A recent article in a news portal dealt with ground-level traffic lights for smartphone zombies. People who walk around while staring at their smartphones are becoming more and more common – they’re so busy with checking their e-mails or sending messages via messenger services that they entirely forget the environment. Digital whiteboards are now being used in schools instead of traditional blackboards. Learning films dealing with this issue can be viewed on YouTube. And things are changing in the factories too – the maintenance technician no longer has a pad of paper and a toolbox in his hands and is automatically brought to the next “patient” by an autonomously controlled mobile robot while being informed by a tablet how the software of a given system needs to be adapted. Is this the image that comes to mind when we think of daily life, school and industrial production ten or fifteen years ago? Certainly not. The world has changed.
New technologies from yesterday
Due to rapid technological development, ever increasing internationalization and the meanwhile wide-spread availability of Internet with the ability to retrieve data via smartphones, new opportunities for getting involved with relevant topics and learning content are cropping up all the time. In addition to this, the trainer’s typical target group, i.e. “digital natives”, are growing up with smartphones and tablets and find it strange that these media are considered “new”, and that their legitimacy is sometimes even questioned.
The transformation has begun
The balancing act is a tremendous challenge in particular for trainers. On the one hand they’re faced with the training requirements of future employees, and on the other hand they’re dealing with the target group which obviously has the greatest affinity to these media but unfortunately often demonstrates deficits in other school subjects (or at least this is the general feeling). Stated briefly, the training content (“what”) is changing, as well as its didactization (“how”), i.e. the way in which the (new) training content is being (can be) imparted. Learn a few new words while waiting at the bus stop, watch a training video from sofatutor or the khan-academy on the smartphone on the way to work – this could be entirely relevant in the future. And thus the “where” is also in a state of flux.
4.0 training elements
Training at Festo has already undergone considerable change due to these developments. Steps taken already will certainly be unable to encompass digitalization in all of its complexity, but they’re important steps which are moving in this direction at the doing level. Technical content (for example from the field of sensor technology) is experienced and made tangible in various projects. Interest in the new and unknown is strengthened as a result. Concrete projects such as “Sensor Pong” and the “Balance Board” unite technical and emotional learning in the field of sensor technology for Industry 4.0. And the “new” media are used to this end. In addition to the trainers’ smartphones, tablets or 2-in-1 notebooks are also made available from the equipment pool which can be taken advantage of by the trainers as required. However, in some cases the trainees use their own smartphones, for example in order to be able to control a small robot with an app. An open guest Wi-Fi system is of course indispensable for this purpose.