After they turn on the screen : use of information and communication technology in an upper secondary school in Iceland (original) (raw)

This thesis has taken a long time to be finalised and would not have been completed without assistance from my family and friends. I am grateful for their support and the encouragement I got. I also am grateful to my main supervisor, Professor Jón Torfi Jónasson, for his support, constructive feedback and contributions that enabled this thesis to be written. My appreciation is extended to Dr Sólveig Jónsdóttir, my cosupervisor, for her assistance and valuable support. I like to thank Professor Inga Dóra Sigfúsdóttir, a member of the PhD committee, for her care, assistance and positive encouragement. Information technology (IT) is the design, study and use of processes for representing physical, hypothetical or human relationship employing the collection, creation, storing, retrieving, manipulation, presentation, sending and receiving of information (Cox, 2004, p. 67). If we look at the definition of IT from the Icelandic Ministry of Education from 1996 it has a stronger connection to technology than the definition suggested by Cox above: … to use appropriate technology for information processing whereby the term technology refers to computer technology, telecommunications technology and electronics (Ministry of Education, 1996, p. 92, translated by the author). Interactive educational environment also has different names, e.g. educational software, cognitive tools for learning, interactive multimedia systems, intelligent tutoring systems. The field is ill-defined, it is not even clear what interactivity is as it can be of many forms and there is a lack of consensus in the discussion (Brown, 2008). Brown´s brief analysis shows how difficult it is