Vision

Technology at service of universitary studies

The education has always integrated in a rich and creative way every new tool available to maintain, grow and transmit knowledge. University, since its origin in the Middle Ages, has experienced and taken every new available "technology of the word". Let us think, for instance, to the word "lesson" or "lecture", which indicated the dictation to the students that teachers used to do in order to allow them to write basic scientific texts: the available technology was handwriting (chirography), and this was the most effective and efficient way to promote the diffusion of the Classics and the knowledge.

The movable type press and the periodical press, as well as the following technologies up to computer science and telematics, have found in the university an intelligent and generous welcome.
Such predisposition has always gone along with a certain caution, to verify the real benefits of a new technology - sometimes this caution has become distrust and suspect: this is not surprising, if we think of the exaggeration of some advertising messages.

The use of new information and communication technologies (ICT) in education - so called eLearning - is extremely new as for the available technologies and the opportunities they offer to enrich the learning experience. At the same time, however, it is completely traditional as for the faculty and the will of the university to "do better its job".

eLab intends to promote in teachers and lecturers an appropriate culture, which helps them integrate digital technologies in a rich and efficient way, by focusing the attention not on the mere technologies, that always change, but on the learning experience and on the people who learn: "e" is in learning's service, not viceversa ...

This philosophy has been rewarded by the Swiss Virtual Campus with the assignement at USI and SUPSI of 18 projects in the two past calls: not a comfortable arrival point, but an exciting starting point!