ISTE in Action
EDUsummIT 2009
By Ann Thompson
ISTE helped support an international conference in June in The Hague, Netherlands, called the EDUsummIT 2009. Approximately 70 leading ed tech researchers, policy makers, and practitioners gathered to define action steps following the publication of the Handbook on ICT in Primary and Secondary Education. The handbook, released in 2008 by Springer, provides a broad international synthesis on major research in the field.
Summarizing 40–50 years of research on information and communication technologies (ICT), the handbook provides a useful summary of what we know about ICT and thus an ideal starting point for defining directions in the areas of policy, research, and leadership.
Editors Joke Voogt and Gerald Knezek orchestrated the international summit to provide a platform to use the comprehensive handbook to help move the field of ICT in primary and secondary education forward. ISTE's CEO, Don Knezek, provided leadership for the summit, and the British Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) and Kennisnet, a public ICT support organization in the Netherlands, also supported the realization of the conference.
Chris Dede, the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies in the Technology, Innovation, and Education department at Harvard University, opened the conference with an inspiring keynote address. He indicated that he felt more positive about the potential impact of technology in education than at any previous time in his career. Dede pointed out three factors that suggest the time is right for action:
- Students' out-of-school lives are richer in ICT than their in-school lives.
- Schools are currently still operating under an industrial model for education and not responding to the need for producing students with skills necessary for life in a 21st century, global economy.
- New and powerful technology tools are available to support changing roles for schools.
Summit participants accepted the challenges of discussing and defining what we know as well as setting goals for the future and actions to achieve these goals.
The reports from each of the groups (research, leadership, and policy) revealed some strong overlapping themes in terms of a call to action. These actions included a challenge for researchers, leaders, and policy makers to:
- Use findings presented in the handbook to inform research, policy, and leadership for ICT in schools
- Radically restructure schools around the need for multiple technology-enhanced pedagogies to address students' individual needs
- Work to use student technology experience in informal learning environments to inform work in formal environments
- Actively study both research and development on ICT applications in classrooms
- Nurture an international community of ICT scholars who continually build upon our knowledge base
- Develop new assessments designed to measure outcomes from technology-enriched learning experiences
- Develop and use distributed leadership models for technology use in schools and teacher education programs
- Adopt an ecological perspective to study ICT use in classrooms to help explain and influence the complex interactions and events
Participants departed The Hague with a renewed mission to better connect ICT research with ICT policy and action plans for primary and secondary education.
Learn more about EDUsummIt at http://edusummit.nl.
Copyright © 2009, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education), 1.800.336.5191 (U.S. & Canada) or 1.541.302.3777 (Int'l), iste@iste.org, www.iste.org. All rights reserved.
Learning & Leading with Technology | September/October 2009
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