A QUESTION OF LOCATION

David Wesley

Forty years ago, America was gripped by "Future Shock." The book by Alvin Toffler which was originally published in 1970 became a bestseller (Toffler 1984). In a movie adaptation of the book, Orson Wells describes future shock as a sickness which comes from too much change in too short a time. It's the feeling that nothing is permanent anymore. It's the premature arrival of the future . The premise of Toffler’s book was that the element of change would continue to increase in society to such a rate that it was overwhelming. In an afterword commentary for Educause, Andy Cooley, Senior Vice President, Marketing for SunGard Higher Education states:

Charles Darwin observed that it’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but those most adaptive to change. For humankind, the pace of change has been accelerating, and never as rapidly as in the past century. One hundred years ago, our body of knowledge doubled only once every century. Today, our body of knowledge doubles every few years. In our digitized, microchipped world there is virtually no subject that cannot be Googled, downloaded, and consumed. In higher education the challenge is clear. How can we analyze and apply that information in ways that will help our learning institutions thrive? How do we turn that ubiquitous cloud of information into real knowledge?

The ability to learn how to learn and how to learn how to filter knowledge and information in this environment is essential. It is not particularly new news or an extreme statement that nearly every aspect of contemporary society is going through continuous transition and change. What may be more difficult for many people to understand is that these changes are more than more information, simple changes of finding better ways to do business, education or administration; the changes are real paradigm changes which flow from a larger epistemological shift in society. These shifts which flow from the way people see the world and think, are something which impacts every part of society. Over the next new posts, I would like to explore the common thread of the epistemological shift related to location and look at how this shift affects intercultural education by exploring how societal and technological factors contribute to educational models of learning which are centered on learning communities of pilgrimage rather than centered on traditional physicality. I am intentionally connecting dots between the literature related to the phenomenon of short-term missions, pilgrimage, sociology, theology, hermeneutics and education as a prism to understand the current shift and also as a paradigm for a way forward in graduate level intercultural studies in the U.S. as well as in educational systems outside the U.S. The final section will hypothesize how these aspects could provide opportunity for stronger learning models for intercultural studies in context .