Because there has to be another way to learn.

The majority of us, with some years on us, have suffered through it. And we continue seeing it in younger generations. Though there are those rare exceptions, from the moment you innocently start learning how to read and write, the act of learning remains a long and tedious bore/torture that drags on until one day you find yourself with a diploma in hand looking for work.

It doesn’t come as a surprise either. We spend decades within organized structures and schematics that we’re born into, learn within, and work within that have become old and lack reflection. Then, fifty or a hundred years later, a revolution arrives like a cyclone, taking with it all that comes into its path. We’re undergoing a new revolution. Not an industrial one this time, but a socio-digital one. Thanks to new technologies, people today have more power than ever. Its strength comes from bringing together millions of connected individuals or “micropowers” (a term used by Javier Cremades). Each active user’s micropower on the Internet is generating this global movement in all parts of society. Government, ideologies and institutions have been left behind.

Just yesterday we were calling them “new technologies.” Today our kids ask us why we call it “new.” Life, in “their” super-informed society with all the technological means at their reach, comes naturally to them. And a lot of consumer businesses of recreational games like PlayStation, Apple, or Nintendo have figured out how to reach them commercially by speaking their same language, using their same codes, and by technologically evolving. Nevertheless, the majority of students continue to learn geography, history or mathematics using books and memorization. It’s not just about airing out statistics. It’s about how much the weight of this increasing school disaster is directly related to the cultural gap between a certain generation of institutions and educators with children and young adults. It’s certain that this “older” generation’s disillusionment and lack of imagination on how to reach them are two factors only worsening this distance.

Raúl Almarcha, Vice President of the State Confederation of Student Associations (CANAE), recently said to Consumer.es: “There’s no effort to motivate the student body’s learning process and new and more attractive methodologies should be used, such as for example, promoting the audiovisual medium.” He also affirmed that, “students should feel like they’re participating in their education.”

However, in general, there are now schools, pedagogues/teachers and education professionals, who are pushing for education in another manner. Besides books, new methods of education are emerging based on stimulation, participation, games, and experimentation. We believe there still exists a gap or distance between these new methods and students. Simply because bridges, in this case technological ones, still need to be found in order to connect with them in their same language (an interesting example is the educational method of game consoles in the classrooms.)

Offering our grain of sand in order to reach those bridges is our concern here at Utani. We want to assure that technology this time around ceases to act as a game console, cell phone or navigator and it becomes a medium or platform so that the student feels at home, comfortable, and like a protagonist/a player in their own education.

For us, Mesosfera is one of those bridges.

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