Learning Tech 2 (English introduction)
Learning Tech 2 has the thematic heading “Curricula and IT” and contains five peer-reviewed articles that examine and relate to what role IT has played in curricula over time, and how IT plays an increasingly important role in schools’ everyday lives and in the way in which conduct education.
Preface
By Stefan Ting Graf, University College Lillebælt & Thomas R. S. Albrechtsen, University College South Denmark
There is no doubt that IT is playing an increasingly important role in the everyday life of schools and in general in the way education is conducted. It is therefore interesting to investigate in which contexts in school that IT plays a special role, how it has been legislated, what expectations there are for it, and how IT is actually used and experienced by teachers, educators, school leaders, parents, and students.
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How is IT integrated into the subjects? What didactic considerations must be made to ensure that IT promotes and does not hinder students’ learning and education? How can you initiate innovative teaching courses with IT? In what way is IT incorporated into the curricula, and how are these descriptions interpreted in the daily use of IT in teaching? How can IT be used to create more inclusive learning environments in schools?
This second issue of Learning Tech contains five articles, each in its own way analyzing and discussing what notions of IT have been in play, how these have become a regular part of the curricula, and how they have affected the school’s everyday life.
The first two contributions are overview articles that provide an insight into some of the overall challenges and historical ideas about IT in schools with a special focus on the Danish subject.
Jeppe Bundsgaard, Aarhus University, thus gives a historical description of how the relationship between IT and subject didactics is a relatively new area of research in a Danish context, and gives his assessment of it’s direction in his article Subject Didactics and IT: Where do we come from and where are we going? A personal story – which is therefore mostly about the Danish subject.
Dorthe Carlsen, University College South Denmark, analyzes in her review article Is IT a case for Danish?, how IT has been described in the curricula for the Danish subject in public primary and lower secondary school from 1984 until today, and in this context raises some questions that this development raises, including in what way IT is both content and tool in the subject.
The following three articles touch on various issues that are also more or less related to the fact that IT has over time become an integral part of schools’ curricula.
Camilla Kølsen Petersen, the Alexandra Institute, examines the importance of the subject Information Technology in upper secondary school in her article Potential and feasibility in the experimental curriculum for Information Technology C and B in upper secondary school. In his article, Kølsen discusses the importance of promoting IT creation skills (‘computational thinking’) and the way in which this can be achieved in the upper secondary school area.
Dorte Ruge, University College Lillebælt, in her article Pupils’ use of IT as support for the development of food and health-related action competence: A case study addresses how the theme food and health intervenes throughout the school, and examines how a teaching process using IT can help to promote the youngest students’ action skills in this area.
Helle Bundgaard Svendsen, VIA University College, focuses on the theme of writing and reading technology in her article A didactic field of tension: Teaching young people with and in written language difficulties, using reading and writing technology. The article is based on a focus group interview with teachers from dyslexic continuation schools and discusses the didactics and strategies that need to be developed in the context of the available writing and reading technology.
The research field of subject didactics and IT has from the beginning been closely linked to specific development interests. In many cases, researchers have designed research projects that consisted of developing digital learning materials, or that had the premise that digital teaching aids were developed that could be used to investigate a phenomenon or test a theoretically formulated hypothesis about what could contribute to improved or changed practices.
From Subject didactics and IT
