Reflections on teaching-learning in the 21st century: The rhizome at work

This reflective, future-oriented paper identifies eight trends/directions relevant to (language-) learning in the early part of the 21st century: an unprecedented rate of change; an unprecedented richness of information; a growing emphasis on interdisciplinarity; the potential growth of a research mentality; the centrality of meaning-making in all learning; the power of social networking; the need for creativity and divergent thinking; the empowerment of the learner. It then proposes a model of teaching-learning based on the notion of the rhizome as a way responding better to students’ needs through the elicitation of individual needs, and coupled this with a technologically-based solution constructed on a multimedia database.

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