The Pedagogical Functions of ICT for Education and the Connection to Policy and Implementation

Abstract

Thanks to the realization of Moores Law - computing power will double every two years while the cost decrease proportionately - the price of the ICT infrastructure is less expensive than ever and expected to continue to decline. The effect of this has upended OECD countries economics, politics, and social interactions. In the backrooms of every stock exchange, massive computers are managing (or mismanaging) the market in ways humans cannot fully understand. Now the rest of the world has joined the revolution. Political leaders of every sort are promoting ICT for education. However, their promises are grand while the details are vague. The role ICT should play in the classroom is often ill-defined, the hoped for outcomes are usually over-defined. Politicians, project managers, and teachers often talk about an extremely wide range of goals and outcomes that ICT will bring without trying to connect the expensive digital device to direct educational or social outcomes. My research found three common pedagogical uses for ICT4E: teacher, tool, and subject. In the ICT as a Teacher pedagogy, the digital devices teach and grow with the students. When ICT is a tool, teachers use technology in order to better teach their lessons. Finally, the ICT as a subject treats ICT as subject, like math or English. Furthermore, there are four common rationale for ICT4E: • an economic rationale: the development of ICT skills is necessary to meet the need for a skilled work force, as learning is related to future jobs and careers

• a social rationale: this builds on the belief that all pupils should know about and be familiar with computers in order to become responsible and well-informed citizens

• an educational rationale: ICT is seen as a supportive tool to improve teaching and learning

• a catalytic rationale: ICT is expected to accelerate educational innovations.

The pedagogical uses for ICT are never considered when planners are creating new project, partially from a lack of a theoretical framework to work with. Thus, in order build a framework for connecting the pedagogical applications of Information and Communications Technology in education to the expected goals, this paper will try to answer the following questions: 1. Does each function correspond with a certain outcome? 2. What are the project design and policy implications when attempting to solve each of these pedagogical problems? Rodriguez, Nussbaum, and Dombrovskaia have created a comprehensive framework for evaluating an ICT4E project. By examining each of the pedagogical uses of ICT with this framework, the different policy implications required by each use becomes clear. To illustrate these issues, three different ICT4E organizations – One Laptop Per Child, Intel Teach, and Plan: Ghana Transition and Persistence were be compared. They showed that different pedagogical emphasizes matched with different outcomes.