New Modes of Technology-enhanced Learning: Opportunities and challenges (original) (raw)
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Becta Research Report, …, 2008
Both the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) see technology as a vital tool to help achieve our ambitions as set out in the Children's Plan, World Class Skills and Higher Education at Work-High Skills: High Value. We need to ensure providers and learners use technology well in supporting these ambitions.' This sets the ultimate goal which public funding for education and training will seek to secure for the foreseeable future: a world-class education system that underpins a competitive, world-class economy. Again, the preface to the 2008 strategy document identifies the reasons why investment in technology for learning is vital in pursuing this goal: new technology is seen as helping to raise standards, support flexible, personalised learning, support transitions across different parts of the system, and enable services which are responsive to needs and which gel together.
The Role of New Technologies in Advancing Education and Learning
It is generally agreed that education is an inseparable component of solutions to many contemporary problems such as the population explosion and the climate crisis. In the transition towards economies increasingly based on knowledge creation and dissemination, educational institutions are urged to change, pressed by a sense of competitive urgency and the fear of being left behind emerging knowledge-based economies. The term pedagogy – the art or science of being a teacher – refers nowadays not only to strategies and styles of instruction, but also to the facilitation and management of sustainable transformations, whether individual, social, structural or institutional. The paper seeks to provide some modest and certainly partial answers to questions about the educational challenges that can be solved with technology. Technologies are not magic wands, but they can contribute to the dissemination, scaling up, 'thingification' and acceleration of human intentions, using flexible modes of delivery, smart integration strategies, and effective policies allowing increased access to quality education. We show that the nature and quality of learning will depend on the epistemological orientations, and structure of the usage of technology.
Technology as a Tool in Pedagogy
The phrase " Technology in ELT " is simply a reference to the use of technology – audio, video, and multi-media – more of multi-media in modern times with computer and electronic technology recording several advances. However, it also relates to issues arising out of the use of such technology in an ELT class. It is a development that can be seen as correlated to what has come to be called e-learning, which began to be defined in the early years of this millennium. By all accounts, e-learning is a learner-friendly and learner-centred development that focuses on the learners' needs. Cross (2000) as " the convergence of learning and networks and the new Economy " , and Masie (2000) as " the use of network technology to design, deliver, select, administer, and extend learning ". Goodyear (2000) chooses to call it " the systematic use of networked multimedia computer technologies " for (a) the empowerment of the learners, (b) ensuring improvement in learning, (c) fulfilling the learners' needs by putting them in touch with human and other resources, and (d) putting together learning, learner performance, personal and institutional goals into a unified whole by bringing about their integration. Support for this is available in Egbert, Paulus and Nakamichi (2002), who cite from research reported by Lee (2000) and Warshauer & Healey (1998) which we have been able to access and confirm. We do not intend to give this the shape of a research paper and shall, therefore, focus the seven papers presented at that conference which are being published in this issue.
Educational Technology and the " New Language of Learning " : Lineage and Limitations
Even the most rudimentary definitions of the term “technology” indicate that its meaning extends far beyond artifacts and devices to include processes, methods, means, and applied knowledge. It is therefore surprising how rarely instructional theories, methods, and applications—for example, learning theories, learning designs, or learning environments—are considered specifically as technologies in the relevant literature. This chapter focuses on the instrumental nature of the concepts of “learning” and “learning theory” as used in the field of education and technology—which Gert Biesta (2006) and others have characterized as being manifest in a “new language of learning.” This refers to a vocabulary or discourse that, for example, characterizes “teaching [as the] ‘facilitation of learning’ [and], education [as the] ‘provision of learning opportunities’” (Haugsbak & Nordkvelle, 2007, p. 2). The chapter argues that this vocabulary represents a particular technologization or instrumentalization of education, a process that makes educational practices and priorities appear germane to, or even incomplete without, technological rationalization and reshaping. This chapter traces how this vocabulary casts learning as a natural and universal process, and quite consistently accompanies the promotion of a range of technological artifacts in education. Running from the introduction of “teaching machines” through to current visions of school reform, this theoretical lexicon will be shown to efface its cultural and ideological contingency through a quasi-scientific “neutrality” and a biologically based universality, and to limit the possibility for discourse and practice within the field of education and technology.