Winter 2006

The ICT agenda

How to exploit the capacities of technology

John Hedberg argues that thinking needs a paradigm shift to ‘disruptive pedagogies’ if our investment in ICT is to pay dividends.

Several authors have presented dismal pictures of how ICT is employed in learning. Many uses of technologies are little more than information storehouses with little interaction for the learner. Effective e-learning requires: a rethinking of learning activities; a more detailed and focused exploration of how interactions are managed and facilitated; the choice of the right tool for the pedagogical task; and for widespread implementation, a focus on disruptive innovations and pedagogies.

Vrasidas and Glass (2005) examined the task of preparing teachers to use technologies in the classroom. They easily identified several obstacles (see Table 1), but suggest that overcoming these obstacles is not simply a matter of providing access to technologies. A careful process of ensuring collaboration between teachers and experts, gaining successful experience in teaching with the technologies, and participating in a community that provides continuous support is required.

In many education contexts, some of these elements are missing. Certainly, many teachers have never learnt using e-learning strategies, nor do they have professional learning in teaching with e-learning strategies. The rapidly changing context in which learning with ICT is occurring makes the challenge just that little bit harder.

Table 1: Obstacles to integrating ICT in the classroom

So why would we realistically expect ICT to make a major difference in most teaching and learning contexts? Clayton Christensen (1997) has proposed the idea of disruptive innovations as a possible answer to this. He claims that a disruptive innovation or technology is one that eventually takes over the existing dominant technology, despite the fact that the disruptive technology is both radically different from the leading technology and often initially performs worse than the leading technology. Here the obvious recent example is the demise of film as the medium for home photography.

In the second half of last century, the Polaroid film process presented a potentially disruptive technology. Visual records of the world became almost immediate. Then, as the recording process moved from analog to digital, the storage of images in a visually recognisable form was no longer required. Excellent quality digital images could be transmitted anywhere in the world and reconstructed wherever they were sent. Thus, digital photographic technologies became disruptive technologies, replacing both the photographic film and the Polaroid recording of our world.

No such disruptive innovation has yet replaced traditional pedagogies for ICT in education. While curriculum managers may have initially seen e-learning as a potentially disruptive innovation, it does not seem to have replaced the dominant classroom paradigms.

E-learning has enabled the curriculum to be more efficiently recorded and transmitted to learners in many different learning environments. It has enabled every institution to become a potential distance learning provider, and it has encouraged many students and teachers to change the meeting times and places they use on a daily basis. Students request that many aspects of their courses be provided online, for easy access to those managing a complex work and study schedule.

Table 2: Some options for technology use

ICT technology affords much more than the elements available to the individual classroom teacher. It enables the learner to create high quality representations with tools that support the transduction of information from one form to another. It is now possible to collect data then represent it in a graphic or animated display that explains the ideas succinctly and visually.

The full impact of e-learning depends on a revolutionary move away from traditional classroom-based teaching practices (see Table 2 for examples). This, in turn, increases the challenge and requires higher-order skills of the learner.

How to achieve disruptive technology-based learning

Different outcomes can be achieved by a range of interactive activities. When digital elements are involved final assessments, for example, can go beyond the reproduction of facts and concepts in a single product to the more important emphasis on the process by which the student attained the final outcome. It is easy to show versions of essays, to get students to explain how they changed things and why, and finally to get them to assess their own progress toward the goal.

Such learning interactions emphasise personal construction. By comparing versions of the assessment piece, how the learners’ thoughts were changed or modified, and even the source of the influence on those thoughts can be considered. It is possible to document not only the personal construction of understanding but also the social interactions that have contributed to the journey. A list of possibilities is shown in Table 3.

Table 3: Possible technology matches to achieve alternative learning paths

What do we need to add for disruption

Games and three-dimensional virtual worlds might provide more disruptive pedagogical strategies. These environments increase the motivation of participants. The options for learners to construct their own spaces raises further challenges to perform at higher cognitive levels (Lim, Nonis & Hedberg, 2006). Games will create environments in which learners experience multimodal views of the world that require a range of literacies, not only to understand the different representative descriptions, but also to select and employ the tools to construct ideas and communicate them to others.

For any ICT learning experience to be disruptive and integral to future learning, we must create a learning space that facilitates the movement of learners from passive participants to active engaged constructors of their own experience. And the options are vast (see Table 4, below).

Table 4: E-learning options for different motivation

References

Christensen, C M (1997). The Innovator’s Dilemma, Harvard Business School Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

Jonassen, D H (1996). Computers in the Classroom: Mindtools for critical thinking. Merrill, New Jersey, USA.

Lim, C P, Nonis, D & Hedberg, J (2006). ‘Gaming in a 3D Multi-user Virtual Environment’ (MUVE): Engaging students in Science lessons’, British Journal of Educational Technology, 37(2), pp 211–231.

Metros, S (2003). ‘E-learning: from Electronic-Learning to Engaged-Learning’. Plenary address to the Ninth Sloan-C International Conference, available at www.sloan-c.org/ conference/proceedings/2003/ plenary.asp

Vrasidas, C & Glass, G V (eds.) (2005).Preparing teachers to teach with technology. Information Age Publishing, Greenwich, California, USA.

John G Hedberg is Millennium Innovations chair in ICT and Education, and director of Macquarie ICT Innovations Centre, Macquarie University.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au