Possibilty, Learning and IT (1998)
Pino Fiermonte & Roger Frisch |
Introduction
The topics of inter-cultural awareness, access to IT and media literacy, parent involvement and life long learning play an increasingly important role in education. Political statements by governments (USA, Denmark) political and economic organisations (EU Bangemann Report, Info 2000) as well as political parties, local politicians etc. show the enormous challenges we face at the end of this century and at the beginning of a new era, marked above all by technological development.
Debates about changing education and scientific concepts about complexity, chaos, continuous socio-cultural transformation and globalisation have converged to produce a range of new guiding metaphors to negotiate key concepts in learning. The learners' independence from a curriculum, their responsibility for their own learning, the parents' right to determine the content and the direction of their children's learning, the ways in which this self-directed and parent-determined learning should be supported or is suppressed by institutional education and, of course, the reasons for this suppression are all important questions that have to be discussed in schools as well as on a national political level.
The development of IT in schools has been marked by divergent conceptual views on literacy. The computer was introduced as a means for modernising existing methodologies (drill and practice programs, for example). Several attempts have also been made to teach computer literacy, a sort of functional literacy regarding IT. The need for introducing this subject is motivated by the fact that we are shifting from the Industrial Era to the Information Era or from machine-based to information-based organisation. Implementing the use of IT in this perspective, stresses the fact that educational change results form changes in economy more than anything else.
Since the rise of desktop computers in the 80s, a notable change has occurred in the area of media education all around the world. Widespread pedagogical development is trying to integrate new communication and information technologies in the curriculum as a whole and in everyday classroom work.
This paragraph could introduce a general description of the impact of new technologies on education. However, it is a fact that only about 4% of the world population have access to computers. Even the so-called industrialised countries are far from what they are expected to offer their citizens regarding access to high technological media equipment. Computer technology may well have already contributed to increase the number of educators which take into account complex learning environments and power relations in education. However, we doubt that the impact is as strong as often stated.
Qualifying and motivating teachers and even parents to face these growing challenges should be one of the priorities of all those in charge of school development or in charge of providing job qualifications for students. Qualifying teachers is of course one thing, but the question remains as to what counts as qualification and who does the counting. The book Brave New School by Jim Cummins and Dennis Sayers (Cummins, J. & Sayers, D. (1995). Brave New Schools, New York: St Martin's Press.) offers a good insight into this dilemma. Take the examples below as an illustration of how contradictory positions can be when decisions have to be taken that should lead to changes in curricula and methodologies.
Concerning the Internet:
Whereas some "view this potential reduction of top-down control over the learning process as one of the most positive aspects of global learning networks" (Cummins, J. & Sayers, D. (1995). Brave New Schools, p.12, New York: St Martin's Press.) others see this technological evolution more as a threat to acquired culture and try to reconcile western economic objectives with a progressive school design by promoting computer literacy mixed with a Back-To-Basics discourse. This discourse is above all nourished by elitarian views on achievements. Around such statements as nivellement vers le bas, raising the standards a whole range of measures are taken that should be aimed at rethinking and reforming education from the ground up. But it remains difficult to agree on how school should be reshaped as long as policy makers do not define their learning concepts (As an example, unemployment is a social fact that certainly won't be eliminated just by changing education. Diplomas do not have the status they used to have. Obviously this is a consequence of educational democratisation, giving a larger percentage of the population the opportunity to attend universities than three or four decades ago. Any attempt to avoid this inflation of diplomas can only be an attempt to eliminate competition for the white collar jobs by selecting the future members of the elite as early as possible.)
Concerning textbooks:
Many people think that changing curricula may respond to the demands of our modern society. Others "argue for the importance of withdrawing learning from the prescripted texts controlled by those who exercise power in our societies because educational systems organized according to this model have resulted in staggering failure rates among so-called minority groups." (Cummins, J. & Sayers, D. (1995). Brave New Schools, p.13, New York: St Martin's Press.)
Policymakers and teachers who remain stuck in implicit building block models of learning will want to change certain items or blocks in the curriculum. This will not at all affect the global learning environment and the providers of information won't change. Constructivist theory suggests that redesigning environments in a way that puts the learner in control over information is more important than readjusting predetermined topics. A comment in Brave New Schools on Sirotkin sketches the situation as follows: "He notes that teacher lecturing or total class work on written assignments continue to emerge as the primary instructional patterns and suggests that "navigating back to the basics should be easy. We never left." (Cummins, J. & Sayers, D. (1995). Brave New Schools, p.100, New York: St Martin's Press.)
There is ongoing pursuit of transformation in education but, we would like to argue, it is trying to fit the concepts of the traditional school system. (For example: textbooks are replaced by other textbooks, subjects are newly labelled, assessment methods are slightly reshaped, new labels are given to children who do not fit the schema of the average child, new types of classes are created where these children are educated: classe spécial, classe d'accueil, classe d'intégration, classe francophone, classe d'attente.)
The traditional school system remains largely determined by the roles teachers, pupils and parents play in educational processes as well as it is characterised by certain implicit concepts about learning, evolution, growing up and of course about culture. In Luxembourg, what has to be accepted and promoted as culture is mediated through textbooks and how-to-work-with-the-textbook guidelines, thus leading teachers to "continue to transmit officially approved information and skills as if they were neutral reflections of objective reality" (Cummins, J. & Sayers, D. (1995). Brave New Schools, p.4. New York: St Martin's Press.). At the same time these materials often ignore any socio-cultural particularities. (The textbooks that are used in primary school to teach German and a year later French, do not make any reference to the multilingual situation with which nearly every child is confronted, long before attending school.) These methodologies and cultural backgrounds are taught as well in pre-service training as in in-service training courses. They not only define what should be taught but also what can be thought. Teachers transmit the corresponding views and attitudes via their behaviour, the classroom culture and the discourse they promote, to parents, to pupils and even to local politicians in charge of preschool and primary school. Structural elements that guarantee continuity and stability of the school system are not touched. And even if some may argue that education is by definition an open system and that it cannot avoid transformation as new technologies are emerging and the global network is spreading and reaching classrooms, the traditional school "survives by its ability to change some aspects of its structure or behavior in order to maintain stability in those areas that define its core identity." (Eisen, S. (Jan. 1998). http://weatherhead.cwru.edu/amjdc/papers/106.html)
Of course, it would be too easy just to call for governmental directives to change education, especially when the main issue is the empowerment of teachers and parents. A plausible response is that "The critical error in such efforts appears to be the assumption that a command-and-control culture can change to an empowered culture by using command-and-control assumptions and methods." (Eisen, S. (Jan. 1998). http://weatherhead.cwru.edu/amjdc/papers/106.html) |
Equipment and the setting of technological standards
"The same technology that opens the world to our consciousness
frequently closes our consciousness to the world."
(Cummins, J. & Sayers, D. (1995). Brave New Schools, p.4. New York: St Martin's Press.)
"We make decisions in less than ideal circumstances, given inadequate or incomplete information and using limited objectivity and rationality. Often, we are even willing to settle for the first acceptable option that becomes available, fully aware that other options may be better but not wanting to allocate the time or resources to consider them." (Sternberg, R. J. (1997). Successful Intelligence, p.181. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc.)
A symptomatic problem not only in Luxembourg but also in Germany or France for instance concerns the kind of equipment should be acquired for educational purposes, and more particularly the choice of technology and hardware. The question is: should the equipment in schools reflect the standard equipment of the workplace?
In Luxembourg the equipment is not prescribed by the state. This is the case at least at the level of preschool and primary school. The local communities usually set the standard for the equipment according to their view of what the standards in the workplace are. As most decision makers work in offices or are employed by banks and administrations, their perspective is strongly shaped by the way computers are used in offices. However, page layout programs, video digitising technologies, digital photography, design software, to give but a few examples, have created a whole range of new perspectives on how IT could be used in education. Recent developments in web publishing, database programming and management of documents, workgroups and projects could change the theoretical frameworks and practices in education on all levels.
If we want to engage in a critical debate on the use of media with parents, teachers, students, children, we have to broaden the range of possible uses of IT. We have to address the question as to how they mediate, transform and create information, experiences, thoughts and realities. An important issue is the standardisation of computer interfaces, operation systems and software.
Word-processing
Today, Luxembourg is above all a banking place after having been shaped for decades by steel industry. Since the mid 70s, the school system in Luxembourg has been trying to respond to the increasing demand for employees in this sector. We encounter two major arguments here for promoting one particular type of computer technology and a limited set of programs.
The Luxembourg educational system with its strong accent on language learning (by the age of fourteen young people are having to learn 4 languages more or less simultaneously) of course calls for word-processing as well as drill and practice software that can be used in language learning. This partly explains why office software is so popular in education. A main argument for introducing office software is that children supposedly have to be trained to find a job, which means that they have to be prepared to be able to work in an office where they will of course be confronted with word-processing, calculation and databases.
A third factor that must be taken into account is the teachers themselves who tend to be at best but occasional users of computers. Considering their limited exposure to these technologies it seems obvious that teachers' implicit expectations and theories are not necessarily the best basis for thinking and discussing the role and potential of computers in education. Surely, if the aim of the school should not be to produce technonerds or informaniacs, then it should not be to produce bankers and secretaries either.
Operating systems
The discussion around PC versus Mac remains one of the favourite topics in meetings where implementing computers in education is discussed. This may be interpreted as a symptom of this undifferentiated view of the use of computer technologies in the workplace and of their purpose in school. In fact, it seems that both perspectives - the use of computers in most parts of the workplace and the main purposes attributed to school, i.e. language learning and job preparation, merge into a general assumption of what computers should look like and what possibilities they should offer in education.
Mostly these assumptions ignore that there exists a whole range of operating systems, old ones still in use or new, recently developed ones (DOS, Geoworks, Windows 3.x, Windows 9x, WindowsNT, MacOS, OS2, BeOS, ATARI, Linux, etc.), that in many respects they are constructed in a very similar way, that they are products in a global market place where big companies struggle to expand their area of influence and dominance. What is also disregarded is the fact that the potential uses of these operation systems and software is continuously increasing.
Return on investment
Maybe a few concrete examples can illustrate how the rapid technological evolution influences education. They also show to what extent schools are left behind by this evolution, as educational management focuses on standards that have already been overtaken by new technological developments.
Data transmission technology:
In 1994, in the district of Roeser in Luxembourg, we acquired a 2.4 Kbps modem for the primary school. It was meant to serve in a pedagogical project. However, we never really got over the conceptual stage, and the equipment was hardly used at all. A year later, for a different project, the technology required was slightly different. The project used Macintosh and ClarisWorks as standard equipment and we used remote access technology to connect directly (not via the Internet) to a server in southern France. The new modem was a 14.4 Kbps set. In a year the amount of data that we transferred got so big, that 28.8 Kbps modem was needed.
In 1997 RESTENA (Réseau de Télécommunication de l'Education Nationale, the official Internet provider for schools) decided that ISDN should become the standard for schools which wanted to have access to the Internet. At the end of the term in 1998 we needed two ISDN connections (providing a transmission rate of 128 Kbps) for a teleconference.
An increasing number of schools now have a single ISDN connection. However, many aren't really working on projects where this equipment would be needed. Conversely, in those cases where projects are at the basis of these innovations in schools, their potential is hardly ever fully taken advantage of. In fact most of the time the use of telecommunications is limited to occasional updates of Web sites and the transfer of children's work or school magazines from one school to another.
We don't want to argue that schools should be waiting for the next standard like xDSL or data transmission via satellite before equipping themselves with IT, as we don't think that we should wait for the quantum computer or the genetic processor to be ready. But, setting or following standards can be a very expensive undertaking with no notable returns, especially when frequency of use is very low.
Operating systems:
At the beginning of the 90s Windows 3.x was generally seen as the standard operating system, now in the late 90s we have windows 9x. Meanwhile, the concepts underlying software design haven't changed a lot and word-processing still accounts for up to 99% of our use of computers. An old 286 or a Mac II would be enough for this purpose and operating systems such as Geoworks 1.0 already offered everything that is needed to type and edit text, even with graphs included. (The technological requirements for this operating system was 10MB of free disk space and 1MB of RAM. It already offered a graphical interface, a trash icon, drag and drop and long file names.) Of course one could object that many of the newer features were not available with the older software. However, it would be interesting to see how many of these advanced features are actually used in education.
The consequences are enormous costs for schools and local authorities that are forced to constantly invest in equipment without any noticeable gain. An aspect that should by no means be neglected in this discussion, is the dependence of state schools on the big computer, software and even telecommunication or broadcasting companies that have already identified education as an important future market.
Conclusion
Debates about two competing operating systems are symptomatic for a weak conceptual framework. The controversial positions remain focused on hardware and operating systems, and do not even touch on software and the reasons or the purposes for its use. There is no debate about the euphoria nor about the anxieties that accompany the introduction of IT.
It is hardly conceivable that knowledge about word-processing alone is sufficient to understand how computers have already altered the ways in which a text is constructed, how recipients deal with a text and what its nature is. Of course we acknowledge the fact that it could be enough for instance to discuss non-linear text organisation, rearrangement of thought and fragmented writing. However, to understand our contemporary technological culture in which typed and spoken words are not the only carriers of meaning, a different perspective should be adopted by educators and policy makers. The rich diversity of computer interfaces, environments and uses must be considered if we want to engage in a qualitatively different debate.
We think it extremely questionable that so-called standards of equipment should at all be followed by educational bodies. Undoubtedly the call for standards can be explained by the fact that most educators and even policy makers have a narrow view and limited experience of the uses that computers can be put to. We think it important to include a discussion of ideological biases into any debate about the use of information technology in education.
We have to investigate what computation is all about and analyse how new technologies do not only change society but how they are constantly changed themselves as a result of new inventions and new ideas. Operating systems and software represent but a small proportion of technological material in IT. Capacities of storing devices, interface designs, network architectures, peripherals, transmission modes, etc. will affect the design of learning environments and the use of technologies in the learning process.
Today, thinking about computers in terms of standards that have to be set or accepted is forgetting that new developments will already in the short term render those same standards obsolete. Setting standards without first thinking about what use we want to make of technologies is starting from the wrong end. We think that here efficiency has nothing to do with effectiveness.
Besides, although there are many applications of IT, most of them aren't even considered in school: presentation, simulation, animation, graphics, video digitalisation and editing, layouting, programming, on-line publishing, communicating, organising, 3D-modelling, sound editing, project planning and managing, designing, broadcasting, hypertext editing, robotics etc. If the aim is to train pupils for the market place, is it enough to teach how to use word processors, spreadsheets and possibly databases?
We think that teachers and students should gain a broad perspective on information technology, its designs, uses and environments. Furthermore, we argue for a general framework that sets educational standards for the exploration of the potential of IT and not just standards for the acquisition of equipment. Knowing only one possible alternative is not an appropriate basis for making a choice. The context in which computers are to be used is extremely important but under the pressure of having to make quick decisions on what to buy, careful analysis of that context may well be neglected.
"From Vannevar Bush on, many of the key figures in the history of hypermedia have had a deep interest in developing the medium as an aid to learning. One of the main obstacles to this was that the technology needed in order to deliver it either did not exist or was too expensive to be a practical proposition. Now most of those obstacles have been overcome and we are faced with more profound questions regarding what we actually mean by learning, education and training. As with many other areas where hypermedia can be used, simply grafting the medium on to existing practices seems likely to miss the new opportunities that the medium presents. This includes the opportunity to reflect on both the purposes and processes of what is being done and whether or not they can be improved." (Cotton B. & Oliver, R. (1997). Understanding Hypermedia 2.000, p.158. London: Phaidon Press Ltd.) |
Computers in Education: An Open Space for Teaching and Learning?
Luxembourg is known for its wealth and its stable economic and political situation. Luxembourg is also known for its large number of people of immigrant origin. Non-Luxembourgish people represent 35% of its population, most of them are Portuguese. The educational system is so far still considered reasonably well adapted to the challenges of our modern society and a common assumption holds that it is this educational system which continues to guarantee the country's economical competitiveness. Compared to other European countries such as Germany, France or Belgium, a salient feature of the Luxembourg educational system is its focus on language learning.
So what is the educational situation in Luxembourg and which aspects might be generalised to other countries? What are the essential questions that have to be addressed in order to establish a framework for educational development that takes into account technological development?
To put it bluntly, in Luxembourg there has been no serious attempt at raising a debate about media education nor have there been any serious attempts at implementing the use of IT in schools except for computer lessons. It would certainly be wrong to blame it all on education. The issue is far too complex and wide-ranging to leave the responsibility for taking action solely with policy makers and actors in education. Nevertheless, there is still no governmental policy on how and why to introduce computers in school. In the following description we will focus on preschool and primary school to outline current developments.
Projects
Only a few research projects funded by the Luxembourg government and/or by the EU have succeeded in raising the issue for primary school: Computer im Schreibatelier (1993) (Gretsch, G. Computer im Schreibatelier. Ministère de l'Education Nationale et de la Formation Professionnelle.), TEO (1995) (Gretsch, G. TEO - développement et évaluation d'un traitement de texte oral. Ministère de l'Education Nationale et de la Formation Professionnelle.), DECOLAP (1995) (Développement des compétences langagières au préscolaire. Ministère de l'Education Nationale et de la Formation Professionnelle.), DECOPRIM1 (1997) Développement des communications orales et écrites au primaire. Ministère de l'Education Nationale et de la Formation Professionnelle.). All of these projects adopted a constructivist view on teaching and learning. Especially the first two projects are accepted as examples of good practice and have helped to establish the general opinion that computers need to be installed in the classroom or in near-by rooms so as to be easily accessible throughout the day for groups of pupils and for the teacher. These projects also rejected specialised media rooms for the very reason that they do not allow permanent access. They emphasised that media education and language learning were not to be disconnected form each other. An official ministerial recommendation for school architecture insisted on adding side rooms that could be directly accessed from two classrooms so that multimedia equipment could be installed and that children from different classes could meet and perhaps even co-operate.
From these isolated projects one could easily get the impression that everything was fine with IT in Luxembourg's preschools and primary schools. In practice, however, things are somewhat different. There has been no implementation of the two projects' (Computer im Schreibatelier and TEO) underlying methodologies in school, neither practically nor theoretically. Neither the programme (that is, the official curriculum which is called Plan d'Etudes) although it is provisional - nor the textbooks for the different school subjects have adopted that kind of perspective. It is important to say that these textbooks are designed by official workgroups and published by the government. Most of the members of these workgroups are also trainers at the teacher-training institute (ISERP). Both the curriculum of this institute as well as it's final exams strongly reflect the philosophy of these textbooks. Whole courses are designed around how to work with these materials.
The Courrier de l'Education Nationale, which every three months publishes the official statements of the Ministry and which is sent to every teacher, has never promoted a teaching methodology that applies the findings of the two projects mentioned above.
This has reinforced the widely-held belief that working with textbooks does not necessarily exclude working with computers in the ways described by those two projects and vice-versa. For the Ministry there seems to be no contradiction between on the one hand working your way through textbooks designed according to a building blocks model of knowledge construction and on the other hand an openly structured curriculum. Such a curriculum should, for example, take into account the potential offered by new technologies in a productive and dynamic learning environment, where the skills and interests of the children and the teachers, as well as the resources and characteristics of the local community play an important role.
Computers are most of the time considered to be just a supplementary tool, therefore it is up to the teachers to find their way of introducing them to their classroom work and finding their own way through the curriculum in order to see where computers can be used effectively. It is also up to the teacher to find out what effectively might mean.
This incoherent policy is best illustrated by an excerpt from the Courrier de l'Education Nationale N°A//1998, p. 8 where the excessive use of images is considered to be one cause for very young children's low language performances: "La société luxembourgeoise comme d'ailleurs toute société développée est confrontée de plus en plus à certains facteurs désintégrants par rapport à un projet d'éducation, résultant notamment de l'évolution socio-économique et familiale, à savoir le nombre d'enfants en bas âge souffrant de déficits de la socialisation, du développement psychique en général, langagier en particulier (et cela dû aussi à la confrontation excessive au monde imagier des médias)."
CD-ROMs
Another symptom of this lack of debate and of a clear positioning is the promotion of CD-ROM's by the CTE. The CTE, the national Education Technology Centre (Centre de Technologie de l'Education) was created in 1993 in order to offer support and resources to schools in the field of IT.(CTE 1998. http://www.CTE.lu/loi.html "Le Centre a pour mission:
de mettre à la disposition des enseignants, par tous les moyens et procédés techniques appropriés, les médias d'enseignement adaptés aux objectifs et aux programmes de l'enseignement public luxembourgeois;
de prêter aux autorités scolaires conseil et assistance techniques en matière d'installations, d'équipements et de maintenance;
de collaborer à des activités d'éducation, d'enseignement, de formation et de perfectionnement dans le domaine des technologies de l'information et de la communication;
d'entretenir une documentation multimédia sur les aspects techniques, éducatifs et socioculturels des technologies de l'information et de la communication et d'en diffuser les informations dans le cadre des réseaux d'information de l'Education nationale;
de mettre ses compétences et ses ressources techniques à la disposition des services du ministère de l'Education nationale dans le domaine des publications et au niveau des stratégies médiatiques d'information et de communication;
d'entretenir des relations avec des services et organismes luxembourgeois ou étrangers ayant des missions similaires.") The centre's main activity is producing video and audio material to accompany the textbooks that are commonly identified by teachers, parents and pupils as the programme - the curriculum. The CTE is a resource for secondary school, primary school and preschool. It emerged from the School Film Service, where teachers were able to borrow videotapes, films and slides. (This in part explains why most of the centre's employees feel mainly competent in this domain.) The main services now provided by the CTE are giving access to the Internet and to educational CD-ROMs which teachers and students can try out in an information technology room. It seems obvious to us, that no resources have been allocated to extend the competencies of the CTE over and above what this service already did when it still was the school film service.
To us, this promotion of CD-ROMs is an undifferentiated effort at implementing IT in schools and at making teachers aware of the impact of new technologies on education. Undifferentiated does not imply absence of differential judgement concerning the quality of CD-ROMs on the market, but it refers to the extensive promotion of this type of learning tool. In our view there are many reasons to think that learning with a ready made digital product is not so very different from learning with textbooks. Promoting the access of schools to encyclopaedic knowledge stored on CD-ROMs or elsewhere does not solve the pedagogical problem of how to use these - at times very expensive - resources in your everyday work in school. Not only is there a need for analysis in terms of return-on-investment, but the fact that these materials are not vehicles for neutral information must also be considered. It stands to reason that there should be a critical analysis of the ideological biases mediated by these products with respect to socio-cultural context, gender, history, identities, knowledge etc. Needless to say that the same is true for textbooks.
It seems quite understandable that a considerable number of teachers who start to work with computers focus on helpers like multimedia CD-ROMs (edutainment, encyclopaedia, ...) and learning software and this for various reasons: For one, teachers are likely to use new media in the same way that they used the old ones. They leave aside what is too challenging or too different and stay with what has worked for them or what was delivered as working strategies in teacher training. Another reason for the popularity of CD-ROMs may be that most of them can be classified as edutainment. They thus represent an alternative to boring lessons or a camouflage for drill and practice exercises. Furthermore, these materials are ready-to-use, no preparation is necessary. This is particularly true in cases where acquiring computer literacy (i.e. knowing the basics of using a computer) seems to be the main goal of a course. The most attractive and easy to use product on the market will do. As differentiation in the classroom is also an important issue software that works by itself is well suited to occupying children who work on their own.
In practice, however, things seem to work differently: Schools and local communities which have already spent a lot of money on hardware are reluctant to invest in expensive CD-ROMs and learning software. On the one hand multimedia CD-ROMs can be disrupting when used in the classroom. On the other hand using them with the entire class in a computer room does not make sense either. Pupils, when attracted by certain gimmicks and animations, are asked not to fool around on the computer. Instead, they are asked to use the features that require concentration and reading. At best, multimedia products invite children to discuss how to use them. This again may lead to disrupting activities in the classroom.
There is still a lot more to say about this subject. For instance, one might ask who should be responsible for defining a technological department's policies or if CD-ROMs are at all conducive to learning. At the moment the impact and the potential of information technology are not being investigated. It is not surprising then, that teachers will easily surrender to software or CD-ROM hypelists.
Conclusion
The fact that many questions are not only left unanswered but are not even asked suggests that education regarding the use of IT in Luxembourg is in a low experimental state. However, this can be seen as an advantage for teachers who really want to explore this domain as most of the time they will be free to choose how they want to use IT. Nevertheless, schools are faced with a difficult task when they are trying to ague the case for introducing IT in the classroom. They have to overcome scepticism from local government as well as from parents who often subscribe to the general view that teachers should first and foremost busy themselves with the programme. There are no official statements nor in-service training courses that would really help teachers in this respect, in fact the problem is hardly mentioned at all. In oher words, there are a lot of contradictions between what is officially stated and published and what teachers are trained for and expected to do when it comes to the implementation of IT in the classroom.
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In need of a new framework
"The only thing we can be sure of in forecasting the future is that whatever happens will not be what is forecast - which, of course, leaves one saying, 'But why bother?' The answer is that by attempting to visualise the shape we would like the future to have we can influence the shape it actually takes." (Tiffin, J. & Rajasingham L. (1995). In Search Of The Virtual Class, p.186. London: Routledge.)
One of the aims of our work on the CD-ROM is to illustrate what it means to make autonomous and productive use of the different kinds of media and artefacts, the goal being that children are empowered to develop attitudes that enhance learning by building and expressing hypotheses on the world they experience. Evidence of these hypotheses can for example be found by observing the children's multimodal means for analysing, exploring and representing their environment, languages and cultures.
We think that there are systems and attitudes that are more or less effective in supporting the collaborative managing of complex dynamic situations. We also think that a context-free design of technological equipment, curricula and textbooks, methodologies and interaction patterns, evaluation and promotion systems (in analogy to the context-free grammar conceived by Noam Chomsky), serves inflexibility and prevents any change of paradigm in the culture of education and cultural education.
We argue for interdependence between the possibility of discussing and overcoming implicit theories which guide the teachers' practice (such as, for example: understandings evolve from simple to complex - higher test scores means higher performances - new technologies can solve old educational problems - meaning and form are independent from each other - detailed planning of teaching lessons results in valuable learning - context and learning can be analysed independently - standardisation means equal opportunity - ...) and an educational framework which accepts learning as a function of:
individual and collaborative authorship,
a creative process,
awareness of meaning in action,
collective transformation of culture,
reconfiguring one's identity and designing one's activities according to a given socio-cultural environment,
emergent interpretation and use of artefacts as means of analysis, exploration and expression,
flexibility in responding to a complex environment subject to change.
Possibility, relationships, emergence, etc. are the underlying concepts. It is obvious that these criteria have major implications for the practice and organisation of teaching and learning. Participants in a learning process have to plan actions and environments according to the possible consequences of potential plans of action. In order for this to happen, the partners involved in an activity have to negotiate in a meaningful context (activity in a meaningful context is here the basic unit of analysis and have to work on their assumptions about and their understanding of learning processes ("... actions are always situated into a context, and they are impossible to understand without that context (e. g. Suchman 1987) The solution offered by activity theory is that a minimal meaningful context for individual actions must be included in the basic unit of analysis. This unit is called an activity. Because the context is included in the unit of analysis, the object of our research is always essentially collective even if our main interest is in individual actions. An individual can and usually does participate in several activities simultaneously." Nardi, B. A, ed. (1996). Context and Consciousness, p.26. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.).
A professional dialogue is a process where meaning is transformed, new means of analysis are gained and where hypotheses are built on what learning is all about and how it is to be organised and achieved. Depending on the objectives pursued by the actors involved in education, any criteria can of course be interpreted in very different ways. Therefore we think that ethical considerations need to be included in any discussion on teaching and learning. Depending on one's ethical position applying these criteria opens up new ways of acting, being, organising and learning. Such a perspective should be the basis for talking about changes in education in general and about the implications of the use of IT in education in particular.
We need to design education and educational environments to promote exploring the potential of media and at the same time acknowledge the fact that school cannot be changed as a consequence of the introduction of IT alone. We are convinced that school needs to introduce computers and telecommunication technologies as distinctive modes of representation and as tools for generating multiple text forms in which design affects the articulation of meaning. Beyond a romantic theory of self-expression, we need to consider form as a constructive, interpretative and transformative function in all representations. Form and meaning cannot be isolated from each other the same as a single mode of representation cannot be fully separated from others or as individuals cannot be isolated from the socio-cultural context they evolve and live in.
IT should be considered at the level of the learner and from the perspective of the teacher as researcher or reflective practitioner. It can be a powerful means for analysing learning and for engaging in a process of self-reflection.
Technological development and resources (storage capacities, data transmission modes and performances, network architectures etc.) have to be considered in relation with a dynamic educational context. ("... the use of the new technologies in education is neither predictable nor mechanistic. It is process-driven, dynamic and evolving". Tiffin, J. & Rajasingham, L. (1995). In Search Of The Virtual Class, p.171. London: Routledge.) Therefore resource management is an important issue. It is not just the material resources that play a major role, but resources such as time, support, accessibility, space, tutors, outside school experiences, etc. are important as well.
We are not in a period of theoretical uncertainty about how to explain and justify the role of computers in the learning process - we are in a situation where the computer is being considered as a neutral tool. Ideological biases are only perceived when computers are used for playing.
Defining standard equipment on the basis of considerations like control and efficiency can be viewed as an attempt to cope with the challenges of the information era. Ignoring considerations other than those concerning technological equipment when configuring an environment for the use of IT in education is evading these very challenges. Under such circumstances the teacher is unable to bridge the gap between school and the real world. ("As with all increasingly sophisticated tools there is a risk that the process of learning will become increasingly decontextualised, and the teacher must provide the context linking the learning to the real world." Somekh, B. & Davis, N. (1997). Using Information Technology effectively in Teaching and Learning, p.21. London, New York: Routledge.) Defining schools as experimental environments that build on meaningful contexts, activities, the use of multiple artefacts and diverse social relationships seems to be a more appropriate response to what is going on in the real world than calling for technological standards according to which teaching should be organised.
At the moment, it seems obvious that teachers are less and less able to depict the future that awaits their pupils, particularly when they are totally disconnected from the technological and social evolution around them. This becomes a major problem when they have to prepare their pupils for further education. In a few years we will have electronic universities, course networks, virtual classes and virtual learning institutions, multi-sensory virtual learning experiences etc. These are all learning environments that teachers will probably never have experienced themselves, even if their own school experience is not that far behind that of their students.
If we do not succeed in implementing the general framework that is needed, there is an undeniable danger that teaching in state institutions will be less and less relevant to the existence and the situation of the young people of tomorrow.
"I know a false god when I see one"
(Postman, N. (1998). Education and Technology: Virtual Students, Digital Classroom, p.119, in Stichler, R. N. & Hauptman, R. eds (1998). Ethics, Information and Technology, Readings, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland.) |
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