| old_uid | 6692 |
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| title | Why doesn’t IT Happen? Postmodernity, technocracy and the lack of systematic thinking on the integration of the school and the digital culture |
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| start_date | 2009/04/07 |
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| schedule | 10h-12h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | Pavillon Jardin |
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| summary | As a background to my presentation I will point to:
· At least five large waves of computerizing education which have swept the West since the 1980s and demanded enormous funding and outer resources ;
· The extremely high expectations which were attached to these computerization waves, and their failure to meet these expectations ;
· The explanations that have been given to this obstinate failure ;
· The insufficiency of these partial explanations.
The root cause of the repeating failures, I will claim, lies at the lack of systematic-strategic thinking on education in general, and hence also on the issue of integrating the school culture and the digital culture. Today this lack is more acute than in any other period of educational transformation during the last 2,500 years (since Isocrates and Plato “founded” the tradition of Western education). The reasons for this are:
· The transformation needed today is probably the most fundamental in the history of Western education systems: alphabetical literacy is replaced by what might be revealed as a return to hieroglyphic logic (reliance on symbols and visual metaphors) and a radical return to illiteracy; and modes of rational-systematic-critical thinking, which are basic to (at least) the ideal of thinking in Western culture, are replaced by their opposites ;
· The lack of awareness of thinkers, educators and policy-makers of such issues and of the need to rethink education from scratch.
I will point to the ideal structure of such systematic-strategic thinking (while acknowledging that in practice we can only try to approach it); and to the grave obstacles inherent to the fabric of our culture, which have prevented the development of such thinking (the above “loss of rationality” as well dominant academic and technocratic political “moods”).
I will end by trying to address the question: Is there hope? Are there chances that such thinking can be developed in a sustainable manner?
Lectures conseillées:
Aviram, A. (2000) “ICT and Education: From ‘Computers in the Classroom’ to Mindful Radical Adaptation by Education Systems to the Emerging Cyber Culture”, Journal of Educational Change 1,4, 331-352 ;
Aviram, A. (2002) “Will Education Succeed in Taming ICT?”, in: Sancho, J. (ed.) Proceedings of the II European Conference on Information Technologies in Education and Citizenship: A Critical insight, Barcelona, June 26-28, 2002 ;
Aviram, A. (forthcoming) Navigating through the Storm: Education in Postmodern Democratic Society, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam ;
Aviram, A. (forthcoming) The Futuristic School, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam ;
Aviram, A. & Talmi, D. (2004) “The Merger of ICT and Education: Should it Necessarily be an Exercise in the Eternal Recurrence of the Reinvention of the Wheel?”, in: Hernandez, F., & Goodson, I. F. (eds.), Social Geographies of Educational Change, 123-42. London: Kluwer ;
Aviram, A. & Talmi, D. (2005) “The Impact of Information and Communication Technology on Education: The missing discourse between three different paradigms”, E-Learning Journal 2,2, 169-91 ;
Aviram, A. & Richardson, J. (2004) “Introduction: A Turtling Tale, From Papert to Present”, in: Aviram, A. & Richardson J. (eds.) (2004) Upon What Does the Turtle Stand? Rethinking Education for the Digital Age, 1-24, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Netherlands ;
Meyer, J. W. & Rowan, B. (1992) “The Structure of Educational Organisations”, in J. W. Meyer, & W. R. Scott (eds.), Organisational Environments: Ritual and Rationality, 179-197. Newbury Park: Sage ;
Morphew, C. C. & Huisman, J. (2002) “Using Institutional Theory to Reframe Research on Academic Drift”, Higher Education in Europe, 27(4), 491-506. |
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| responsibles | Pasquinelli |
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