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International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

TEXT FOR THE WEBSITE

OF THE INTERNATIONAL ROUNDTABLE FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW

Towards a Semiotic Understanding of E-education.

The title suggests a bewildering combination of two concepts, which are at first glance incompatible. Semiotics is widely unknown and seems to belong primarily to scientific discourses. Education interests the general public, is trendy and politically loaded. E-education, the expression for "electronically enhanced" education, only adds to public curiosity or some of the many trendy features of modern education as well as to public fears that electronic devices do not meet educational ideals about socially enhanced behavioral quality. What should one do with electronics in schools, institutions and families other than instructing how to manage computers or unveiling the vices and virtues of cyberspace, and what has semiotics to do with all that?

E-education is the definition for all types of electronically enhanced education, with emphasis on education, which is a stark contrast to e-learning. It would not be correct to perceive e-education only as a set of pedagogic practices with emphasis on learning with the use of electronic instruments. Education itself changes fundamentally where electronics are at stake; it will have a different character and a different understanding of the social relations that sustain the process of education. E-education embodies furthermore specific programs and devices, which are not only confined to information (like most data transference and e-learning), amusement (like most e-games) or storytelling (like what happens in family circles). Goals beyond them are generally described in vague terms such as personal growth or change. Change is indeed the key notion in the case of e-education. Any form of change achieved in knowledge, behavior or attitude can be tested in e-education through accessing the student's feedback, which is registered in connected computer programs. Individuals as well as groups of students change attitudes or other personality features because of their participation in e-educative programs. Those changes are, however, not identical with e-education in its entirety; semiotic dimensions are incorporated in all parts of the e-educative process, because each fragment appears to be sign-relevant in a specific context. E-education suggests a new access to the unfolding of a human individual, and thus might partially fulfill the promise of social semiotics. This type of education is not the application of theoretical insights and premises or of philosophical doctrines and categories in classrooms and related facilities. Social semiotics includes the understanding and guidance of an unfolding personality not only by words and story telling but also by mastering the signs that belong to the world of our youth. Consider how many words are connected to electronic devices for conversations, and one understands the meaning of how personal growth became an issue of electronically designed and practiced sign qualities. Social semiotics should unfold from these practices and E-education contributes to that process.

Semiotics is considered to be the study of signs and symbols, meanings and complexities of their uses. Emphasis is on the sign, which forms the nucleus of the scientific project called semiosis with the ancient Greek notion of seme (=sign) as the central component in its name. Names, ideas and other forms of expression are altogether a sign, which is therefore a core concept of each process of meaning formation. A sign is a something that relates to something else for someone in some respect or capacity. This is general but precise, and could help for instance teachers to clarify their task in social life.

Two godfathers of semiotics are to mention for the 20th century—a philosopher and a linguist. They inspired scholars in many disciplines, from law to linguistics, from physicists to architects, from mathematicians and logicians to geneticists and educators. The philosopher is the US author Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and the linguist the Swiss Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). Both felt that linguistics would form part of a more general science of signs called semiology. The two never imagined to ever influencing modern pedagogic.

Semiotics and E-education

Basic philosophy.

Disciplines such as genetics, medicine, architecture, literature, law, or pedagogic are anchored in the experience that the ways in which signs and meanings are created, decoded, and transformed, create the world we live in—in everyday life as well as in the worlds of sciences. Peirce showed already 1890 that there are always signs, and signs in signs—a basic idea we can apply to texts and specific social situations such as a classroom or other forms of education.

Daniel Chandler formulates in his 2002 Semiotics: The Basics: "Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign.'1 He means: (1) Semiotics involves what we refer to as ‘signs’ and of 'reference', when we consider 'anything that stands for something else’. (2) Semiotics is how signs take various forms, such as words, images, sounds, gestures and objects. (3) Signs can also be something positive as well as negative, so that an eventual absence of an action may equally be seen as an actual sign. (4) Semiotics concerns furthermore how meanings are made and reality is represented. (5) The making of meaning and the processes of representation upon which these are based, can (among others) take the form of ‘texts’ and ‘media’.

1Chandler, Daniel: Semiotics: The Basics, Routledge, Abingdon (2002).

These remarks are already a possible outline of philosophical insight in the semiotics-education relationship. Texts are a central and critically challenging category of education. The most essential and confrontational issue is here that today's education still remains a word-education—despite the breath-taking growth of electronic communication and the perseverance of virtual reality in daily life! E-education is the first type of pedagogic that does not restrict itself exclusively to word-texts—an option that leads straight to semiotics! Chandler noticed how a text can exist in any medium and may be verbal, non-verbal, or both. A text is an assemblage of signs or strings of signs (such as language-words, but also images, sounds, tactile events and/or gestures), which are constructed and interpreted with reference to conventions of communication. We highlight three issues to focus on e-education:

1. E-education is not exclusively a Literary/Verbal/ Narrative/ or Word-education.

Education took hitherto mainly place via words, writings, conversations, and storytelling. It was and is a literary performance and rooted in a culture with a literary character. Notice for example the limited attention that education theories give to behavioral components, or notice our impoverished knowledge of body language, which is understood only as a parallel to, and never independent from, word-language. This strong position of word-bound expressiveness has severely limited Freud (dream stories), Lacan (the word of the other) and other psychologists who provided basic thoughts for education. So one remembers Greimas' position in his groundbreaking 1968 essay on the interaction of semiotics constraints: "It is obvious that … there is nothing specifically literary in the play of the creative mind, obvious that it draws from the same sources as the whole of meaningful activity … in opposition to the suspect tradition of occidental humanism which sets forth literature as a basic datum2 .

2 A.J.Greimas /F. Rastier: The Interaction of semiotic constraints, in: Yale French Studies, 1968, p. 86.

The crux of understanding E-education in terms of semiotics is in an expansion of the traditional "word-education". Education basics are here in semiotics, based on Peirce's philosophy in which any person is a sign, a specific kind of general idea. The insight how each person represents a universe extremely rich in its diversity of utterances is a most valuable point of departure for education. We live in a web woven with infinite strings of signs and Peirce underlined how each sign reaches far beyond itself: signs imitate, point to or symbolize the need to reach out to more than themselves; they exist by the grace of something else to refer to! A sign confined to it's self is not even a sign! Not unlike education, semiotics explores possibilities to understand meaning and is a dynamic inquiry into how meaning occurs and is anchored. Any skeleton of thought that elucidates signs and their meanings possesses a logical form. But to make that logic a subject of education is not a primordial task for logicians: educators and semioticians come in!

Semiotics does not interpret "words as signs" to interpret reality, but interprets reality rather as an ensemble of components with sign character. The issue is therefore not, and will never be: "how to use words"—a formula one often encounters in educational relations—but rather: "how to access the means that lead to meaning". We emphasize that semiotics in relation with education focuses a new understanding, a more encompassing and less purely analytical meaning, which envisages words on an equal level with visual entities, non-verbal expressions, images, emotional and experiential events and properties, in short: all what belongs to the unfolding of a person in context.

A non-word education finds in e-education its possibility to realize a wide scale of equivalents for words, mainly electronically transferred and enhanced visual elements. Although E-education programs contain such equivalents, much more study and experiment should be dedicated to its semiotic complexity, whereas an equivalence of word and visual entity is by no means sufficiently researched, although its sheer functioning in education shows already very good results. Let us not forget: this not only goes to speaking, writing and other individual activities but also to listening and involvement, which are activities that include per definition other individuals!

2.Play and the Connectedness of Things.

Two themes of Peircean semiotics are clearly intertwined and characterized by what he calls "synechism": the connectedness of things being a field of research and contemplation in which tychism (an expression for evolutionary cosmology) and continuity (as a matter of growth and mental action) are the basic pillars. Each of those concepts is important for education and the position of E-education in this context.

The Peircean triad analogous to the German author Friedrich Schiller, who distinguished "Stofftrieb", "Formtrieb" and "Spieltrieb" is of interest here. Traditional education would emphasize the first two, and underline that youngsters should concentrate on knowing how to concur matter and form. Peirce emphasizes the importance of the "Spieltrieb" (or "Play of Musement"), which is in E-education translated and often misunderstood in the saying that learning and education should be "fun". The identity of fun and play, however, is a theme for deeper understanding in forms of non-word education like E-education. The three Schiller-forms in Peircean guise are what he calls "three steps of dancing the architectonic of the semiotic science"—as if he foresaw today's implications of e-communication and virtual reality. Play or 'musement' is a free kind of doing, a general human feature with its importance for all sorts of education. Basic for success in education is the ability to create a safe and secure environment. That allows an engendering awareness of freedom in doing and acting within the limitations of the rules of play and fun. Play indicates an idea of chance (without which an operative mind cannot operate), which is most probably a major impulse of man's existence. E-education is void without a sense of movement, diversity and change—the three often occurring "without words" and concentrating in 'play' that causes 'fun'!

The idea that a text is an assemblage of signs with sufficient room for play and fun includes at least two important issues: (a) a semiotic approach is not restricted to the reality of words; or to words as the only form of reality, and (b) any assemblage of signs forms an environment and not solely a word-bound relationship between a speaker and a hearer, or a sender and a receiver. That also relates to the Peircean idea of "play". Greimas referred to play as 'a long journey punctuated with compelling choices that leads, through a series of exclusions and of options, manifesting personal and social phobias and euphorias to the constitution of an original work…3 His remarks can be understood as a plea for a semiotics of forms of education that distance themselves from the hegemony of linguistic expressiveness.

3A.J.Greimas & F. Rastier: The Interaction of Semiotics Constraints, in; Yale French Studies, No 41: Game, Play, Literature (1968), p. 68 ff.

3.An implicate order

The order of implication, as Peirce tried to unravel, is extremely important for education in all forms and all ages, because the deciphering of the order of reality is basic for becoming a person,—and becoming is not only by means of words! There should be special consideration given to the fact that words are only a part of that entire order, because much of the semiosis unfolds beyond language and linguistic issues. Is there a semic order in the structure of reality and of what we call the "world", a sign-order beyond the order of word-language? Examples of such implications are analyzed in signs, not in words4. They pertain to a language/nature relationship, which is problematic in its epistemological context—a problematic character as fruit of how variants of human perception relate to invariants of nature perceived by humans. Signs always emerge from other signs, on different levels and in different measures (up to the nano-level) of measuring. Strings of signs are of essence, and they form individual growth as well as social environments, individualistic as well as social qualities, which E-education provides. The range and order of the two are a matter of chance and choice, and by no means an issue of linear development—an observation of utmost importance for any type of education.

4David Bohm: Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge London 2002.

Semiotics in E-education

Introduction:

Electronic-friendly education

Semiotics in E-education shows an important difference to other education approaches with electronic devices. Despite the fact that computers play a dominant role in e-education, their function and appearance differs, and so does their mediating role in the attitude of most students. The latter consume music with their iPods, page, text-message, phone, make pictures or read the news of their preferred channels with their cell phone, and all this shows how indeed electronic devices change face and function in the context of electronic-friendly education environments. But E-education with all its devices shows literally and metaphorically different dimensions. Computer screens are widened and expand their reach and have different colors; keyboards are super sized and have non-individualized touch pads; differently placed keyboards in the classroom, for short: E-education provides much more than the usual electronic games. All electronic devices accompany, sustain and exemplify body movements, are wired together and form a dynamic system of communication. Walkie-talkies, sound and image producing and recording devices, footpath and staircases with touch pads, an occasional hide-away with switches for sound and vision are a new and e-educative milieu for conversations, oral exchanges, formal as well as informal discussions and provisions to play with a great variety of devices. Virtually all of them, from fully loaded electronic devices to more simple lightening rods, pencils, home computers, calculators, rulers or pieces of carton can fulfill a role in an E-education set. In other words, everything can become an E-education device and nothing is definitively designed only for that E-education purpose. It seems virtually impossible to represent detailed information about all elements of E-education packages, its programs, devices but also its institutions and associations with schools or recreation centers. There are books available, and the MIIL website informs about them as well as other relevant publications. We thus focus three components of the world of E-education, which are particularly important for semiotic analysis: (a) the EEEIM(Electronically Enhanced Education Environment), (b) the Keyboard in E-education designs and the Forms & Shapes designed as equivalent to words in a language pattern, (c) the E-education Institutions, Schools as well as Centers5.

5See the list of book publications and articles on the web site >www.MIIL.org<

The EEETM.

EEE stands for "Electronic Educational Environment". To emphasize environment as an important issue in education is not new. Parents look for instance into their yard and see their children playing in an environment they bought and established in their backyard. They play hide and seek, find shelter in a little barn, climb a ladder, use a slide or a shoot, jump from a platform, move, cry, shout at each other, play in the sand, or attempt to swim in a small pool. There seems no order in their activities. This is also performed in the EEE™, their play trains them in social skills and the coordination of body movements, or in bringing eye and hand, thought and leg together. Moreover, a basic trust is acquired when jumping or an understanding how to maintain equilibrium when climbing, swimming, or using the shoot in the EEE™.

Its floor space of 500-plus square feet is used to establish a structure analogous to a backyard playground. Wooden steps, ladders, staircases, bridges and gates, and computer-based instruction devices comprise an education entity that can change its form or structure in accordance with a variety of education goals. There are two floor levels in any unit. They allow arrivals in, or departures from the unit through climbing up and down the ladders and stairs. At both levels are computer stations and other communication devices, such as walkie-talkies, video’s and headphones, to listen to program instructions or to accompany TV or video images. The entire device attracts attention because of its labyrinthine design. The device’s attraction is enhanced by the fact that an entire electronic substructure resulting from a sophisticated wiring, is built into the unit. Such substructures make the EEE™ a truly electronic education environment; the environment they establish both facilitates and creates interactivity. The EEE™' of this generation functions in various centers are mainly wood constructions including the sophisticated wirings, as the picture shows.

Whatever configuration the unit has for the functions it performs, there is this electronic structure down to the smallest details. For instance, each stair has at least three step-on keypads that can light up in various colors. Small pillars offer a variety of hand buttons, which relate to the colored pads, so that different patterns are shown and task patterns designed. Walkie-talkies are there to involve students in experiences with those pads, their colors, and the performance of the task to move in accordance with the patterns shown by the pads by means of language. But not by words, only via touch-screens students give and receive information related to the tasks performed6 .

The same principles are realized in different shapes and forms of EEE™ units, which might not be located in one and the same space. In those cases, the electronic wiring is even more complicated but on the other hand, the task to communicate will become more sophisticated and an issue that can only be trained in the midst of appropriate electronic devices. It means that the semiotic essence of the EEE™, which represents the total importance of E–education, is not in the use of this entire device or of its parts (such as light pads, shapes, extra-linguistic elements and the like), but in the environment as such, as it were in its totality:

6Michael H. Foox: Devices in E-education, IIS PUbl. Cie, New York 2004, p. 79 ff.

AN EEE™ WITH MANY STATIONS

This becomes clear if one considers the fact that personal interactivity in an awareness of the virtual is a major issue for the EEE™ and for e-education in general. The project of e-education requires a new evaluation of devices in the EEE™, be they a playground, a gym, a simple staircase, a computer, a walkie-talkie, or even a video camera in classroom. All those devices appear in a new light when they become wired and incorporated in e-education and its programs. Until now, emphasis has been almost exclusively on the relation of those devices to individual behavior, their material aspects and their implicit challenges to school- or other education environments. But the complexity of the wiring (with or without real fibers) remains an issue per se. The essence of e-education and an EEE™ is in the subtlety of its electronic connection, the speed delivered by the wiring and its accessibility for all participants are altogether a matter of signs, of signs in signs and of the many ways signs are maintained.

Humans are offered a socialized life form at each stage of their life in e-education. The predominating form called “individuality” constitutes a basic value to every participant in contemporary society. Will that last? Implications of individualism are by no means evident and not globally accepted.

The generation born between 1900 and 1929 will be largely dead after 2010, and those born between 1930 and 1950 will have become senior citizens without important social influence. So one can raise the question whether individuality will be the primary social value after 2010. Education designs have to confront that type of question and may need to include alternative approaches. E-education takes the lead in that direction. Discussions about whether individuality is acquired during processes of acculturation and not (genetically) preconceived are still vigorous. Individuality from acculturation is an idea not fully accepted by educators. Individuality remains understood as a natural datum, although it is (to begin with) a result of education and not its basis. That observation is of central importance to any consideration concerning education, and it acquires a very strong meaning in e-education where emphasis is on interactivity and social patterning. With this, one is in the central context of Peirce's philosophy, who wrote: "…reality depends on the ultimate decision of the community; so thought is what it is, only by virtue of it's addressing a future thought which is in its value as thought identical with it, though more developed. In this way, the existence of thought now depends on what is to be hereafter; so that it has only a potential existence, dependent on the future thought of the community… The individual man, since his separate existence is manifested only by ignorance and error, so far as he is anything apart from his fellows, and from what he and they are to be, is only a negation7. . How the individual becomes an individual by means of education remains concealed in processes of semiotic nature.

7Ch. S. Peirce: Collected Papers, Vol 5, p. 316

Keyboards, Shapes and Forms

A Greimasian Square and its predominantly logical analyses of semiotic constraints tries to take a position that does not embrace the superposition of word and linguistic entities, but it fails to work with equally understandable and especially visible alternative entities. E-education and its EEE™ wiring and system character emphasize visual elements to not identify semiotics with literary elements. That is basic for semiotics and a great inspiration for any semiotics of law. A central question of further research in theory as well as practices of E-education is also of great importance for semiotics: how should one understand equivalences between word and visual entity? Philosophical aesthetics have often analyzed the proximity of word and visual element, for instance in early 20th century cubism or in the great works of art that combined the two, but also did not come to an encompassing alternative.

The question at issue is, however, deeper than the surface- or deep structures of paintings or the composite materials of such visual works. Our research pertains to educative ground lines where the growth of a character or the emergence of a human personality is at stake: in fact, the emergence of a human person has for semiotics a symbolic character. One asks what in such processes is the relevant distinction between word and visual element, and what contributes semiotics in that regard? One of the answers in all experiences with the EEE™ is in the emergence of an individual being endangered to grow up as an isolated and incapable to socialize human being. This is an ever-occurring contrast to a socially oriented personality in a childhood, adolescence or adulthood. Various clinical pictures show us how fundamental these differences are, and how they exist in character growth and personality development. Could it be that education and semiotics are closer than one would at a first glance accept? Severely disturbing clinical pictures such as autism, or symptoms of Alzheimer, even a symptomatic Parkinson patient show these problems in personality development. That issue was observed in the EEE™ activities. Structures of individuality resulting from EEE™ activities are crucial for behavior and character development. Educators and students need social networks for the deployment of a basic trust for learning and growth to become an individual in society, and the apprehension of the often-disturbing diversity of signs and symbols belongs to that process. E-education has the ability to sustain that deployment of trust and semiotic harmony via a specifically designed e-environment. However, this task is much broader than traditional education normally perceives. E-environments contradict the quasi-absolute domination of individuality and e-devices help change those dominating attitudes in family life and classroom, since parents and students are proportionally engaged. A change towards that attitude can be perceived as soon as the classroom gets computers and e-devices to function in the framework of e-education. Its attention is for semiotic dimensions rather than for entertainment or sheer information.

The most extreme individualistic device that we all gave a place in our offices and living rooms is the computer keyboard with its overtly individualistic and often anti-group design. Computers can look great, but they always have only one keyboard and one screen, which is mostly visible from only one particular angle. Laptops perform socially better than desktops because of the movable screen, but they still have one keyboard, and nobody can intermingle with its most simple activities. Any understanding of the instructions to make an education program work remains an in essence individual experience. Students sitting at a keyboard can discuss how to manage, but do not have the opportunity to treat keyboards or screens other than individually. Younger children sometimes say: “I hate computers, they are dumb”. This can be interpreted negatively and positively; the hate can be real hate, or on the contrary a forceful articulation of the attraction of the computer, which seems an intimidation. It has not yet been an issue of social and psychological research whether the computer as a complex object or its individualistic design create passionate and affective experiences of positive and of negative character. Let us not forget how keyboarding became like (but only like) speaking, and the manipulation of keyboards parallels (but is not) speech activities of all kinds.

THE NEW KEYBOARDING

This became clear where in the EEE™ the screen was enlarged and in that form made visible and readable for a group instead of for one individual at a time. The moment a keyboard was made accessible to three or four students at the same time in the same program, and the keys became movable through the various sheets with figures functioning as a key, the appreciation of a computer became more positive—because it was as if a common activity was created and applied. What signals did we receive from that change? In any case it was a message pertaining to the vital importance of visual data in a world, towards which e-education leads! It needed a sophisticated new type of wiring in boxes that function as a keyboard, and the introduction of touch pads, which can covered by various sheets linked with the variety of pads, but those changes worked! They became a socialized device, unique in the world of computers and a novelty with important semiotic consequences.

The interest in this change also pertains to the computer-independent forms and shapes (often in plastic or simply carton) in use of the EEE™ and other E-education devices. Consider a simple exercise: “I function as an instructor in an oral situation, and say to the student to reproduce a pattern of a simple set of colored boxes that I show on a photo or describe on a blackboard”. Compare that situation to an e-education fragment where exactly the same task is set: “The screen of the computer shows the required pattern, and students are invited to reproduce that pattern by arranging colored boxes on a little table next to the keyboard”. These are two different situations and contexts. The difference is that the students can use the keyboard to change the pattern on the screen, because they now fully interact with only the instructions prepared for them as a background. The first situation is a reproductive task whereas the second has reproduction as only one of the elements of the entire situation. The quality of behaviors and social contacts is direct in the first and partially indirect in the second case. Students experience a patterning activity as an illustration in the oral context, and perceive the same patterning activity in the second e-education context as a fascinating task, whereby the instructors eventually assist their own initiative and task-directedness.

The relations between forms, shapes and the computer are manifold. These devices do not aim at verbal expressiveness but on tactile experiences, spatial insight, eye- and hand coordination as well as the ability to transform real life issues into abstract figurations. They are often linked to comparable shape and form devices such as wooden figures, pads or writing blocks. Correlations with the flat computer screen are made such, that changes in the concrete figures on a table can parallel changes on the screen showing the same figures. Many coordination exercises unfold when table- and screen figurations must go together. "Paralleling signs" is a concrete semiotic task to fulfill in this context!

The parallel is in the coordination and ordering of the visual components and the body movements. Some differentiations are of essence: shapes and figures on a flat table changing on the table as they do on the computer screen is still on one flat level so that spatial insight does not play a role.

To build for instance a tower with the same "shape and form"- devices requires spatial insight, which is not demonstrated via the flat tables and their flat screen correlatives. The transformation of spatial data created by the manipulation of shapes and forms (for instance a tower building) into computer images and even programs, is an interesting and difficult issue. Build a tower—and what now to do on the computer? How does the tower, constructed with two dimensional flat pieces and looking on a photo like being made with three-dimensional pieces and became also in reality a three-dimensional product although it is made in reality with flat two-dimensional pieces, transform itself into the dimensions of a computer screen? What is this game of dimensions in semiotic perspective?

MY TOWER

The tower shows a challenge to transform elements from which semiotics is transformed into computer operations. These are perhaps a further step after the construction (the word is only an often misunderstood metaphor) of the 'Greimasian Square', not solely depending on mutually contrasting linguistic elements but on reality perceived and shaped by the human mind.

Institutional Requirements

Visual elements form an equivalent to words and speech as elements in e=education and broaden the scale of semiotic possibilities. However, this entire broadening of the concept requires insight in the institutional constraints, which are vital. A school administration has to understand on beforehand how e-technology is not just an additional factor, which favors patterns of already existing education. On the contrary: introducing e-technology implies a fundamental change in the entire education setting. E-education is not just introducing video and other e-devices in classes, or is it even computer-based forms of training. It starts with everyday problems in the life of adolescents and younger students, all ups and downs in behavior, learning, or other worries included. In the institutional features of e-education: the institution should be as open and informal as possible. An additional motive is in its indeterminacy: One never knows on beforehand what students will acquire and discover. “Everybody learns from it, the outcome will become visible”—would be an appropriate slogan. This attitude is, sociologically spoken, a consequence of the basic democratic attitude and design of e-education. In philosophical words: e-education is by nature open to all members of a society, and institutional selectivity would be incompatible with the basic ideas of educating in cyberspace. Admission to institutions for e-education must therefore be on the basis of parental or other familial request, eventually initiated by schoolteachers or other educators. Note how participation in e-education often results from regular school activities that intertwine with in-school e-education programs and devices guided and promoted in the school by e-educators.

It is a great contribution to the enrollment in e-programs if e-education specialists contribute to the school programming for the regular classes as well as for after-school activities. Not the entire package of e-education needs to be incorporated into or around the school curriculum. School boards should handle the institutional requirements with care and cooperate to establish such centers in their neighborhood. Here, as well as in schools, specific devices must provide the possibility of interactive work in a variety of areas, such as science, math, nature, music, language and reading, arts, technology, traffic, home environment or citizenship. These activities should are combined with daily course work from school, on an individual basis and in small groups. The diversity of subjects should mirror the school curriculum’s diversity. New viewpoints, which then form an enriched motivation for the school program can be introduced, and include issues of semiotic relevance. A future society must have integrated possibilities of cyber(space) e-programs, and education prepares for that type of society through the development of e-education as a portal to semiotics. E-education enhances the chance for a deep and fundamental democratization by means of an integrated education and appropriate training in e-communication and its implicit signs and symbols.

There are two insights to mention.

1.There are devices and e-devices. E-devices are tools or appliances that can, because of their electronic properties, become wired. Their wiring abilities are the foundation for networks within which education can take place. Devices that do not have such wiring potential on their own must function within a network. The network itself can be understood as a semiotic grid.

2. Discussing devices in e-education is a discussion education. This is the logical consequence of the thesis that all e-education is first and foremost education, i.e. that e-education expands our understanding—including a new view on dimensions of semiotic nature—of education as an institutional requirement in general.

E-education a Form of Semiosis.

All electronic dimensions constitute a specific ensemble, a pedagogic milieu, which has its decisive influence on students, teachers or parents and other involved persons. Here is a difference with E-learning as Internet-enabled learning. Internet programs stimulate the organizational culture to implement online learning. It is, however, clear that this instruction differs from learning, whereas those two again differ from education. E-learning specifically emphasizes information whereas e-education is an encompassing cultural activity of individuals and groups in society, and as such a matter of semiosis—itself a hitherto unnoticed component of social behavior and society's organization. Let us not forget how Peirce underlined that a sign is "something by knowing which we know something more", which is a pragmatic instruction to interpret by means of our activity to use signs. It interests how education is mainly this activity: using signs in order to reinforce and sustain knowing. The basis is here the mastering of the signs; an individual grows, develops, unfolds and perceives in a world, which acquires meaning through learning and maintaining signs. This process of learning and education does not exist on the initiative of one individual—it is rather in itself a sign of the intricate social character of semiotics, and in particular e-education is a new technique to have this social semiotics come to the fore.

Semiotics in education is not unlike semiotics in medicine. Knowing is in the light of semiotics an urge to interpret. This has undoubtedly a wider meaning. Semiotics not only focuses on specific fields of human-cultural activity, such as medicine or education. The wider meaning is in Umberto Eco's observation that the universe of signs is a labyrinth of human culture and itself a virtually infinite network of interpreters (Peirce calls them 'interpretants'). They share the many ways of using signs; no wonder that today's youth has to be taught to become an unfolding self whilst identifying with those signs and its many ways of sign using.

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