NEW MEDIA INTEGRATION IN TURKEY: CHALLENGES FOR A HOLISTIC EDUCATIONAL POLICY IN AN ERA OF SPORADIC PROJECTS

Integration and use of media technologies in educational environments is an essential debate in educational policies. Up to date a variety of policy interventions took place: increasing access to new media through technology investments, enhancing children’s media literacy skills, creating new communication channels by forming novel international/intercultural networks initiated at national and/or international level. However, in most cases, given the lack of a holistic approach, cooperation between these projects does not exist. Rarely, there might even be a conflict of interest between project parties.

This paper aims to discuss this impediment taking Turkey as its unit of analysis through the examples of
(i) FATIH (Movement of Enhancing Opportunities and Improving Technology) project as a national project and
(ii) eTwinning platform as an international project.

Although nation-wide technology investment projects were hype in the early 90s, it is only 2000s that the notion of media integration in schools started to be discussed in depth. Turkey witnessed two critical junctures within this period: the introduction of elective media literacy courses in secondary schools and the initiation of the FATİH project which aims to transform all classrooms in Turkey into smart classrooms and equip 16 M students with tablet computers. Within the context of 5 yearlong project, as an exceptional step, the platform EBA (Education Information Network) was introduced to provide educational e-content for students and teachers.

Another project; online eTwinning platform also stands out in terms of its scope. Initiated by the EU in 2005, eTwinning aims to offer a platform for European schools to develop ICT-based joint projects. The platform welcomed institutions from Turkey in 2009 and the number of registered Turkish schools has been increasing ever since. Today, there are over 4,000 finished projects in Turkish schools and around 1,000 on-going ones.

One main divergence between the projects lie in how they are implemented; while FATIH constituting a solid example of a top-down project, eTwinning representatives are relatively flexible within their regions. As such, while all decision making processes come from Ankara (Capital of Turkey) when FATIH is concerned, in the case of eTwinning, the program administrators within the ministry of education act only as coordinators of the program.

It is of significance that though both projects are coordinated by the Ministry of Education, there isn’t any mechanism linking these projects. Thus, the paper will draw attention to the possible areas of cooperation between the two projects and argue for a more holistic approach regarding media integration in the implementation of such projects to shed light on possible mutual advantages. One immediate measure could be taking account the enhancement of technical infrastructure of pilot FATIH schools and promoting eTwinning for possible in class technology use. In return, eTwinning could serve as a platform, where students and teachers can consolidate their media literacy skills and become more motivated for integrating these technologies in other fields of their learning and teaching experiences. Such an intervention, though may seem quite simple, requires a holistic approach at the policy level to enable the intertwining of national and international projects on ICTs.