How to be Literate in Self-Learning

SELF-LEARNING LITERACY

in a

Plurilingual Communication-Oriented

Knowledge Society

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

ABSTRACT

Since 2019, we have been living in a pandemic, COVID-19, and a second epidemic has been developing for six months or so now, Monkeypox. Both epidemics started by jumping from wild animal species to man. I will not discuss these events more at the medical level which is in no way within my field of competence.

But- these epidemics and COVID-19 as a pandemic, still going on, have forced us to take measures we would never have thought possible, except in war time. Schools were closed. Confinement and total isolation were cast upon cities, or even provinces, or even countries to isolate the sick and protect the non-sick. Transportation was disrupted both for goods and for people. The Health system all over the world was overloaded and close to breaking point and collapse. That forced us to rethink education, and distant schooling was encouraged with today’s communications technology: 4G where optical fiber was available or where satellite networks existed, Virtual Reality where it was developed and feasible, Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning on smartphones, tablets, and computers.

I have been testing and developing guided self-learning in various Paris universities when students and institutions permitted but using it very systematically in private institutions where computers, tablets, and the Internet are available for all students. I have also worked with post-graduate professionals, mostly but not only in the medical field, with strong demand in start-up companies who need to work on foreign languages to reach the world.

The following research and report concern one CEO of a medical start-up company that I identify as the Nordic God Odin. It is only one cycle of work on Erin Meyer’s book “The Culture Map” after more than six years of guided self-learning on his side. He was the first gentleman in this experience (though I had had a student assistant when teaching at Paris Sorbonne and…