LEARNING IN A NEW ERA –
Or an expensive trip to a “technology rich” educational wasteland?
Nancy LAW
Centre for IT in school and teacher Education, University of Hong Kong
ABSTRACT
When governments all over the world are spending billions to move schools into the information
age with an unprecedented urgency, do we know where we are going, and what the promised
land is supposed to look like? Drawing on results from a study on IT implementation in Hong
Kong schools, this paper describes four models of IT use for teaching and learning deriving from
four philosophies of education, each with distinctly different choices of technology, different
priorities in implementation, different pathways of teacher professional development and school
development. These four models of IT use range from using IT (1) as an empowering advanced
education technology tool for the teacher, to (2) as cognitive tools for the learner, to (3) as
empowering productivity and communication tools for the learner, to (4) as a learning support
environment to promote the development of metacognitive abilities involved in becoming an
effective autonomous learner and to facilitate the development of a community of learners. The
initial findings from the study indicate that while all the four models of IT use are present in
Hong Kong schools to different degrees, the most prevalent mode is the first one, that of using IT
as empowering presentation tools for the teacher, resulting in more presentation oriented, didactic
classroom practices. Another observation is that there is no natural course of migration from one
model to another as these are developments along different tracks. Thirdly, a general overview of
current situation in schools indicates a picture of confusion, a picture of diverse understanding
and aspirations without leadership. This paper ends on a cautionary note, warning that if Hong
Kong does not pay attention to establishing and sharing a vision of IT in education that integrates
the use of technology with preparing learners as knowledge workers of the 21st century, the huge
amount of money spent on IT in education will only result in the creation of a “technology rich”
educational wasteland.
KEYWORDS
Education reform, models of IT use in education, models of teaching and learning, computer
supported collaborative learning.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN EDUCATION – MEETING THE CHALLENGE OF
THE INFORMATION AGE
Explorations with uses of computers in education have started very soon after the invention of
computers. Such explorations have gone through a number of different phases of development,
starting with models that essentially seeks to replace the teacher with the computer (tutorial
programs, drill and practice and then later on intelligent tutoring systems belong to this category)
to the use of computers as cognitive tools for learning, supporting learning in ways that would
not be possible without the technology (for example simulation programs, modelling programs,
visualization tools, etc). During this time, with the increase in the power and decrease in price of
computers, the use of computers in education has also moved from being confined to top research
universities to the ordinary school classrooms. The advent of personal computers in the late 70’s
marked the beginning of computer use in schools in many countries, including Hong Kong.
However, even in those early days, the economic situation of the day and the impact of
information technology thereon formed the key considerations of decision-makers in funding
those initiatives. At that time, the need for schools to prepare graduates who possess informatics
knowledge and skills to satisfy a growing demand for IT professionals in the society was the
main motivation and thus the key use of computers in classrooms in fact started with the teaching
of informatics – computer basics and programming skills. The use of computers as pedagogical
tools in teaching and learning slowly but steadily gained importance. However, the more or less
ubiquitous urgency and importance placed by many governments on promoting IT in education
in the entire school system is not primarily motivated by a desire to simply improved the
effectiveness of teaching and learning, but a recognition of the society’s need for new qualities in
the graduates from the school system in order to stay competitive in the information age. The
publication of a comprehensive national IT masterplan is a relatively recent occurrence and an
inspection of these plans reveal this same tenet of emphasis (President's Committee of Advisors
on Science and Technology, 1997), (Singapore Ministry of Education, 1997), (Education and
Manpower Bureau, 1998).
TECHNOLOGY IN THE CLASSROOM – THE TRIPARTITE RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN TEACHERS, PUPILS AND TECHNOLOGY
Given this much broader perspective of the role of IT in education, its effective implementation is
paramount to a call for fundamental education reform in the system. However, as has been
widely documented in both research reports on IT implementations in schools and in the wider
education reform literature, effecting a reform is a long and difficult process. As highlighted in
the IT Masterplan of the Dutch government (Plomp, 1996), achieving the goals of the plan will
require an evolution of education institutions where ultimately an entirely new set of instructional
methods and approaches is expected to be established. This is not a simple or easy process and,
as the same report pointed out, requires both care and courage. Since we are not there yet, we
cannot quite visualize how exactly the final form of the school or the classroom will be. This is a
critical and important characteristic of the challenge that we are facing.
How do we know if we are moving in the right direction? Are we able to tell whether a school, an
institution, or a classroom practice is moving in the direction of reform rather than away from it?
It is argued here that a key yardstick for evaluating the value of any particular implementation is
the contribution made by the use of technology to the following:
1.
2.
3.
4.
empowering the learner,
enhancing teacher-learner interactions,
enhancing the interaction, peer support and collaboration of learners,
enhancing the interaction between the learners and the wider community.
Case studies conducted in Hong Kong on IT implementation at classroom and school levels
reveal that the model of IT use in the classroom as well as the pathway taken by a school in
developing and implementing its IT plan are in general very consistent with the general
educational aims and philosophy of the particular classroom teacher or school.
MODELS OF IT USE IN EDUCATION
This section describes the four models of education identified in the various case studies
conducted, together with the typical kinds of technologies that tend to be used, the likely
professional development pathway for a teacher and the corresponding change strategy found in
the school leadership for each of the models.
Transmission model – teacher as subject matter expert, expert presenter and evaluator
In this model, the role of the teacher is seen to be that of a knowledgeable person who presents
the appropriate information in clear, well-organized formats for students to learn. Within this
paradigm, a good teacher would be one who has up-to-date, strong subject matter expertise who
presents information effectively and efficiently. This model assumes that the key to effective
teaching lies in enhancing student interest through the use of attractive audio-visual aids to
illustrate the concepts and ideas taught.
Within this educational paradigm, the role of IT as perceived and appreciated by the teacher
would be that of empowering tools for the teacher to enhance effective and efficient delivery, and
this includes:
i. Technology as an efficient and attractive means of presentation
ii Technology as the medium of collating, organizing and transmitting materials
iii. Technology as the productivity tool for the teacher – clerical, administrative, presentation,
lesson planning, teaching resource and professional communication
iv. Technology as the assistant of the teacher to evaluate and monitor student progression
through the curriculum
Within the transmission model of teaching, the model of a teacher of the information age is one
of an expert presenter and knowledge arbitrator. A teacher, who operates within this paradigm,
would go through stages of development in terms of technological competency and familiarity
with various kinds of presentation and authoring technology (including hardware and software).
A school leadership that shares a vision of technology as primarily one of providing empowering
tools for teachers would give priority in its development plans to develop the technological
infrastructure of the school and the development of technological competence of teachers.
Evaluation of development would be made primarily on the basis of technological sophistication.
Facilitation model – teacher as a cognitive coach who guides the learner through the cognitive
process, providing cognitive scaffolds
This is more or less the model of a good teacher that many will assign a “constructivist” label to
and is similar to Scardamalia and Bereiter’s (1991) “knowledge-based model”. Here the teacher
gives full recognition of the fact that deep, significant learning can only take place through the
learner’s active participation in the “construction” of knowledge, in formulating their own
personal understanding of the various information and sensory experiences that they are
presented with. The teacher’s role includes “the setting of appropriate, knowledge and interests,
activating prior knowledge, asking stimulating and leading questions, directing enquiry, and
monitoring comprehension” (Scardamalia, 1991), p.39. A good teacher under this paradigm will
spend a lot of efforts on ascertaining the prior concepts that students hold, design learning
experiences and pose questions that will direct the students’ attention and stimulate them to think
along the lines that will most likely bring about the construction of the desired and yet accessible
conceptual understanding.
The role of technology that will be most valued within this paradigm are facilitative and enabling
tools for the learner as well as tools that would enable teachers to monitor and evaluate students’
conceptual understanding and progress. Tools that would fit into these categories include:
i. Knowledge-based intelligent tutoring systems;
ii. Simulation tools that allow learners to explore the relationship between different
parameters in particular domain areas;
iii. Modelling tools that support the creation by learners and teachers models of reality in
specific domain areas and to allow the learners to explore the consequences of different
theoretical models.
Within the facilitation paradigm, the model of a teacher of the information age is one of an expert
pedagogue who understands very well students’ interests and cognitive capability, can maker use
of technology to gain a better understanding of the kinds of misconceptions and conceptual
difficulties that the target group of students have in relation to the knowledge domain they need
to master, and can choose appropriate IT tools to help students explore and construct an
understanding of the subject domain as defined by the curriculum. A school leadership that
shares a vision of technology as primarily one of facilitating students’ curricular learning would
give priority in its development plans to source appropriate cognitive tools for learning and to set
up appropriate technological infrastructure as necessary for different subject areas accordingly to
maximize the effectiveness of facilitation activities. There would be an emphasis on subjectspecific professional training to teachers that includes and anchors around developing a good
understanding of the cognitive demands and difficulties of learners in the subject area, in
conjunction with the introduction to various cognitive tools. Evaluation of development would be
made primarily on the basis of student learning outcomes in various subject areas.
Liberal co-construction model – teacher as providing an enabling physical and organizational
infrastructure for knowledge co-construction & exploration,
and acting as a partner in learning.
This model is underpinned by a strong educational philosophy that believes in and values the
fundamental ability of students to learn and to see students’ self-directed learning activities as
leading to the most significant kind of educational outcomes for students in the life-long context.
This paradigm normally also treasure and value the establishment of a strong cooperative and
collaborative culture within the student community. Teachers do not see their primary role as that
of an expert but rather as someone who can respond to students’ interests and aptitudes and to
provide as best they could the physical and organizational support that can facilitate the students’
learning plans. Teachers may also act as co-learners in the process but need not end up to be
necessarily more expert that the learner.
The most important role of information technology within this paradigm is that of student
empowerment. The school and the teachers will identify and provide as broad a level of access as
they possibly could to tools and facilities that would foster the establishment of a strong student
community that engages actively in various kinds of knowledge exploration and sharing. The
school and the teachers will also try to reduce emphasis on traditional systems of assessment and
monitoring progress, but rather to focus on supporting projects and initiatives that encourage
autonomous, collaborative learning activities. The IT tools that would be most valued within this
paradigm are:
i. General office productivity tools and communication networks that are easily accessible
to all students most of the time;
ii. A good network connection as well as the provision of a platform for the students to
organize their own students’ communication network and to establish their own learning
resource repository would be crucial as a basic empowering infrastructure (just as the
provision of office space, appropriate facilities and resources are crucial for enabling the
establishment of a strong autonomous student union);
iii. Other technological tools, some of which may be subject domain specific, to help and
support students’ learning activities as the case may demand, depending on the specific
interest and nature of the project engaged in by the students.
A teacher within this paradigm is like a good manager, encouraging risk taking and providing
resource and infrastructure support. The main goal is to provide as good a supportive
environment as possible within existing resourcing limitations. Such a teacher would go through
different stages of development in terms of their ability to prioritize and make available enabling
technologies as well inject/seed initial expertise to support the start-up stage of new initiatives. In
fact, as resource and infrastructure support for students are essential in this model of education, it
would not be implementable unless the belief and vision underpinning this paradigm is shared to
a large extent by the school leadership. A school leadership that shares a vision of technology as
primarily one of providing empowering tools for students would give priority in its development
plans to improve the accessibility and connectivity of the school’s technological infrastructure
and to foster the establishment of student societies and learning cooperatives. The criteria for
success of such school IT plans would be the extent of student participation, the quality of their
learning activities and outcomes, and the extent to which an autonomous student body has been
established that is confident and capable of profitable self-directed learning activities.
Knowledge community model – learners as producers of knowledge and teachers as coaches to
help students develop the metacognitive abilities required of
members in a knowledge community
This paradigm is founded on an understanding of the challenge of the information age to
education. Individuals need to have the ability as well as the affective capacity and orientation to
remain effective in a fast-changing knowledge economy. Schools should thus not only facilitate
learning, encourage autonomous, self-directed learning, but also to proactively and consciously
develop the metacognitive abilities required to be an effective life-long learner. These abilities
include: enquiry abilities, problem solving abilities, creativity, information skills and self
monitoring and evaluation abilities as well as the ability to work cooperatively and
collaboratively in teams. This model differs from the facilitation model in that while both
emphasizes the active cognitive engagement of the learner, “most of the high-level control of the
learning process remains with the teacher or the program. [The teacher] tries to be responsive to
the knowledge, the interests and the knowledge needs of students but by this very effort retains
control of the educational process.” (Scardamalia, 1991), p. 39. In this model, the teacher
consciously and systematically turn over to students the high-level processes involved in
formulating specific learning goals, activating prior knowledge, asking questions, directing
enquiry and monitoring comprehension and progress, providing coaching and guidance on the
way.
In implementing a knowledge community model of schooling, IT tools can and should play a
very significant role. These may include:
i. Concept mapping tools that help learners to organize their own ideas, focus on and make
explicit their own understanding of the relationship between various concepts and to
communicate that understanding;
ii. Enquiry support environments designed to support students in their knowledge
construction process, sensitizing their awareness of the various knowledge processes
during an enquiry (posing high-level questions, planning, goal setting, critical thinking,
etc.) and to direct them to resources that can support them in the development of the
requisite metacognitive abilities;
iii. Computer supported collaborative learning environments that support the group processes
in knowledge co-construction through the provision of tools that support knowledge
aggregation, group planning, cooperative pursuit of explanations and cooperative
commenting, argumentation and negotiation.
The tools listed above are different in nature from the conventional educational software and are
closer in nature to the knowledge management tools used in many corporate organizations. In a
knowledge community, learning occurs at three levels: individual, team and community. The
design of appropriate and effective technology platforms (generally known as knowledge
management architectures (Borghoff, 1998)) to support the access, use, communication, and
storage of such knowledge is recognized to be crucial to the success of knowledge intensive
enterprises. The design of computer supported collaborative learning systems has been gaining
importance in recent years and CSILE is amongst the best known of such environments (Bereiter
& Scardamalia, 1993; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1990).
Similar to the liberal co-construction model, a teacher working within this paradigm is also like a
good manager, but conversant with knowledge management tools and works consciously to build
up the students’ readiness (meta-)cognitively and affectively for effective participation in the
knowledge society. S/he would devise mechanisms to encourage/reward the sharing of
information, encourage and support the development of creative thinking, critical analytical
abilities, problem solving and presentation skills. The fact that in the school context, participants
in the knowledge construction community are mainly young learners mean that the task of the
teacher would be different and may be more complex than that facing a corporate manager. The
teacher need to develop a much better understanding of the processes involved in the growth of
expertise (the metacognitive abilities described earlier) in collaborative learning and the
conditions that lead to such growth. This is still relatively new terrain that is largely untrodden.
Teachers who wish to lead students into learning for the new era within this new paradigm would
need to be brave learners themselves, participating themselves in a community of learning
teachers and experiencing this new mode of learning at work.
A school leadership that takes the school into the knowledge era would need the courage and
insight to see that schools need to be re-engineered, re-invented, in order to deliver the kind of
educational outcome demanded in the 21st century. A vision of IT in education that encompasses
such a deep level of change fully recognizes the magnitude of the impact of IT on education.
Such change goes far beyond that of any “education reform” that a school has ever experienced
in scale and complexity. In fact, these changes are bound to bring about fundamental changes in
the nature, function and organization of schools as an institution. Schools embarking on a journey
of reforming and re-engineering itself would not view the establishment of a technological
physical infrastructure in the school nor the technical competence (to feel comfortable about
using technology as a productivity tool) of teachers to be the main hurdles. However, these two
factors are fundamental enabling pre-requisites without which the transformation envisioned
would be seriously hampered.
WHITHER THE PROMISED LAND FOR HONG KONG?
Obviously, more than one of the four models of IT implementation presented above may be
present in a school. Further, specific implementations/classroom uses of IT may encompass may
not be neatly categorizable into one of the four paradigms. However, these four models do
describe the key possibilities in terms of the goals of IT implementation as well as the roles
played by technology adopted by teachers and schools, as observed in the case studies made.
Further, results from the case studies indicate that there is no natural course of migration from
one model to another as these are developments along different tracks with different goals, even
though the relationship between some of the models are evident.
Initial findings from the study indicate that while all the four models of IT use are present in
Hong Kong schools to different degrees, the most prevalent mode is the first one, that of using IT
as empowering presentation tools for the teacher, resulting in more presentation oriented, didactic
classroom practices. This is in fact not surprising but extremely worrying. It is not surprising as
there has not been a process of vision-building in the community on what are the expected
outcomes from the massive push from the government on promoting IT in schools. All the focus
and resources have been put into building up the physical infrastructure of schools and the
technical competence of teachers. Even for the 20 IT pilot schools, the only public criteria for
selection was “IT readiness”. It is not clear what these pilot schools are supposed to be piloting,
what the program intends to achieve, and there has been no publicly announced criteria for
assessing the success or otherwise of these pilots. Given such a lack of leadership and the current
prevalent image of IT as advanced education technology for empowering teachers, one cannot
possibly be optimistic about the current introduction of IT into Hong Kong schools as a process
that would lead schools into “Learning in the New Era” as it appeared on the cover of the
government’s five-year strategy (Education and Manpower Bureau, 1998). There is an urgent
need for clear leadership for the implementation of IT in education in Hong Kong, which must
include means to enhance the awareness and understanding of the education community on the
meaning of “Learning in the new Era”. Without this, the whole movement will end up in the
proliferation of “technology rich” but educationally poor schools and classrooms.
References:
Bereiter, C., & Scardamalia, M. (1993). Environments for collaborative knowledge building.
[Toronto]: Centre for Applied Cognitive Science Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
Borghoff, U. M. P., Remo (Ed.). (1998). Information Technology for Knowledge Management.
Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Education and Manpower Bureau, H. (1998). Information Technology for Learning in a New
Era. Hong Kong.
Plomp, T., ten Brummelhuis, A. & Rapmund, R. (Ed.). (1996). Teaching and Learning for the
Future. Den Haag: Committee on Multimedia in Teacher Training, Dutch Ministry of
Education.
Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (1990). Computer supported intentional learning environments
(CSILE). Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
Scardamalia, M. & Bereiter, C. (1991). Higher Levels of Agency for Children in Knowledge
Building: A Challenge for the Design of New Knowledge Media. The Journal of the
Learning Sciences, 1(1), 37-68.
Singapore, M. o. E. (1997). IT Masterplan for Education . Singapore.
President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology Panel on Educational Technology
(1997). Report to the President on the Use of Technology to Strengthen K-12 Education in
the United States.
當今世界很多國家都樂於花費極為大量的金錢，以急速的步伐推行資訊科技教學，但到底
我們是否清楚計劃中的目的地是怎麼樣的？我們希望藉此而達到的教與學情境又是怎樣的
呢？一項仍在進行的研究顯示，香港學校現時在資訊科技應用的狀況甚為混亂，各自有著
不同的理解和目標，缺乏領導和指引。本文從此研究及其他國家的經驗出發，提出驚剔，
指出此狀況很容易導致學校成為一所「高科技」的教育廢墟。