Rhodes to global educational networks for the common good
This special issue presents a selection of papers from the International Conference in Information and Communications Technology in Education (ICICTE),which was held on Rhodes in July 2006. ICICTE 2006 brought together an international community of scholars and practitioners in a multi-cultural forum co-hosted by the Canadian University College of the Fraser Valley and the Greek University of the Aegean. Each year ICICTE addresses the many challenges and new directions presented by technological innovations in education. This year,however, our keynote speaker George Papandreou, president of PASOK (www.pasok.gr), set us a much broader agenda involving ethics and global sustainability for the twenty-first century. Papandreou (2006, p. 6) argued that “a global awareness of the challenges facing humanity must be embedded in our educational systems … we should encourage students to get involved in real and virtual networks. Create learning communities which will become permanent companions in a lifelong learning process. These communities can help us to define the common good on our planet”. Papandreou’s keynote resonated with many delegates and sparked many informal debates on how to acquire the competencies to build such global educational networks. The papers we have selected for this special issue are influenced by this theme and explore professional development to remain abreast of pedagogic and technological innovations and also consider the ethics of applying ICT in education.
We begin with an exploration of the new social networking technologies that comprise “Web 2.0”. In “Changing paradigms: managed learning environments and Web 2.0”, Emory Craig argues that Web 2.0 approaches are transforming learning management systems into social networks where learners collaboratively create and publish knowledge. Craig predicts that the advent of Web 2.0 means that learning designers will need to become familiar with constructivist approaches to learning (see von Glasersfeld, 1984)and simultaneously pay close attention to an emerging generation of technology. Craig argues that “this fundamental shift in the experience of the digital environment in the social world will require innovative solutions, including broad institution-wide dialogues on the role of organizations in a Web 2.0 environment, innovative approaches to faculty training, a new emphasis on the role of faculty as learners in a rapidly changing environment, and rethinking the underlying architecture of our LCMS model” (Craig, 2007;see also papers in Shurville and Browne, n.d.). So this move will entail transformative professional development for many of the incumbent generation of professionals who were trained in approaches where the lecturer and institution maintained a locus of control. The problem, as our next paper will attest, is that professional development is easier mandated than achieved.
Michael Henderson argues that sustained commitment to professional development for teachers is both imperative and, in practice, difficult to achieve. In “Sustaining online teacher professional development through community design”, he presents international case studies to support his thesis that social engagement can be as important as purposeful and situated tasks in achieving such commitments. Henderson argues that learning designers of programmes in professional development for teachers need to include the forces of community, identity and practice within their designs as these help to sustain teacher engagement. In other words, developing constructivist learning designs for professional development requires an even broader range of competencies that we have hitherto imagined.
Our next two papers examine Conversation Theory (Scott, 2001),a socio-constructivist approach which can be used to help learning designers to develop such competencies and the apply them in practice. Conversation Theory originated from cybernetics and attempts nothing short of explaining learning in both living organisms and machines (see Scott and Cong, 2007; Scott, 2001). Here Bernard Scott and his co-authors apply Conversation Theory to help explain how to design both courses and learning technologies and how to further professionalize the field of learning design. In“Designing interactive learning environments: an approach from first principles”, Bernard Scott and Chunyu Cong outline principles of learning theory and course design in a process whose key features include knowledge and task analysis, topic mapping and learning design that supports adaptive teaching. The process is exemplified here via “Military Knowledge 1 and 2”,which are quality web-delivered distance learning courses aimed at British Army officers in the early and middle periods of their careers. Piers MacLean and Bernard Scott’s “Learning design: requirements, practice and prospects” uses survey data to explore the current levels of professionalism of learning designers in the UK and beyond. They identify clear gaps in competencies currently associated with the profession and in the training that is available to learning designers at this time. Their ongoing research should generate useful inputs to the curricula for training and developing professional learning designers who are equally familiar with ICT and educational theory. MacLean and Scott advocate including Conversation Theory as key component of such curricula as it can bridge a range of theories of learning and teaching and can be used in both education and training to develop and deliver individual and collaborative learning designs.
The competences for a professional learning designer should include being able to design and deliver learning materials and environments that are accessible to disabled learners. As the United Nations’ E-nable web site notes: “more than 500 million people in the world are disabled …they are entitled to the same rights as all other human beings and to equal opportunities. Too often their lives are handicapped by physical and social barriers in society which hamper their full participation (E-nable, 2006). In “Virtual learning environments: enhancing the learning experience for students with disabilities”, Catherine Gerrard demonstrates the need for accessible learning within the online environment by investigating disabled students’ levels of engagement with a virtual learning environment. Gerrard bases her article on the outcomes of a focus group of undergraduate students with various disabilities and offers valuable insight into the pedagogical issues surrounding learning design for students with disabilities. We think that the article is important because it shares the first-hand experience of students with disabilities rather than merely demonstrating how to comply with legislation.
Another hallmark of a professional learning designer is ethical practice. In“Ethics in the information exploitation and manipulation age”,Richard and Mary Snow show how geographical information systems can be used in education to abuse data and hence colour student perceptions of issues such as climate change. They advocate that learning designers first adopt a code of ethics when developing materials and then specifically include ethics as part of a responsible curriculum. One interesting component of Snow and Snow’s paper is a summary of a recent Code of Ethics for GIS (give full name rather than just abbreviation) (Urban and Regional Information Systems Association, 2003). We believe that this code could serve as an ideal starting point for a similar code for applying information systems within our own community.
Establishing and supporting the information systems that will underpin global learning communities requires the pedagogic and technical skills of readers of this journal. So we are very grateful to Campus-Wide Information Systemsfor once again providing this chance to share some of the outcomes of the ICICTE with you. We hope you enjoy the papers herein and that they will be useful to you in your own work. Finally, we would like to thank all of the organizers,presenters and participants of ICICTE 2006 for their engagement throughout the conference and beyond. We would also like to thank Joe Bennett, Glenn Hardaker and Kelly Pycroft of Campus-Wide Information Systems for making this special issue a reality.
Simon ShurvilleSenior Lecturer at Cranfield University, Cranfield, UK.
Ken Fernstrom Professor at the University College of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford, Canada.
