Teacher education institutions may either assume a leadership role in the transformation of education or be left behind in the swirl of rapid technological change. For education to reap the full benefits of ICT in learning, it is essential that preservice and inservice teachers are able to effectively use these new tools for learning. Teacher education institutions and programs must provide the leadership for preservice and inservice teachers and model the new pedagogies and tools for learning. They must also provide leadership in determining how the new technologies can best be used in the context of the culture, needs and economic conditions within their country. To accomplish these goals teacher education institutions must work closely and effectively with K-12 teachers and administrators, national or state educational agencies, teacher unions, business, and community organizations, politicians and other important stakeholders in the educational system. Teacher education institutions also need to develop strategies and plans to enhance the teaching-learning process within teacher education programs and to assure that all future teachers are well prepared to use the new tools for learning.

 Global Context

 As noted in the UNESCO World Education Report: Teachers and Teaching in a Changing World (UNESCO, 1998), the young generation is entering a world which is changing in all spheres: scientific and technological, political, economic, social and cultural. The emergence of the ‘knowledge-based’ society is changing the global economy and the status of education.

 

These new possibilities exist largely as the result of two converging forces. First the quantity of information available in the work—much of it relevant to survival and basic well-being—is exponentially greater than that available only a few years ago, and the rate of its growth is accelerating. A synergistic effect occurs when important information is coupled with a second modern advance—the new capacity to communicate among people of the world. The opportunity exists to harness this force and use it positively, consciously, and with design, in order to meeting defined learning needs. (UNESCO World Report, 1998, p.19)

 

As is the case of other sectors of the wider economy and society, education will need to come to terms with the new technologies. This could require substantial public and private sector investments in software research and development, purchase of hardware, and refurbishment of schools. It will be difficult for national policy makers to resist finding the necessary resources whatever their sensibilities over expenditure on education, although without international cooperation and assistance the poorest countries could fall still further behind. Parents and the public at large, in the industrial countries at lease, are unlikely to accept for too long that education should be less well equipped with the new technologies than other areas of social and economic activity. (UNESCO World Report, 1998, p. 20)

 

There is growing awareness among policymakers, business leaders and educators that the educational system that was designed to prepare learners for an agrarian or industrially-based economy will not provide students with the knowledge and skills they will need to thrive in the 21st century’s knowledge-based economy and society. The new knowledge-based global society is one in which:

 

·         the world’s knowledge base doubles every 2 –3 years

·         7,000 scientific and technical articles are published each day

·         data sent from satellites orbiting the earth transmit enough data to fill 19 million volumes every two weeks

·         graduates of secondary schools in industrialized nations have been exposed to more information than their grandparents were in a lifetime

·         there will be as much change in the next three decades as there was in the last three centuries (NSBA, 2002).

 

The challenge confronting our educational systems is how to transform the curriculum and teaching-learning process to provide students with the needed skills to function effectively in this dynamic, information-rich, and continuously changing environment.

 

The technology-based global economy also poses challenges to countries as national economies become more internationalized with an increasing flow between nations of information, technology, products, capital, and people. This new economic environment is also creating a new era of global competition for goods, services, and expertise. All of these changes are producing dramatic shifts in the political, economic and social structures of many countries across the globe. In industrialized nations, the economic base is shifting from industry to information. This shift also demands new knowledge and skills in the work force. ICT has changed the nature of work and the types of skills needed in most fields and professions. While it has, on the one hand, created a wide array of new jobs, many of which did not even exist ten years ago, it has also replaced the need for many types of unskilled or low-skilled workers. For example, the new ‘smart’ agricultural equipment, using advance digital and industrial technology is able to do the work previously done with a large number of low-skilled agricultural workers. In addition, new manufacturing plants are requiring fewer low-skilled workers. A Canadian study notes, for example, that in high-tech companies only 10% of the work force is unskilled workers (NSBA, 2002). These trends pose new challenges to educational systems to prepare students with the knowledge and skills needed to thrive in a new and dynamic environment of continuous technological change and accelerating growth in knowledge production.

 

The UNESCO World Report (1998) notes that the new technologies challenge conventional conceptions of both teaching and learning methods and materials and, by reconfiguring how teachers and learners gain access to knowledge, have radical implications for conventional teaching and learning processes. To meet these challenges, schools must embrace the new technologies and appropriate the new ICT tools for learning. They must also move toward transforming the traditional paradigm of learning.

 

Many countries are engaged in a wide range of efforts to effect changes in the teaching/learning process to enable students to meet the needs and challenges of an information and technology-based society. Education is at the confluence of powerful and rapidly shifting educational, technological and political forces that will shape the structure of educational systems across the globe for the remainder of this century. ICT provides an array of powerful tools that may help transform the present isolated and text-bound classrooms into rich, student-focused, interactive knowledge environments.

 

To accomplish this goal requires both a change in the traditional view of the learning process and an understanding of the role the new digital technologies may play in creating new learning environments in which students are engaged learners, able to take greater responsibility for their own learning and constructing their own knowledge. To accomplish this goal will require a change in the traditional paradigm of the learning process. Thomas Kuhn suggests that revolutions in science come about when the old theories and methods won’t solve new problems. He calls these changes in theory and methods a “paradigm shift.” There is widespread concern that the educational experiences provided in many schools will not prepare students well for the future. Many educators and business and government leaders believe that changes in views of the learning process, coupled with applications of the new information technologies, may play an important role in bringing educational systems into alignment with the knowledge-based, information-rich society.

 

The Traditional View of the Learning Process

 

The existing view of the learning process emerged out of the factory model of education at the turn of the 20^th century and was highly effective in preparing a large number of individuals with skills needed for entry positions in low skilled positions in industry and agriculture. The innovation of classrooms with 20-30 students was created along with the concept of standardized instruction for everyone. The traditional, teacher-centered approach to learning is illustrated in Figure 1. As shown, the teacher is the expert and the dispenser of knowledge to the students. It is largely a ‘broadcast’ model of learning where the teacher serves as the repository and transmitter of knowledge to the students. The traditional educational paradigm is often characterized by the following views of learning:

 

·         Learning is hard. Many view learning as a difficult and often tedious process. According to this view, if students are having fun or enjoying what they are doing in a learning activity, they probably are not learning.

·         Learning is based on a deficit model of the student. The system strives to identify deficiencies and weaknesses of the student. Based on noted deficiencies, students are tracked, categorized, remediated or failed. The impact of the deficit model of student learning is most obvious in compensatory education programs. As implied by the term, compensatory education is designed to make up or remediate learning that some children, particularly poor minority children, do not have, but which the curriculum and structure of schooling assume are common to all children.

Breur, in his book, Schools of Thought, notes that research overwhelmingly concentrates on the weaknesses of poor children. Very little research has been done on their strengths. In addition, the weaknesses identified are often deficiencies in terms of the traditional organization and content of schooling. Very little thought has been given to the idea of changing schooling to accommodate new kinds of students; all the effort has gone to changing the students so that they will fit into the schools. In addition, the underlying assumptions about poor students’ motivation, language, and conceptual development have...”militated against offering them a literacy of thoughtfulness and have favored a low-level, atomized, concrete, basic-skills curriculum. The language of that curriculum has been so simplified that it is both boring and artificial. It has been stripped of its richness and context and made fundamentally meaningless, which is to say unabsorbable by normal people, except through memorization, whose effects last only a few hours or days.” (Breur, 1993)

·         Learning is a process of information transfer and reception. Much of our present learning enterprise remains “information-oriented," emphasizing students reproducing knowledge rather than producing their own knowledge. It also remains teacher-centered and many still see the role of the teacher as a dispenser of information and the role of the student as a passive receiver, storer and repeater of the transmitted information (see Figure 1.1). The prevalence of this view is supported by observations that teachers continue to rely on old standbys such as lectures, textbook reading and fill-in-the-worksheets—practices that reduce students to passive recipients of information and fail to develop their thinking skills.”

·         Learning is an individual/solitary process. In a study of schools in the U.S. the National Assessment of Educational Progress, noted that most students spend long hours working alone at their desks completing worksheets or repetitive tasks. A London Times survey of English school children indicated that children almost unanimously rejected this daily ordeal of dull and ritualistic solitary classroom activity and called for a broader and more exciting curriculum. Above all, they wanted more work allowing them to think for themselves. They wanted to design and make things, to experiment and to engage in first hand observation. The Times reported, however, that there was little evidence of changes in the curriculum that would respond to the students’ wishes (Resta, 1996).

  

 

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Figure 1.1 Information transfer model of learning

 

·         Learning is facilitated by breaking content/instruction into small isolated units. The educational system is often geared more to categorizing and analyzing patches of knowledge than in sewing them together. Breur (1993) notes that the technology of mass education is quite adept at “breaking knowledge and skills into thousands of little standardized, decontextualized pieces, which could be taught and tested one at a time.”

Neil Postman in his book, Teaching as a Subversive Activity states that our educational systems break knowledge and experience into “subjects,” relentlessly turning wholes into parts, history into events without restoring continuity." (Postman, 1969)

·         Learning is a linear process. Frequently, the textbook or teacher provides only one linear path through a narrowly bounded content area or sequence of standardized instructional units. For example, in a mathematics text only one correct problem solution trail may be offered for a specific subclass of problems. However, the problems encountered in daily life (or in mathematics) seldom have only one solution path or sequence.

 

Changes in Views of the Learning Process

 

In contrast to the traditional teaching-learning paradigm, based on three decades of research in human learning, a new paradigm of the teaching-learning process is emerging that is based on the following understanding of human learning:

 

·         Learning is a natural process. The natural state of the brain is to learn, however, not everyone learns in the same way. There are different learning, perceptual and personality styles that must be considered in the design of learning experiences for the individual student. Given interesting and rich learning environments, and supportive and stimulating teachers, students will learn. Teachers have often noted that children who appear disruptive or with short attention spans when confronted with typical classroom instruction may spend long periods engaged in meaningful and interesting computer-related activities.

·         Learning is a social process. As evidenced by the rapid growth of quality circles and computer-supported collaborative work in business, government, medicine, higher education and other areas, the communal context of knowledge and learning is beginning to be rediscovered. As Vygotsky (1978) noted long ago, students learn best in collaboration with peers, teachers, parents and others and when they are actively engaged with others in meaningful, interesting tasks. ICT provides opportunities for teachers and students to collaborate with others across the country and across the globe. It also provides new tools to support this collaborative learning both in the classroom and online.

·         Learning is an active and not a passive process.  In most fields and work pursuits, people are faced with the challenge of producing knowledge rather than simply reproducing knowledge. To enable students to move toward the desired levels of competence, they must be actively engaged in the learning process in activities such as solving real problems, producing original writing, completing scientific research projects (rather than simply studying about science), dialoguing with others on important issues, providing artistic and musical performances, constructing physical objects, etc. The traditional curriculum asks students only to recall and describe what others have accomplished or produced. While all production of knowledge must be based on an understanding of prior knowledge, the mere reproduction of knowledge, without its connection to the production of knowledge, is largely a passive activity that neither fully engages nor challenges the student.

·         Learning may either be linear or non-linear. Much of what now happens in schools appears based on the notion that the mind works like a serial processor that it is designed to process only one piece of information at a time in sequential order. We know from our own personal experience, however, that the mind is a wonderful parallel processor that may attend to and process many different types and levels of information simultaneously. Cognitive theory and research sees learning as a reorganization of knowledge structures. The knowledge structures are stored in semantic memory as schema or cognitive maps. Students “learn” by augmenting, combining, and rearranging a collection of cognitive maps, many of which overlap or are interconnected through a complex network of associations. There are many ways that students may acquire and process information and assimilate it into their existing knowledge structures. Although some knowledge domains, such as mathematics may perhaps lend themselves to a linear approach, not all learning can or should occur linearly.

·         Learning is integrative and contextualized. Pribram’s holistic brain theory suggests that information presented globally is more easily assimilated than information presented only in a sequence of information elements (Pribram, 1991). It is also easier for students to see relations and to make connections. Jacob Bronowski (1990), in Science and Human Values, made the point that to discover the connection between what had seemed two isolated facts of existence is a creative act, whether the field is art or science. He calls it an act of unifying. This is not something we can do for someone else. We cannot make these connections in someone else’s mind. We can give them information or data. We can even tell them what the connection is. However, we cannot assume that because we have told them and because they are able to repeat to us what we have said, that they really know. They have to discover it for themselves. That is not to say that children must discover everything unaided. The teacher’s role is to help them in several ways to make connections and to integrate knowledge.

·         Learning is based on a strength model of student abilities, interest, and culture. Based on work of Howard Gardner and others, schools are beginning to take into account the specific interests and strengths that students bring to the learning environment and to design learning activities that build on the student strengths rather than focusing only upon and remediating weaknesses. In addition, the learning environment increasingly recognizes diversity as a resource rather than a problem in the classroom. In contrast to the remedial and standardized concept of instruction, diversity and individual differences are valued and the learning process is designed to build on and expand the strengths and assets brought by the learner to the classroom.

·         Learning is assessed through task completion, products, and real problem solving of both individual and group efforts. Rather than simply evaluating students through paper and pencil tests, assessments are made using portfolios of actual performances and work in both collaborative and individual learning tasks.

 

The traditional view of the learning process is typically teacher-centered, with teachers doing most of the talking and intellectual work while students are passive receptacles of the information provided. This is not to indicate that the traditional lecture method is without value as it enables the teacher to provide quantities of information to students quickly and is a useful strategy for recall or rote learning. However, it is not the most effective means of helping students develop and use higher order cognitive skills to solve complex real-world problems. As noted by Driscoll (1994) we no longer can view learners as “empty vessels waiting to be filled, but rather as active organisms seeking meaning.

 

Don Tapscott, in his book Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation, notes that we are entering a new era of digital learning in which we are in the process of transitioning from “broadcast” learning to “interactive” learning. Today’s students are no longer satisfied being passive recipients in the information transfer model of learning. Rather they want be active participants in the learning process. There is growing recognition that today’s world requires that students be able to work collaboratively with others, think critically and creatively, and reflect on their own learning processes.

 

 

A Shift from Teaching to Learning

 

As technology has created change in all aspects of society, it is also changing our expectations for what students must learn to function in the new world economy. Students will have to learn to navigate through large amounts of information, to analyze and make decisions based on the information available, and to master new knowledge domains in an increasingly technological society. They will need to be life-long learners, collaborating with others in accomplishing complex tasks, and effectively using different systems for representing and communicating knowledge to others. To enable students to acquire the new 21^st century knowledge and skills will require a shift from teacher-centered instruction to learner-centered instruction. The following table (Sandholtz, Ringstaff, and Dwyer, 1997) identifies the shift that will take place in changing from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning.

 

 

Table 1.1 Teacher-Centered and Learner-Centered Learning Environments

 

	Teacher-centered learning environments	Learner-centered learning environments
Classroom activity     Teacher role     Instructional emphasis     Concepts of knowledge     Demonstration of success   Assessment     Technology use	Teacher-centered, Didactic     Fact teller Always expert   Facts Memorization   Accumulation of facts Quantity   Norm referenced   Multiple choice items     Drill and practice	Learner-centered, Interactive   Collaborator Sometimes learner   Relationships Inquiry and invention   Transformation of facts     Quality of understanding   Criterion referenced Portfolios and performances   Communication, access collaboration, expression

 

Shifting the emphasis from teaching to learning provides the opportunity to create more interactive and engaging learning environment for both teachers and learners. It also involves a change in the roles of both teachers and students in this new environment. As shown in Table 1.2 (adapted from Newby et al., 2000), the role of teacher will change from knowledge transmitter to that of learning facilitator, knowledge guide, knowledge navigator and co-learner with the student. The new role does not diminish the importance of the teacher but requires new skills and knowledge. Students will have new roles and greater responsibility for their own learning in this environment as they seek out, find, synthesize, and share their knowledge with others. ICT provides powerful tools to support the shift to student-centered learning and the new roles of teachers and students.

 

Table 1.2 Changes in Student and Teacher Roles in Learner-Centered Environment

 

Changes in Teacher Role
A shift from:                                              A shift to:
Knowledge transmitter, primary source of information, content expert, and source of all answers.   Teacher controls and directs all aspects of learning.	Learning facilitator, collaborator, coach, mentor, knowledge navigator, and co-learner.   Teacher gives students more options and responsibilities for their own learning.

 

Changes in Student Role
A shift from:                                             A shift to:
Passive recipient of information     Reproducing knowledge     Learning as a solitary activity	Active participant in the learning process     Producing and sharing knowledge, participating at times as expert   Learning collaboratively with others

 

(Table adapted from one developed by Newby et al., 2000).