The Virtual Classroom in the Age of the Virtual Library
Magdalena Kostova-Panayotova, South-West University “Neofit Rilski” (Bulgaria)
Abstract
"The virtual classroom in the age of virtual library" is an article, which is directed towards issues related to the future of teaching classic works of literature in the age of digital literature. The electronic text has promised to make reality all the old dreams of universal and total knowledge, to make accessible all the ancient texts. It expects cooperation from the reader as he enters the virtual library he can enter in the book and write on the fields to change it. Simultaneously, the network is infantile, it requires skills of value structure, hierarchy, selection and here is one of the roles of the teacher in this context.
One of the possible issues that arise is connected with the idea of possible / impossible dialogue. The article starts from the ideas of John Durham Peters in his book Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999) which in the weary 21st century fewer and fewer means exactly dialogue and more " dissemination " . For the author of this book dialogue can be tyrannical whereas dissemination is something altogether different.
Applied to teaching of literature, Peters’ ideas reveal how unfounded the accusations of the distortion of dialogue are insofar as the book founds its characteristic communicative strategy on the idea of “dissemination”, while dialogue is a secondary concept. “Tuning oneself to a particular frequency” the teacher does not pursue sharedness of the world. The teacher shares one’s perceptions of the world.
The virtual classroom is viewed as a compass in terms of the ocean of the virtual library and one of the tasks of teaching could be a resumption of the related book types of communication, of which we are now deprived, provoking as many occasions and forms of speech of his opinion regarding the cultural heritage, of intellectual creation.