ICT in Education in Global Context

Abstract

Knowledge building/knowledge creation involves exploring idea landscapes, crisscrossing them in every direction to learn one’s way around. Through pursuit of multiple and intersecting rather than prescribed paths, knowledge creators come to feel at home in a conceptual environment, able to pursue promising ideas, redirect work based on advances and failures, and adopt a “design thinking” mindset in which improving the conceptual environment is a realistic possibility. Such creative activity produces inventions, solutions to big societal problems, theories, cures, new business enterprises, and so on. It is the mainstay of success in what the OECD is terming an “innovation-driven” society. In contrast, schools tend to reduce the conceptual landscape through simplification of the range of ideas to be explored, paths to be pursued, and goals, leaving students to traverse a diminished space along fixed, common paths, with prescribed goals. School procedures leave little for design thinking to get hold of. The goal of Knowledge Building theory, pedagogy, and technology is to recreate schools as knowledge-creating organizations–a formidable educational challenge requiring a shift in the modes of thought that since ancient times have characterized education. In this chapter we consider some of what this radical departure entails in terms of classroom practice and technology supports.