Papillon
The “ Papillon ” [“Butterfly”] educational concept supplies the content for global learning in the 21 st century and is a free learning method which grows with knowledge like a living organism, creates, uses, reuses and improves continuesly new things. Imaginative multimedia learning environments are offered and depicted in an initial online school book with this educational content. A concept that connects worlds; multimedia, intercultural and interdisciplinary as well as classical education and New Media — intelligently networked!
The Papillon method works on the base of keywords and transforms teaching books into a huge dynamic ecosystem of knowledge.
This completely new digital learning method allows children to see our world in a global context, fosters an alert creative spirit as well as analytical abilities, teaches playful learning and motivates students to develop their own ideas, and can also provide help for self-help in the best sense. In addition, the project not only imparts knowledge, but also forms the entire personality. Students and teachers work together in an educational network, and garner the opportunity to be brought up to the latest standard of knowledge. Papillon is an example for new paths of imparting knowledge in the 21. Century. Based on the principal of a central component of learning in a society of knowledge the concept is able to complete perfectly the vision of an educational reform which will be provided through the internet.
Contents
Idea
Based on the idea of writing a childrens book a study project developed which is an example how to adapt learning to the 21th century. Thirst for knowledge and interest in topics taken from literature, history, philosophy and art as well as openness for science, environmental topics and new media have influenced the development of the model project “Papillon” which I have been working on for 8 years.
Book
The basis of the Papillon digital teaching concept is the GOLD DUST tale.
The history of Prince Aron of Nubia, the hero of the “GOLD DUST”[1]story, is full of unusual ideas and surreal images which are “drawn” with the word. A story full of fantasy with a real-life background which still keeps children occupied for a long time. It is linked to two other parts and the GOLD DUST constellation is developed as a trilogy.
Fairytales convey a simple basic thought: A good character makes you beautiful. It is exactly the right format to spin a yarn about the great questions of life.
Children like to read fairytales and understand them without problems. They are certainly the most beautiful stories in the world. Their material has everything great and beautiful within it. Fairytales are the mirror reflection of the human soul. We can re-find ourselves in them. Because fairytales are a common cultural heritage of all of the people in the world, we encounter each other through their language of symbols even across borders. Fairytales convey to us a magical world through which the children can easily distinguish between the rules and rituals of reality, good and evil. They are an appropriate means of evoking fantasy and creativity and thereby promote the moral and social competence to make judgments.
Thank you for support:
Oliver Wetter's work was chosen to be the cover of the fantasy story “GOLD DUST” that is part of the education concept “Papillon”. He doneted the piece: „The source“.
Online Book
The online schoolbook develops out of the fantasy story "GOLD DUST", the core of the digital teaching concept "Papillon".
Everyone can participate in the first global online schoolbook Interaction
Start: Level I – becoming a translator or artist
Goal: Level II - becoming Einstein
Study: Innovative learning in the knowledge society
Internet and school realities
“Instruction is so deadly dull that you could fall asleep“, a student said during an interview and was not alone in her opinion. The motivation to like going to school is lost and must then be re-stimulated. This a bitter truth in the age of the informational society.
It has everything you need: proven teaching methods and digital methods which the children need in order to again feel like going to school. Combining these elements in a sophisticated manner and making learning an experience through interactive elements[2]is rather a question of creativity than a question of money. You have to want it. However, in these parts, there seems to be more than a risk because the Internet has to assert itself against many objections. The school still blocks out this part of learning acquisition to a very large extent although E-learning accommodates the media use of learners and important pedagogical goals such as independent, self-determined learning and cognitive and communicative skills can be promoted.
The school still blocks out this part of learning acquisition to a very large extent although E-learning accommodates the media use of learners and important pedagogical goals such as independent, self-determined learning and cognitive and communicative skills can be promoted.
Here the Internet is an adventure, conquering new worlds, the whole universe in the palm of your hand! The Internet is exactly what the school needs to be appealing again because the potential for positive application opportunities to improve the quality of the instruction is virtually unlimited and ensures interactive and challenging learning with a lot of variety. Therefore, Papillon shows the strengths of the Internet and wants to stress its positive sides!
No other medium is more able to interlink information in such a sustainable way and still be so boundlessly entertaining, informative, vivid and current. Topics can be worked on in an interactive and playful manner with this method. There is access through playing and faster successful results because feedback is given after each task is assigned. If students discover their own interests through digital learning, have fun researching and discovering, their curiosity is kindled and talents are encouraged, then they have invested so much more time in the development of their personality and have prepared themselves for life after school. They have developed important traits to help them survive when they have left the protected area of the school.
Practicing media competency is just as important as learning how to read and write. Those who are prevented from doing so or exclude themselves for various reasons are denied the ability to get a foothold in the knowledge society. Access to one of the most important resources of the 21st century gets lost. That is why students should learn to use the Internet with a much certainty as they use a light switch. We can bring knowledge from the entire world into the school via the Internet and improve the quality of instruction. Without this access, only a limited horizon is conceivable.
Matthias Horx, manager of the Future Institute in Vienna is certain that those “users” chided as being addicts will be the pioneers of a strategic intelligence in one, two decades which will be infinitely more malleable than the brain structure created by the old, analogue method of imparting knowledge. In the next twenty years a different "cognitive species" will be formed, what is known as the net people. Their thoughts, actions and feeling are interlinked”.
Interlinked worlds
“Multiple interlinking” is the central principle of the Freiburg lecturer in neuro-pedagogy Dr. Preiß. New information can be cemented most permanently in the complex neuronal tissue if it is interlinked in as many ways as possible. According to this theory, the critical factor for the performance of the brain is not the number of cells but the amount of interlinkages which occur. No where is the number of linkages documented in a more impressive way than on the Internet. “The Internet, and thus the expectations of specialists, while span the entire globe and develop into a capsule containing millions of computer networks so that an ‘intelligent’ planet is created” Michio Kaku, Zukunftsvisionen [Future Visions], Lichtenberg publishing company, Munich [3]
The more interlinked the brain is, the higher the probability that a new combination will be created in the brain. The more numerous the connections which are in principle available to the neurons the larger the selection of possible linkages is – thus new thoughts can be composed all the more. An inter-disciplinary group consisting of neuroscientists, computer scientists and linguists made this discover. Pure knowledge alone is not sufficient to create something really new. To be innovative, individual knowledge must be re-combined. When this occurs, then we think of something new. Picasso combined a steering wheel and a saddle to make a bull’s head.
Research has long made this interdisciplinary approach its own. Researchers have been able to make important breakthroughs through inter-discipline collaboration[4]. Specialists from different disciplines are sharing their experiences among themselves and reciprocally apply their results.
For example, physicists and physicians are working together on the development of new therapeutic methods. Scientific methods with which linguists study the language and bio-informaticians study genes is based on one communality: “Chains of symbols“. Computer codes, texts or DNA codes are subject to the same laws and let both disciplines learn from each other. The cooperation between Wikipedia and the German Library has created a new, temporary apex in terms of the establishment of synergies and the networking of knowledge. A link leads from articles related to people in the online encyclopaedia to all available publications at the German library. With this alliance, the national Archive Library recognises the profiling platform which the multi-lingual and much used modern knowledge-based tower of Babylon called Wikipedia has to offer.
Education makes an important contribution to the extent in which the networking of the brain occurs. A stimulating and thought-provoking learning environment promotes interlinkages. Making thought more flexible also helps one to get closer to the solution of a problem. A wide, cross-subject education and cross-border thinking challenges children to ask questions, show curiosity and to change their perspectives. "Children must be given the opportunity to view a certain aspect from different perspectives. This is how they learn the same content in all of its complexity and learn in the process that different perspectives can result in different assessments.”[5]
In the modern knowledge-based society, the mind is continuously stimulated and challenged. Of course, the more a student is involved with the Internet, can be linked from website to the other, the more his brain activity will move toward networked thinking. Thinking cannot be conceivable as anything but networked thinking - and you cannot learn better than on the Internet. Media learning can therefore be excellent brain training for students.
If the promotion of diverse networking by neural science is adapted to modified learning environments, the logical consequence can only be in interlinking the textbook and the Internet. In addition to being a suitable source for the knowledge required for school subjects, the Internet allows everyone to participate in cultural, political and economic discussions. Forums and chats for each area can be used. Textbooks can form the basis. But because the development in the 21st century is progressing at an extremely rapid pace, knowledge has a shorter and shorter shelf-life. Learning content researched on the Internet is very up-to-date. By networking both media, a necessary supplement and further development are possible.
Self-motivated learning
Students want to learn something. That is why there are new teaching methods are in new demand which can inspire teachers and students equally because true motivation can only be activated through one’s own motivation. Interest, curiosity and fun are powerful internal sources of motivation. When children devote their time to a task voluntarily and fervently which seems tricky yet solvable, a positive cycle is set into motion and the sense of self esteem is rewarded. In other words: Those who like to learn are swimming in their own good fortune. This phenomenon, also called flow, is a state of extreme concentration. Flow inspires a marathon runner when he is in the home stretch. A child feels flow when he places the last building block on the tower. Flow inspires thoughts when learning becomes an experience. Flow is the feeling of being deep in harmony with one self. Even Aristotle knew that a deeper feeling of well being (eudaimonia) occurs when we understand that which meets our initiatives, needs and possibilities. “A child learns best if he finds the solutions to his assignments. The feeling of jubilation which results lasts longer than any reward from the outside”, Hennig Scheich, Director of the Magdeburg Leibnitz Institute for Neurobiology, explains. Far too seldom have the teachers recognised the relish with which children learn. Like for a drug, she yearns for the dopamine which empties out of the brain for learning success. Dopamine makes one self-aware, optimistic and increases the capacity for learning. Endorphins, the body’s own opiates, give an overwhelming sense of happiness. If a child experiences one euphoria after each successfully completed assignment, the brain wants more and more of it. That is because learning makes people happy. That is because neither money or good words are needed because enthusiasm is enough of a reward. Learning is a self-promoting process. The mind wants to be seduced. This works best when people can connect to something they already know to be abducted into new worlds of learning.
The great didactic potential of digital learning is to make the learner the actor because we learn the best through doing.
Practice
Testing the model project in instruction
Since February 2005, the model project “Papillon“ [6] has been successfully tested at the Ellen-Key Grammar School in Berlin[7].
References
Hans Prengel Graduate in Media Studies[8] Technical University of Berlin Institute for Language and Communication Media Studies Department Department director Professor Norbert Bolz
“…] Papillon is worthy of praise in the area of media pedagogy (enhancement of the instruction through materials) both from the perspective of what is urgently needed for the future (Internet competence) and the psychology of learning (motivation/interest and orientation toward action) and a very promising project is worthy of support“
Sybille Volkholz Education Expert of the Heinrich Böll Foundation Former Berlin Scholl Senator Citizen’s Network on Education in VBKI
“[…] The project is particularly suitable for letting students work independently”.
Margit Günther, Teacher Project Manager “Papillon” Ellen-Key Grammar School
[…] “The fact is that the blackboard and the school textbook are no longer sufficient in our digital world to present the teaching materials in a contemporary manner. I can only say therefore that an innovative teaching method has succeeded in making children interested in school again with the Papillon model project. Creative and eventful learning has resulted in increased motivation for our students. They were so enthusiastic about what they were doing that I sometimes hardly recognized them".
H. Bader Subject Director for German Ellen-Key Grammar School
“I liked the media project from the very beginning because it is a completely new learning method. […] The different between this project and the projects which we have previously known on media competence was that the virtual world and real world are combined and that completely new areas can be pursued in terms of content. So far we have analysed films. We have designed Internet pages. We are experimenting with PowerPoint Presentations but the structure of the content is what’s new and that is what is so well received here”.
Thomas Theus, Teacher Ellen-Key Grammar School
“[…] In this context I am really happy that this work is opening up new, interesting avenues of acquiring knowledge. This is a real benefit for every school which cannot be praised highly enough".
Nhat Phong Tran, Friedrich-Engels-Gymnasium, Berlin Class 12 / Semester II
“Finally a new form of the book! It was the film-maker who made the stuff which dreams are made, always created more and more extravagant forms and illusions and conjured up new variations. But authors have presented their stories in the same way since the beginning without giving books a new, contemporary touch. I would enjoy learning in class based on these materials. It is not a myth but rather a fact that general knowledge [9] is continuously on the decline. By linking a the GOLD DUST tale with the Internet, I can expand my knowledge beyond the scope of the class because the teacher only has a limited amount of time available. A good class for me is when someone is encouraged to learn more and more than the material requires. The class should be signed in such a way that people acquire additional knowledge through their own interest. In general the students are no longer motivated. This reading is motivation for self-motivation! Things take on a completely different meaning and the background knowledge is expanded through the appropriate choice of key words.
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