Contribute to The Educational ICT Debate

Peter Twining, Senior Lecturer in Education from The Centre for Curriculum and Teaching Studies (CATS) at The Open University, UK has devised a questionnaire which explores views on whether ICT should be an essential element of education and what rationales should drive its use.

The questionnaire was developed in the light of evidence that suggests that a lack of shared understandings (visions) about the reasons for using ICT in education has lead to the huge investments that have been made in 'educational' ICT having had much less impact than anticipated (e.g. Cuban 2001; Twining 2002). This has lead to calls for a moratorium on further investments in ICT in education (e.g. Stoll 2000; Cuban 2001).

The questionnaire aims to stimulate and inform the debate about whether ICT should be an essential component of education and the reasons that should underpin the use of ICT in education.

I have volunteered, through our school, to be one of the collaborators so I would like to invite you to help Peter in his research. The url below takes you to the questionnaire which should take you less than 9 minutes to complete. Once you have finished it you can see an analysis of some of the core data that has been collected so far.

Click here to fill in the questionnaire

ReferencesCuban (2001) Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom, London:Harvard University Press. Stoll (2000) High-Tech Heretic: Reflections of a computer contrarian, New York: Anchor Books. Twining (2002b) Enhancing the Impact of Investments in Educational ICT, PhD Thesis, Milton Keynes: Open University. http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/document.cfm?documentid=2515 (visited 31.1.03).