New technologies in education and the pursuit of educational justice
As part of a new society called postindustrial, postcapitalist or postmodern network society, the intensive use of knowledge becomes a major reason of production. However, we must recognize that its dynamic does not necessarily guarantees higher levels of social justice, equity and cohesion. For this reason, for a society like ours that seeks to be democratic, this is an issue to discuss. Currently, we are under a constant progress and development of technology, but unevenly. That is because access differs between geographical, social and economic, groups. Should inequalities in access to new technologies be solved by the national education ministry or by other agents in our society? Some people understand that the school should be the preferred point of access to new technologies for democratization, others find families as the right environment.
Argentina decided to give three million netbooks for secondary schools, teacher training institutes and special education places; but do we have national or international empirical evidence showing that the integration of technology into the classroom, improves quality of student learning? International research on the effects on the quality of learning by introducing new technologies in education has not found evidence of positive impacts.
The educational field is concerned about changing the traditional educational model of the nineteenth century, but, teaching with computers does not change the pedagogical model of teaching and learning for teachers by itself?. Some researchers argue that there is no significant difference between the grades of those who passed through the computer room and those who followed in the traditional classroom. From my point of view, in the National Netbooks Program “Conectar Igualdad” commercial reasons take precedence over pedagogical decisions in procurement and distribution of technological equipment in schools. However, I think that teaching and new technologies should be an unavoidable part of the educational agenda. I believe that the disappointing results are due to public infrastructure to the schools have been enhanced through proper training and educational support.
Moreover, not including netbooks in education would enlarge the social inequalities, as the most favored social sectors have access anyway to use them outside of school. The democratizing promise of ICT in education is far from reality. Access to new technologies remains closely associated with income, educational level, gender and ethnicity. However, the idea is not ti deny the potential democratization of technologies, but to emphasize that the exercise of this potential does not depend on technology itself but of social and pedagogical models in which it is used. Therefore, the reduction of inequalities is not generated by the ICT itself but the educational background in which they are applied. I do not subscribe here to the paradigm of technological determinism.
The ICT education policy needs to understand that the problems of access to ICT are linked not only with the conditions of access (computers, connectivity, etc..), but to personal abilities that people need to have in order to get real access, because otherwise we will have another new problem that education policy must address: **inequality in the ability to use technology, providing results in the division between users and manipulators.**The delivery of computers is not synonymous of real integration of new technologies in the teaching process.
Finally, to effectively integrate ICT in a systemic policy to cut inequalities: doesn’t the ICT need to be part of an educational method in which the crucial components to break the social determination of learning outcomes, are assumed by processes driving the technology?