4. NETRO - THE ELECTRONIC LEARNING SPACE

4.3 THE NAME AND OBJECTIVES OF NETRO

Netro got its name early in the autumn term 2002 when the actual content of the module was far from clear. The name resisted the various metaphors that were forced on it and outlasted them all. To us, Netro represents a vehicle, hence, net + metro. When thinking about the goals and objectives of Netro, this vehicle offers two viewpoints on the question (see Figure 12).

Figure 12. The social and individual objectives of Netro

The first objective of Netro is a social one. The learning space is a medium for communication and sharing. In its ideal form it allows collaboration as well as personal reflections through which the learners can create a shared discourse, a kind of metalanguage with which to discuss the aspects of web literacy. And in this process, the shared goal is in producing new knowledge, a new, redesigned understanding of the concept of web literacy.

The second objective, howvere not of less significance, is on individual learning. While participating in the collaborative meaning making processes described above individual learning can also take place. Netro takes its individual passengers on a journey towards web literacy, that is towards autonomous managing on the web, containing all the three interrelated fields of web literacy already introduced in chapter 2.3. As has already been discussed, Netro is the beginning of the journey and offers its individual passengers the possibility for awareness raising on the content knowledge as well as the metacognitive knowledge related to the medium, the web. The individual learning objective of Netro is, nevertheless, not the Netro passengers to actually become web literate. Netro is more like an introduction to the concept of web literacy. For we argue that through various collaborative awareness raising activities the passengers can become aware of some aspects of web literacy and perhaps even accommodate or assimilate new information to their earlier conceptions on the topic and at the same time build their metacognitive knowledge on web related person, task and strategy knowledge.

Thus, in the lines of our definition of web literacy, our aims are not so much on teaching skills but on raising awareness on the aspects of the medium and of the passengers' use of the medium. By giving the passengers an opportunity to both work inside the medium and focus on that same medium there is an element of practical skills combined with the actual understanding of the diverse concept of web literacy, yet our focus is more on content knowledge and metacognitive knowledge. However, it naturally brings some added value to the electronic learning space that Netro passengers are actually inside the medium when they are asked to reflect on it.

We will now move on to describe the learning space in more detail to present how the learning space supports the reaching of its goals in practice.