Geogebra para estudiar fenómenos físicos

Geogebra, a radical change in the learning environment
José Luis Hernández Neira Permanent Teacher Training Advisor at the Regional Centre for Innovation and Training “Las Acacias” This work has been accomplished in the framework of a research project on mechanisms for improving learning performances, as a consequence of the need of a radical methodological change in a quickly changing worldthat needs a permanent methodological adaptation. The school cannot remain the same either as far as its methods or its contents is concerned. In pre-modern cultures, according A. Giddens (The consequences of Modernity), time and space were linked to the “local”, that is on the one hand it did not exist any separation between “space” and “place” and, on the other hand, time was inextricably joined tothe local. The clock invention led to a separation between time and place because both with clock usage spreading and the organisation of a worldwide system for time measuring, time became universal and independent from space and, at the same time, it get joined back again with space through social activity. In that way, according to Giddens, vacuum time arises. Vacuum space arises, according tothe already mentioned author, as a consequence of the progressive world cartography, since world maps allow us representing places far away from each other within a space independent of any particular place. That creates in people an internal way of representing events that actually implies the existence of a vacuum space. Imagine a telephone call between two people staying in two differentcountries. Both see themselves at their own locality and they imagine the other at his or hers but both localities are separated by a vacuum space. Giddens holds that the space-time separation is of capital importance for the extreme dynamism of modern society for two reasons, on the one hand “because it is the first condition for the weighing the anchor mechanism” and second because “it produces thedistinctive engagement mechanisms of modern social life: the rationalized organization”. The first one has a deep impact in the so called teaching-learning process. Giddens defines the “weighing the anchor” as “the detaching of social relationships from their local contexts and their re-structuring in indefinite space-time intervals” and that is what is happening with the school and theteaching-learning process. Pupils do not learn any more in a reduced space anchored to the local and at moments previously established, but their classrooms has been enlarged towards other space-time environments, both real and virtual, where knowledge exists. From a different approach to the problem, human being cognition system is a complex system that cannot be dealt with from the point of view ofdeterministic theories that try to explain phenomena by linear models based on the law of cause and effect. On the contrary, it must be analysed in the framework of complexity and chaos theories, and even more in the problem we are dealing with: the interaction of the human being cognition system with their environment. In complex systems, event forecasting times get shorter and shorter reaching even thepoint of making prediction useless, since the system evolves through the interaction of the many subsystems it is made up of. What actually matters is providing the system with reliable information so that it can evolve in the best possible way. According to U. Nieto de Alba (History of Time in Economy), “Chaos also appears linked to creative processes. Therefore, unlike heart that must show aregular behaviour since other ways we

will die, brain behaves in a non-linear, irregular way... It is, therefore, a non-linear feedback device that makes possible life and intelligence, where that creation process, that starting with confusion evolves towards an unforeseen intuition, takes place”. From this point of view we consider the teaching-learning process in our work. 1. Stress as a...