POSING “BIG QUESTIONS” REGARDING CHANGES IN EDUCATION PROMPTED BY THE RAPIDLY EXPANDING 21ST CENTURY ICT PROLIFERATION

The near explosive proliferation of information and communications technology (ICT) across nearly the entire planet in the past decade has made remarkable and indeed profound changes in the social fabric nearly everywhere. Near instant global communication, information access and retrieval at speeds unheard of even a decade ago, image accumulation and transmission in the blink of an eye, are now commonplace. The tools that make this all possible are now in the hands of young and old alike, on every continent on the planet. Education practitioners and researchers are facing change at a remarkable pace, and are confronted with impacts of this technological explosion in every aspect of their professional lives. The situation raises a group of new “Big Questions” for the global P-20 education community that need to be discussed and researched in depth.
Some of these questions are:

1. In an increasingly global, interconnected society, how do you balance the heterogeneity that such a society demands with the homogeneity emphasized in many national education systems?
2. In an electronically interconnected, socially networked world, how do educators confront the critical issues of accuracy and validity of information found on ICT resources?
3. How do we adapt curriculum to the technologies that students have already mastered outside of the classroom?
4. What are the new essential roles of teachers in an ICT interconnected system where students have multiple opportunities to legitimately learn outside of the structure of the school system?
5. How do we assure that those without the access to contemporary ICT systems have access to quality educational opportunities?
6. How do we validate and articulate the informal self-directed learning that is happening outside of the formal school setting?
7. How do we change education policies to support more flexible timing and locations of learning employing ICT resources?
8. What does an “educated person” look like today? How will that picture change in the future, given the ICT impacts which have occurred and will continue to occur?

This presentation poses these questions to the practitioner and researcher communities in a more detailed format, knowing that the answers to these questions will only prompt others. It is the authors’ hope that the dialogue across the P-20 community will raise the awareness of all to impacts that ICT creates, and that we can thus begin to craft the responses to those impacts that will benefit us and our students.