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Francesc Pédro reports back from the conference:
“Remediating the school: the future space and time of learning” held in Florence, Italy on 3-4 March 2006.
This conference was organised by INDIRE (www.indire.it), the Italian Institute for Educational Research and Innovation, It was attended by more than 500 primary and lower secondary school teachers from all over Italy, clearly surpassing the capacity of the huge theatre “La Pergola” in Florence.
The conference was organised around three different sessions:
- dominant trends in international scenarios
- sociological perspectives and new languages
- ICT and the future organisation of schools
The first session was chaired by INDIRE’s director, Giovanni Biondi. It included a presentation by Richard Sweet (a former member of OECD Education Directorate) who discussed the 2004 OECD Education Policy Analysis chapter entitled Getting Returns from Investing in Educational IT, highlighting three main ideas: a) despite huge disparities the number of computers available in schools has been growing very fast in OECD countries; b) this is not accompanied necessarily by an increase in use; and c) to improve this situation more has to be done for teacher training and mobilization. My presentation was aimed at a) reviewing the state of the art of research on the effectiveness of ICT in education; b) showing how much we do not know yet about the connections between ICT home uses and academic performance, as PISA data suggest; and c) the need for future research on this issue.
The second session had two interesting speeches, John Urry, from the University of Lancaster, and Edgar Morin. The new social software developments were presented by Derrick De Kerckhove, director of the McLuhan Program at the University of Toronto and Professor also at the University of Naples. There was another presentation by artist Maurice Benayoun, Professor at the University of Paris I, which consisted of a presentation of his own works involving creative and social uses of technology. The session concluded by a mime performance on the lost childhood.
The third session, on Saturday, included presentations from the Netherlands, Iceland, England, and the United States on how ICT can help to improve school designs even from an architectural perspective. Harry Gankemam from the Netherlands presented the Dutch initiative “Slash 21”, and the Icelandic initiative of blended learning in upper secondary education, was introduced by the head of the division of ICT at the Ministry of Education, Jóna Pálsdóttir. Also worth noting was the presentation by Stephen Heppell (www.heppell.net), who is in the process of developing a learnometer sponsored by Microsoft (see www.learnometer.net) which addresses trends in learning. Susan Stuebing spoke about recent trends on school architecture. Finally, Helen Barrett, formerly at the University of Anchorage, gave a presentation on e-portfolios in school education.
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