Comparing Perspectives on the Role of ICT in Education

This paper explores the rationales that people with specific educational roles thought should underpin educational ICT use. It provides a brief overview of the dICTatEd project followed by a summary of the analysis of over 2,000 responses to the project’s web-based questionnaire. Respondents were asked to rate and rank the relative importance they ascribed to each of 19 rationales. Analysis indicates general agreement that some rationales represent poor reasons for using ICT in education while others should be important in driving educational ICT use. However, there was substantial variation between the views of the eight groups within the sample about the relative importance of each rationale. This analysis thus supports an underpinning premise upon which the dICTatEd project is founded: that a key reason for the lack of impact of the substantial investments in ICT in education that have taken place is a lack of shared understandings about the rationales for using ICT in education. The dICTatEd Project dICTatEd (Discussing ICT, Aspirations & Targets for Education) is a project that aims to stimulate and inform the ‘educational’ ICT debate, in order to enhance the educational impact of expenditure on ICT in education. In the context of this research ICT is taken to mean computer related technologies, but, unusually for the UK, the definition used here excludes OHPs, televisions, tape recorders and so forth. dICTatEd is predicated on the existence of a ‘reality rhetoric gap’ (Trend, Davis and Loveless 1999) despite huge levels of investment in ICT in education (e.g. Twining 2002a) ICT does not appear to have a proportionately large impact on learning outcomes (e.g. Cuban 2001; Twining 2002b). One of the key reasons that has been identified for this lack of impact of ICT in education is the lack of shared understandings (visions) about the rationales for using ICT in education (Twining 2002b). The ‘educational’ ICT literature makes frequent reference, both directly and indirectly, to rationales for the use of ICT in education. A literature review was carried out in 2003 which resulted in 19 distinct rationales for the use of ICT in education being identified (Tab. 1). A web-based questionnaire was developed in order to stimulate debate and explore respondents’ views on which of these rationales should underpin the use of ICT in education (the questionnaire can be accessed at http://www.meD8.info/qqa/). The questionnaire asks respondents to: • Say whether or not they think that ICT should be an essential component of education (for a particular age range of learners) • Rate the 19 rationales on a seven point scale (Fig. 1) • Rank the rationales (showing which three they think should be the most important, in order of preference).