youth cultures, digitalization, etc. - confront us with a changing view on the world. In the last couple of decennia a number of borders are rapidly disappearing: between high/low culture, word/image/sound, national/global, consumer/producer, but also between school subjects.

These webquests try to challenge some of the traditional views on travelling, in many cases simply by reversing the point of view. A net as a collection of holes, if you want, tied together with string. While a wonderful view on the sea may produce a tremendous feeling of freedom, Robinson Crusoe rather thought of the sea as his prison.

Travelling closely links up with the environment of youngsters, and is becoming more and more a legitimate field of study. In the make your world website, we confront youngsters with different visions on tourism and travelling. It goes without saying that travelling is linked up with economy, but also with lifestyles, hypes, traditions, images... That is why the website covers some subjects which have been forgotten or neglected in the school curriculum, and which more often than not go beyond the subjects found in the existing school curriculums. The everyday world with its popular culture, entertainment, and 'irrational' concepts which determine our behaviour (e.g. fascination, pleasure) are taken as a primary source for insight and consciousness-raising. At the same time we link up these ideas with with the realization that we perceive the world around us in a mediated form, shaped by signs and genres, and enforced upon us by the culture we live in.

From a didactical point of view, the website supports a social constructionist view on learning, where the basic idea is in fact that people actively construct new knowledge as they interact with their environment. Students are invited to interact with each other, to build up knowledge via the internet, and to acquire research and computer skills via task-based assignments. Constructionism puts forward that learning is especially effective when constructing something for others to experience. This could be anything from a spoken sentence or an internet posting, to more complex artefacts like a painting, a house or a software package.

As the internet is developing, so is our use of it. Whereas until a year ago most people were using the web as a source for information, more than ever the net has become a Contact Zone, where ‘cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today’ (Mary Louise Pratt, Arts of the Contact Zone). With the next generation of web applications being already there, we tried to incorporate as many of these various Web 2.0 applications into the webquests as possible. There's no need for advanced skills in order to create online content anymore: the web is doing it for you, with services as Youtube, Flickr, Odeo and other social networks taking care of all the high-tech behind the screens so that you could add yet another entry to your weblog...

And speaking about popular culture, entertainment and irrational concepts...: enjoy!