oa Outbound Train: The Instructor Support Project, Universal Design for Learning and the Role of Technology

The technological revolution that global society has undergone during the last few decades has completely transformed the way in which people interact with each other and their environment. Digital technology has permeated every corner of the globe and has permanently changed the way in which we function. The importance of technology for individuals in our society is ever increasing and creating a scenario where people, institutions and organizations are forced to adapt or be left behind. As Marshall McLuhan, the eminent Canadian Sociologist and scholar famously wrote, “the message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure” (1968) ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMEC_HqWlBY&feature=related ). For education our medium is dynamic, vivid, flexible digital technology. Like the railroad, or the airplane before it, the world is not as it once was.