Future of ICTs and Pedagogy- con't

3 Future of ICTs and Pedagogy

3.3 Three mindsets

Bigum (2012) proposes that much of what passes for the integration of ICTs into schools is locked into an on-going cycle repeating itself. A cycle where educators are locked into a cycle of

1. Identifying the "next best thing" in ICTs.
2. Buying the "next best thing" in ICTs.
3. Domesticating the "next best thing" into existing education practices.

The idea is that you can replace "the next best thing" with any ICT, such as IWBs, computers, tablets, smartphones etc.

Bigum (2012) argues that this is largely because schools and educators are stuck within the first of three mindsets around schools and ICTs. A mindset that can't escape the "grammar of school" mentioned a few pages ago.

The following table summarises those mindsets.

Mindset	Description
ICTs to improve schools	Schools are doing well in preparing students for the future. The curriculum focuses on the right answer and teaching is focused on helping students achieve the right answer. TPACK is used to understand the complexities of teaching. There's a lot of time wasted trying to identify "benefits" from the use of ICTs in learning.
Schools can't be improved	Schools are broken. They can't be fixed by anything, let alone ICTs. Education will undergo a transformation just like newspapers or record companies.
Focus on change	There are significant challenges facing schools and they need to change. Don't focus on replacing them with a single solution. When you introduce new technologies, unexpected changes happen. Need to consider both the technology and the social. Need to explore lots of different ways of doing it differently. Need to explore how to disrupt traditional relationships between: schools and knowledge, knowledge and children, children and teachers, learners and communities.