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Francesc Pedró reports back from:
The International conference on School in 2020 held in Turin, Italy from March 26 -27, 2009.
This international international event inlcuded presenters from the US, the UK, and France, and local presenters including former ministers of education in Italy, Luigi Berlinguer and Giuseppe Lombardi, an indication of the public importance of the event. It was organised by the Fondazione per la Scuola de la Compagnia di San Paolo (second national bank in Italy), currently an influential education researchers in Italy.
I presented the main findings of the CERI study on technology and educational performance, drawing on PISA 2006 data, facing an audience composed mostly of teachers and ministerial representatives. Among the latter Giovanni Biondi was included. Biondi used to be the director of the Italian Institute of Educational Research and Innovation (INDIRE, based in Florence). It was publicly announced during the conference that he had been appointed vice-secretary at the Ministry of Education, responsible among other things of the whole policy of ICT in education.
Other international presenters included Prof. Sugata Mitra, the social innovator and creator of “the hole in the wall” experiment; Tracey Gray, director of the National Centre for Technology Innovation (the American Institutes of Research); Marcia C. Linn (Berkeley University, co-ordinator of the Cyberlearning strategy at the NSF); Dianne Rhoten, (US Social Science Research Council), and Tim Magner (former director for educational technology at the US department of education). Two notable presentations were, the first about how children, sometimes without any prior knowledge, are able to appropriate computers and the internet (drawing on experiments in rural India), and the last showing how a school 2.0 might look. The others dealt mostly with the concept of digital natives, as if it was something new.
The second day was devoted to policy-making, with presentations by Dough Brown (BECTA) and Georges-Louis Baron (Sorbonne University), who addressed the policy strategies for ICT in education in their countries. I had the chance to participate in a panel with him and the two former ministers regarding the challenges posed by emerging technologies and digital services, such as Web 2.0 and, particularly, netbooks and interactive whiteboards.
My contribution can be viewed on the Italian website: http://osservatorioscienza.ning.com/#punto02
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