ITGS - A blueprint for a social informatics course in pre-university education

Abstract

The continual development of information and communication technologies in contemporary society has led to a constantly evolving inter-relationship between human beings and these technologies. Within the university sector there is a wide range of courses which examine this inter-relationship, but such courses are largely absent from the pre-university sector. One pre-university course that attempts to examine this inter-relationship is the Information Technology in a Global Society (ITGS) course which is part of the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme. This position paper examines whether this course may be seen as a blueprint for the development of other similar courses in the pre-university sector, and how such courses will be able to accurately reflect the constantly evolving inter-relationship between human beings and information and communication technologies. © 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.