ICT in Education

From slow beginnings, slow (but steady) progress.

January 16, 2007

The purpose of this blog (an addition to my growing stable of blogs – some neglected, some flourishing) is to take the time to reflect on the subjects I’m doing in the pursuit of my Masters of Education – ICT in Learning – from the University of Wollongong.

In addition to overviewing the readings and general course content, I hope to stimulate my thoughts on this particular area as well as taking a look at how the principles match up to the practice in actually delivering it. I’m taking this subject completely flexibly, all content is being delivered through the University of Wollongong Faculty of Education website using the Janison Learning Management System.

(There has been one face to face session in the Designing Multimedia subject – thoughtfully scheduled on a Saturday and there are also fortnightly sessions in the IT in Education and Training – less conveniently scheduled at 4.30pm on a Wednesday).

Given the subject content of the course, you might expect the delivery to be relatively cutting edge, incorporating everything that is useful and helpful (not to mention new and groovy). I would take this to include structured,  well moderated discussion boards as a baseline with RSS feeds, blogging, wikis and other Web 2.0 goodies as supplementary material.

In reality I find that (so far) the flexible/distance students in one of the subjects appear to be something of an afterthought – content from face-to-face sessions is rarely posted in any degree of completeness and questions have been met with the suggestion to try searching for an answer in Wikipedia. (Which I had already done as a matter of course)

Fortunately the other teacher seems somewhat more serious about flexible/distance delivery and has made a more conscientious effort to provide support and materials in a timely manner. (Responsiveness to emails is sometimes another matter though.)

So far I’ve submitted one piece of work – a timeline of significant events in ICT in Education over the last century and a bit – based on a few readings provided and my own readings. (It’s attached, if you’re interested.)

Looking back on it, I’ve realised that I’m not a big fan of the detailed referencing that is required in academic writing – a bibliography is one thing but constantly inserting sources for quotes really seems to break up the flow of the writing. This is something I’m just going to have to deal with though as it seems to be part and parcel of tertiary study.

Of course, it would probably be far easier to add these references as hypertext links (again, something that would seem logical in a course focussing on this area) however  the instructions for the assignment specify a word-processed document, so this appears to be out of the question. (I’ll probably still ask the question anyway but am torn between wanting to do things in a more technological way and not wanting to irritate the teachers.)

All of that said, taking the time to get stuck into investigating the use of ICT in Education in the last 100 years has been quite interesting – a far more progressive field stretching back much further than I would have expected.

Ok, well time to press on anyway – I’ll make an effort to overview some of the readings for this subject soonish and will also discuss future plans.

One thing I do feel a little compelled to mention (and I guess it does make me reflect on how we do things at CIT when students need help with their online courses) is the extent to which the subjects are de-humanised through the dominance of codes (EDGI911, EDGI931 etc) rather than descriptive names.

I can fully appreciate the organisational needs being met by this but it just feels wrong.

Timeline of ICT events in the 20th and 21st Centuries.

Entry Filed under: General. .