ICT

ICT in Education

ICT in Education

Introduction

The first thing a review of the literature reveals that there has been an abundance of positive claims published in recent years about the promise that ICT holds for transforming higher education in the twenty-first century, but there has also been a disturbing lack of empirical evidence to support these claims. Stensaker et al. (2007) sum up the situation very well when they describe their own findings about the difficulty of putting ICT theory into practice at universities: cc ••• it is not the visions, the visionaries (institutional top-management) and the economic foundations that seem to be lacking, but an effective link between, purpose, people, and pedagogy inside the institution" (Stensaker et al. 2007:431). Wong and Li (2008), in one of the more substantial empirical studies of how ICT is actually used in contemporary education, confirm the need for a multi-layered approach to instituting and assessing ICT, one that combines lofty educational goals with the day-to-day work of teachers in order to effectively manage change.

The idea that ICT is culturally embedded is taken for granted by experts in the field of education. For example, Zhang (2007) makes an important distinction between the pedagogical cultures of Western nations and Eastern nations. While the West has a long educational tradition, dating back to Socrates in ancient Greece, of individual discovery through debate between learners and teachers, the Eastern educational tradition, based on Confucius in ancient China, emphasizes what Zhang (2007) calls "a group-based, teacher-dominated, and centrally organized pedagogical culture" (Zhang 2007: 302). In fact, in almost all Eastern nations the implementation of ICT in educational settings is controlled by central government agencies, and usually these agencies have national plans that are geared specifically to meet the economic demands of globalization and the social demands of the information age.

One recent study is very informative about the impact of ICT on the professional education of architects. Based on research in the United States, Japan, and Europe, Andia (2002) reviews how the architectural profession has received and incorporated ICT over the past thirty years. His most significant finding is that professional architects have used ICT mainly for the purpose of enhancing existing practices that have been in place for at least one hundred and fifty years, while architectural schools have used ICT to transform both architectural imagination and architectural practical possibilities. Andia points out that ICT has dramatically affected architects at both the level of skills and the level of professional culture. From the 1970s to the mid-2000s architects developed computer-assisted design (CAD) techniques, and since the mid-2000s architects have made great use of the networking capabilities of ICT to improve the design build process. Architectural academia, however, has challenged the traditional tributary role of the profession. As the author puts it, "Schools have become experimental laboratories for creating design machines, promoting new architectural imagination and treatment of materials, and finally extending the architectural realm to cyberspace" (Andia 2002: 7). Andia identifies five distinct discourses that have evolved in architectural ...