There still exists a general perception that schools are dragged along by society and technology. How can we make schools advance or adapt more quickly to technological changes? What is the present situation and where should we direct the use of technologies in the classroom so that our educational systems can be improved? From a lecture presented in the IV Open Classroom Conference, organised by EDEN (European Distance Education Network) and held in Barcelona in November, 2000, this article tries to highlight the most important issues involved in the use of technologies in education, mostly in primary and secondary school, but obviously related to universities, too.
|
|
 |
| 1.
| The impact of technology in the classroom: from a discursive relationship to the interaction and construction of a shared knowledge |
From a conception of education based on the idea that contact between the educator and the student was the basic activity that made possible an education that was basically oral and made little use of the written language, overcoming the invention of the printing press, which included a third element, the books, in the educational relationship, we are reaching a new concept, where teamwork and networking are highly valued, mirroring the social changes and changes in the workforce. It might be a new educational paradigm: networked learning (Harasim et al., 1995).
Technological nets allow interaction between students, experts and sources of information with the idea of progressively building a shared knowledge and develop abilities.
The attributes of networking highlight the opportunities and resources available to students and teachers. These are not limited because of their geographical situation, experts are easy to reach, as are the best libraries and databases in the world.
Many of the aspects of networked learning cannot be attained in the traditional class. It is not possible for each member of a group to actively and frequently participate in a conventional classroom with time constraints. These great opportunities will contribute to improve knowledge and social interaction.
A paradigmatic example of this are learning networks. Many of the aspects contemplated in the work of learning networks are new and cannot be achieved in traditional school systems. The opportunity that the different members of a collective have to participate actively and very frequently is often not available in a face-to-face system, which is highly dependent on the coincidence of space and time. The new opportunities that characterise these networks allow us to think about improvements in taking on knowledge and in the possibilities of social interaction.
From an exclusively educational point of view, the contribution of networks is very valuable. It offers the student many more possibilities of interacting and being active than those the traditional student has when attending a class. Networking allows the student to learn not only from his/her teacher but also from his own fellow students, with whom the student can maintain a much closer relationship. This concept of co-operative learning is currently emerging vigorously as an educational paradigm. At the same time these methods allow the teacher to act from a much more interdisciplinary and integrated perspective.
|
 |
| 2.
| In order to do that, what should be changed? |
It is not the strongest species that survive,
nor the most intelligent,
but the ones most responsive to change.
Charles Darwin
|
|
|
The organisation of time and space in the classroom needs to change according to the great possibilities of communication and information we have if we make use of telematic tools in this environment. The teacher can organise his/her teaching time knowing that the use of the computer also facilitates learning, which has to be guided by his/her expertise. By making use of the possibilities offered by these technologies, the teacher can also organise space and facilitate group work.
But changes in the time structure of the academic year will also be needed. These changes will allow students to progress at their own pace. And here technologies are a faithful ally to teachers and institutions.
In 1999, for the first time in the US, a number of colleges decided to stagger the arrival of new students throughout the academic year, instead of restricting them to the fall semester.
Calendars are breaking, spaces will need to be reconfigured and curricula will need to be deeply revised and rebuilt, for which big doses of collective imagination will be required.
Centres will need to adapt their structures to these changes in order to respond to the demands of society in this respect. These two following criteria will need to be applied:
|
Integration. Learning about the technologies will become part of the general syllabus, abandoning the idea of specific subjects with an end in themselves.
Cross-sectional. It must be introduced in the use of ICT in the classroom; this will facilitate multidisciplinary work among the different areas of knowledge.
|
|
|
|
|
The elements previously mentioned will make the student focus not on the teacher but on his/her own learning process and promote his/her work accordingly. This decentralisation involves giving the student the tools that will revert back on his own learning rather than directing him/her all the time; these tools will gradually become closer to the specific professional world the student wants to access in the future.
Teachers stop being the source of information to become learning facilitators. This does not mean that they now limit themselves to managing the learning process. Through guidance and induction, the aim of the teacher's action is to provide the student with the tools and clues that will help him/her develop his/her own learning process and at the same time attend to his/her doubts and needs.
The evolution of new technologies and the increase in accessibility to information sources are changing the role of teachers. Manoeuvring and moving in such a volume of information —as we have said before— has turned into a search for the exit in a big maze. The risk of wasting time in futile quests is very high. We have to learn to sort the good from the bad. We need an adequate filter and this is one of the roles of the teacher and the trainer.
Curiously enough, and despite the fact that many still want to believe that the teacher's added value is basically what he/she knows —that is, the content— the future is showing us that the most important thing is not that but the method. How we, teachers, do things, how we provide students with the tools they need to grow, to find the information —the knowledge— and what will make them capable of telling true from false information, how we install in them a critical sense.
The way by which we make people learn will be what distinguishes us, what makes us better and give us prestige.
In fact reality is already overcoming some of these topics. On the Internet one can currently find initiatives of specialised on-line private teachers whom students can ask direct questions from their own houses
[1]
. No timetables or travelling. Although the idea is not to substitute the traditional teacher and school system, it does try to offer the student a complement that can give him/her security in his/her learning process.
The debate on the move forward that this kind of service implies is here. Without a doubt some teachers will see this as nothing more than a sophisticated private class. Other teachers will realise the power to motivate and to offer services that can be realised through the Internet, especially for students from rural areas, in hospitals, etc. (with the democratisation implied by facilitating access to information to groups that up to now have had difficulties).
Questions and new situations like the above described at least expose the uncertainty and doubts that the incorporation of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) in the classroom generates. Now, what profile of teacher does this incorporation require? As Sangrà, Bellot and Hinojosa (2000) point out, he/she should...
|
be more collaborative than solitary: he/she will need to work in a net since the Internet communicative possibilities make it feasible to work interactively with teachers from different centres.
foment/promote participation: this not only meaning participation in class but co-responsibility of the projects initiated in the class.
acknowledge/accept the fact that he/she no longer owns the knowledge because students might be as good/skilled or even better/more skilled at/with ICT and moreover, they can access information just as easily as them.
possess important organisational skills since the class and the information will not be bi-directional (from the teacher to the students and vice versa) but the work with the students will be carried out from different working approaches, which will provoke changes in the way of teaching.
be open to experimenting: open to new ways of working with students as much as to new products and services that the Internet offers.
have the capacity/ability to modify from beginning to end the methodology applied to the teaching-learning process.
|
|
|
|
|
In the figure that follows one can see that the prediction is that teachers, who are now still dedicating proportionally much more time to exposing subjects, will stop doing so in order to focus on designing, monitoring and assessing with the students, who will generate more and more knowledge, which will need to be questioned permanently/all the time.
Teachers, with training and reflection obtained from teaching practice, can adapt their role according to what the use of powerful telematic tools in the classroom can offer them; teachers can also take advantage of these resources to stimulate students' conscience of learning with the educational practices these tools offer.
|
|
|
The student is also looking towards to the changes. He/she adopts an active role by being the real protagonist of his/her learning process, while the educator, the teacher, changes his/her role by becoming the dynamizer, the guide, the facilitator of the learner's learning process.
However, the key element to the change in the educational process is the content of what is taught and how it is transmitted. While in the paradigm used up to now the content was found in the teacher's own knowledge and expertise as well as in the static sources of information (books, encyclopaedias, etc.), in the new paradigm, based on the use of information technology, the contents are found in a net. This means that there is a space of shared access from which, and according to the abilities and possibilities of those who access it and to the means and supports available -the teacher with his/her expertise—, the learner develops his learning process.
In the world of education, we consider that the challenge consists of using the technology and functions designed for spreading information and for interconnecting people and institutions as a tool that facilitates learning. But information for the sake of information is not educational. Access to information, as well as its treatment, does not imply an educational action. We need to take into account the variables that form learning processes and replace them according to the new context in which they develop/take place. In short, we need to define and apply a concrete teaching and learning method specific for this new context.
Academic training, if it is to be efficient and facing the needs of present society, has to promote the use of new technologies both in an instrumental and structural way, as tools that can promote and motivate learning. The goal of the initial training of the citizens of this new century must necessarily include, apart from specific subject knowledge, basic training in the use and exploitation of the new technologies.
The students of the future —an already near future— will have access to formal and informal information whenever they choose, wherever they are. They will be very active participants. Also the concept of who is a teacher and who is a learner will be more diffuse.
|
|
|
| 3.
| Highlighting teacher training |
If we want these changes to be directed to the objectives we pursue, then we must focus on the development of the teacher's training from the start and throughout his/her career in our country. These objectives are being realised throughout Europe by several important initiatives, especially with the decided course of the European Commission in programs such as e-Learning, School of Tomorrow and others.
We do not intend to criticise present plans of study with an end qualification which enables teachers to teach in the European community; however, it is true to say that the present syllabus does not enable teachers to teach with current technology. An analysis of the best of cases illustrates the problem; teacher training is dedicating so little time to technology that the knowledge the teacher acquires becomes obsolete after several months.
Only in a few cases was there a clear desire to enable the teacher to utilise technology in an interdisciplinary way and across the board. In spite of this we still face the difficulties of introducing new technologies into the classroom in an efficient and normal way.
|
|
| 4.
| Why is ICT being introduced into the classroom? Why aren't interesting experiences generalised ? What problems do we find? |
The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations. Fools act on imagination without experience. Pedants act on knowledge without imagination. The task of the university is to weld together imagination and experience.
Alfred North Whitehead, Cambridge mathematician
|
|
|
Now that we are in the era of the information superhighway, the encyclopaedia in education is not essential. What is really useful is to know how to navigate through this information (computer or telecommunication) with these new research tools. We must know how to exploit the subject matter (where and what quality information is), and to unlearn the old and learn the new continually. What is important is to learn to learn.
We should also answer the question about how ICT is being used nowadays in the classroom. The use of whatever type of technology has at least three sides, three possibilities of use which are completely coexistent in all centres.
|
Technology as an end in itself: it is what we can name learning technology: systems of communication, parts of a computer, learning to use a text editor, navigating the Internet...
Technology as a tool: it corresponds to the conception most in use: doing practical things, allowing the technical operation of machines and the running of our software.
Technology as a teaching resource: it can be used to look at subjects as diverse as mathematics and social studies and also to reinforce as much as widen our knowledge of them.
|
|
|
|
|
Some create their own web space to connect their institution internally. Most take advantage of electronic mailing systems to communicate and consult with students or fellow teachers. In fact, there is a real possibility of increasing communication between teacher and student outside of the classroom. However, if this method is implemented in a complementary form, without incorporating it directly into the course, it can cause severe problems for the teacher and in some cases deep frustration for the student.
From an analysis of shared experiences that we can currently find on the Internet, we have categorised the technological resources into three broad areas:
|
|
We understand training activities on the Internet as a complementary activity, which takes advantage of new technologies and conveys the topics of the class and the training centre. In other words, we make the utmost of the Internet as a powerful training and educational tool that is not simply for consulting or informative purposes.
We are talking about a didactic complement to the process of the student's learning. This process follows a definition of a specific teaching methodology that integrates the act of teaching and learning into an optimum form. This methodology, which one must understand has a didactic action, can accommodate the different rhythms of learning each student has and at the same time becomes a support in the process. This permits the teacher to optimise his/her didactic resources.
|
|
|
The Internet facilitates contact and therefore interaction among people. This has been one of the main uses of the Internet in schools, which favours the closest link possible between the student, the teachers and the family in an educational centre as well as fosters relationships between other people and schools in other parts of the world. In this way, it is possible to establish regular communication, which becomes a positive and direct part of the learning and teaching process.
|
|
|
We understand this use of the Internet as one of the basic functions of this information technology; the possibility of accessing, in an easy manner, various resources and services depending on the needs of the user. This use of the Internet is perhaps the most widespread. At a pedagogic level, we must see the Internet as giving the student the possibility of building his/her own learning process. The student can search the resources and later work on what he/she has found with the end goal being to consolidate his/her learning and also to obtain knowledge in a more diverse and accessible way.
|
|
|
|
No one can argue that ICT represents an innovation in the field of teaching (or perhaps the problem is no one is questioning!). However, is it precisely its innovative character that prevents its implementation? What is it about the ICT that stops it from being used daily?
|
Absence of clear references: there is a lack of clear methodological standards when using ICT. Everyone knows how to use a video, a blackboard or, in teaching, how to make the most of image. Nevertheless, surely not everyone knows how to use computers in a pedagogical fashion: Letting the students use them freely? Only as information resources ? How often do we need to use the computer room? How can we solve the problems that emerge? What criteria should we employ in order to design a good syllabus? Etc.
Lack of confidence that many teachers have makes them avoid even entering the computer room and that is because they do not possess the adequate training or because they do not know how to teach with computers. Seldom is anyone disposed to ask for help and show his/her failings. What will happen in front of the many students who surely know more than their teacher?
Uncertainty in the light of change : every new pedagogical consideration creates doubts. If we add to these the obstacles about which we have already spoken it is easy to understand that tradition with its security is an element that does not favour change. Everybody agrees that in the future ICT will be indispensable in the classroom. However, because it is difficult to judge when in the future all this will arrive people will not commit themselves. This conservative attitude means that everyone is waiting "to see what will happen" instead of going through with the use of ICT. Also, we must remember that it is not compulsory and there is no monitoring or assessment. Why should a teacher who is not motivated to use ICT have any reason to use it?
Absence of a pedagogically solid criticism: this has meant that the use of ICT has been accepted as inevitable and desirable with comments such as "it's the future", "it has great pedagogical advantages", "if you're not on the Internet you don't exist" … Criticism of ICT has too often been centred around operational criteria instead of pedagogical criteria (and this when there has been a debate which is not the case in many school faculties). Does this lack of criticism hide laziness or/and little will to debate? Is fighting against what is inevitable regarded as pointless?
Presence of new demands in society which all too often make the teaching body a substitute rather than a complement to the educational task of parents. Also the school can become a ragbag that tries to gather all the aspirations that society cannot satisfy in other ways. The teacher has to answer cover too many expectations. All this in a school context that is becoming more and more standardised and bureaucratised and that does not facilitate innovation and "getting away from the norm". In view of all this, does the teacher have the capacity to lead an innovation process of ICT?
|
|
There can also be other reasons that we should not forget.
|
The idea that innovations create problems and are difficult of put into practice, generate a lot of work, cause uncertainty and do not necessarily solve educational problems in an efficient way.
The processes of change generate distrust: ask people to believe in them and to be motivated; they also need active support that sometimes is not there.
Technology does not eliminate school failure and does not guarantee quality of teaching.
|
|
|
|
|
| 5.
| And… What could or should we do? |
We live in an era where everything
is possible and nothing is certain.
Vàclav Havel
|
|
|
Maybe, it is a utopia to think of finding a solution, but we do believe we must do our best. Here are some ideas:
|
Make technology transparent, transform it into a tool that educational agents, students as well as teachers, do not "see" —in a figurative sense, of course— but use.
Promote ethics and, especially, a culture of the use of technology at school that is not different in daily life.
|
|
Do not allow Digital Divide to advance and become bigger, and in doing so make technology an ally to the fight against social exclusion. In this respect, it is an error to think that the implementation of technology in schools of marginal areas is some unnecessary sophistication. On the contrary, everyone must become equal with a future perspective and not with the tools of the past. We must use technologies as tools of social inclusion and promote research in this direction, which is almost non-existent nowadays. Probably, in a few years' time, technological literacy will be a recognised people's right.
|
|
|
It is very probable that traditional education structures will alter as the new ICT affect them. In fact, new concepts and applications of these technologies are emerging in environments that are not exactly educational but that affect the world of education quickly, obeying the principle that when something in the structure of society changes almost everything else is affected by this change.
Currently, as we said before, networking is increasing.
|
|
|
There are many networks in the same line as the ones we defined earlier, especially in the USA, where this new educational paradigm has emerged vigorously.
But it is possible to go further, much further. In fact, it is necessary to analyse —from a wide perspective— what the components of the educational community really are, what relationships are maintained and how these can increase in number and, especially, in quality. It is not only the education act in itself that we should analyse; in the same way as schools develop a social function in its environment, a learning network can become larger with agents that participate in education even if they do so in an indirect way.
This is a wider vision of the educational function of the relationships and service exchanges that can operate in a network. It responds to the initial idea of changing schools and their environment into the place where society becomes computer literate and ready for the cultural change that the knowledge society is going to bring about.
|
|
|
Contributions and benefits of technologies in education
It is clear that everyone benefits from living in community; therefore, it is important to analyse the qualitative rise of advantages in the application of Internet technology in the educational community, seen in a general way.
In a community of the type we are defining, the basic nucleus of users (students, teachers, family) contributes with a decisive synergy to the organisations and collectives that can be reused by them to their own development.
Can we imagine parents consulting their child's teacher at 10.30 p.m.?
Or Andrew, a 15-year-old, sending to a prestigious publishing house suggestions for the improvement of a new juvenile novel script?
And even more, can we imagine the form of a first year of a secondary school taking part in a discussion on the environment together with a New Zealand school? Or Maggie's parents consulting their daughter's activities diary at the same time they are reminded of the school teaching methods?
These are only but a few examples of the multiple possibilities the mediation of technology offers in an educational community and which are currently taking place
[2]
. It does not lose any of its classical/traditional attributes; if anything, it adds new ones which are of great value to those that can use them.
Furthermore, a recent study carried out by the Bertelsmann Foundation
[3]
identifies lesson support and methods of information seeking as some of the most common uses of the Internet in the classroom. This study was made by European (German) and American professors. The most relevant result is that Americans use the Internet in the classroom as a direct support in a proportion of 2.5 to 1. More comparative studies of this kind will be needed to check if these data are also true in other countries and for other uses.
We would like to highlight some of the contributions the application of technology can make to the community.
|
Interactivity
Interactivity, which is in itself a concept that favours learning, has also a great value as a facilitator of relationships in groups of individuals and collectives.
Immediacy and accessibility of relationships
The possibility of developing a culture where neither the distance that geographically separates people nor the time of day when they are connected with the community impede the development of a series of relationships; these relationships are often stable and are, especially, wanted and useful.
Connectivity
Connectivity also contributes to the value of the collective. Belonging to discussion groups, giving one's opinion in forums created to this end, grouping according to interests or hobbies, having a faster access to more and better information, to interesting contents.
On-demand services
Services that can be applied for at any time and from anywhere, and that can be satisfied through the same channel they are asked for.
|
|
We insist: all this is already real when only three or four years ago it sounded like science fiction. The challenge is to observe and guess how these relationships in the educational community will affect other technologies that have been vigorously emerging recently.
|
Cell phones, especially those incorporating WAP technology, which have already revolutionised classrooms all over the world (and not precisely by being properly used). But has anyone contemplated the usefulness that from an educational point of view, the fact of being able to send immediate messages to students', parents' and teachers' mobile phones has?
Satellite Internet, which will give us the opportunity to access remote parts of the planet where it was difficult to install a telephone cable; this will make possible a generalisation of technology literacy
[4]
.
Interactive television if its use is at last generalised and stops being an eternal promise to become a consolidated reality.
|
|
These are only three examples, rather than an attempt at being exhaustive.
|
|
|
| 6.
| Knowing what the possible changes are and being aware of them |
We need to know what we are doing, what is taking place and what the result will be. We need to know what is about to change so that we can anticipate it. This cannot be done from inside each one of the classrooms where we are working.
We need to develop platforms and observatories which can be useful to everyone working in this line; which assess and evaluate the evolution and the exploitation made of ICT in the classroom(s); which analyse and generalise different projects that have a similar aim: achieving more quality in education from the resources than science and society offer us.
We also need to carefully evaluate and spread the successful experiences that are being developed in our countries. What a teacher does in his/her classroom can no longer be left in there forever more.
At the same time, all these platforms and observatories should point out the most identifiable tendencies and undertake a prospective as well as predictive task. The fact that some European projects
[5]
are already doing this is a sign that we are on the right track.
|
|
| 7.
| Epilogue |
"Thirty years from now the big university campuses
will be relics. Universities won't survive…
It's a large change as when we first got the printed book."
Peter Drucker
(
1997
)
|
For us, the question is whether schools will continue to exist, at least as we have known it up to now. I am sure that everyone who is here today is working to build a school that moves forward before society and that adapts more easily to technological changes.
If we are capable of generalising our practices, of inspiring confidence in our colleagues, we must not be afraid at all: this school will be different; it will be better.
|
|
|
|
HARASIM, L.; HILTZ, S.R.; TALES, L.; TUROFF, M. (1995) Learning Networks. A fIeld Guide to Teaching and Learning Online. The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.
|
|
MASON, R. (1998) Globalising Education. Trends and Applications. Routledge: London.
|
|
SALVADOR, E. (ed.) (1999) Catalunya davant la Societat de la Informació: nous actors i noves polítiques. Catalonia Editorial Mediterrania, Barcelona.
|
|
SANGRÀ, A.; BELLOT, A.; HINOJOSA, J. (2000) 2n. Informe del Projecte Astrolabi. Observatori sobre la implantació i l'ús de les ICT a l'ensenyament no universitari. UOC/IN3/Edu Lab/Fundació Jaume Bofill: Barcelona.
|
|
TAIT, A.; MILLS, R. (eds.) (1999) The Convergence of Distance and Conventional Education. Routledge: London
|
|
|
[Published on: march 2001]
|
| | |
