Pedagogical Possibilities for ICT

Heterarchy and changing pedagogy

New pedagogy is based on the opposite of the traditional classical hierarchy – that is, a heterarchy, a term that depicts a system in which each working element or agent is equally ruled by all others. This means that, while learning, these agents communicate or talk to each other, exchanging messages filled with related information. In this system, there are no simple linear chains of cause and effect, but more and more cross-connected rings and loops.

Behind the dazzling variety of new theories, methodologies, and working approaches to learning, one can detect several underlying patterns, or fundamental principles and practices that seem perennial. Re-christened in modern idioms, these principles are referred to as poly-sensory, experiential, project-oriented, constructivist, and connectionist.

Constructivism, a term introduced by Jean Piaget, asserts that the knowledge acquired by students should not be supplied by the teacher as a ready-made product. Children do best by creating for themselves the specific knowledge they need, rather than being instructed in what they must know. Seymour Papert later found that such things would happen especially felicitously when learners are engaged in constructing something external or at least shareable: a sand castle, a book, a machine, a computer program (Papert 1980). These kinds of activities lead to a model of learning that involves a cycle of internalization of what is outside, then externalization of what is inside, and so on.

This mode of collaboration paves the way to connectivism, or connectionism or connectivity of knowledge, which Seymour Papert professed after many years clinging to logical step-by-step constructivism. According to his later views:

"The deliberate part of learning consists of making connections between mental entities that already exist; new mental entities seem to come into existence in more subtle ways that escape conscious (i.e. step-bystep) control ... This offers a strategy to facilitate learning by improving the connectivity in the learning environment, by actions on cultures rather than on individuals." (Papert, 1993)

Papert asserts that conceptual connections between a given notion or phenomenon and a wide array of other notions and phenomena are often helpful in gaining a more substantial understanding of a subject under study. Rather than passively receiving ready-made facts, notions and opinions, students acquire advanced skills and knowledge by solving problems in their immediate surroundings that they consider personally meaningful and emotionally exciting.

In the days of sweeping global changes, training for a particular skill or job must endow the trainee with an ability to be re-trained and self-retrained. It follows that we believe the concept of mass training to be short-sighted. Constructivist education must take command even in vocational and elementary schools, and a trainee must become a true learner. The priority is not the trans-mission of particular knowledge and skills from teacher to taught, but the development of the ability to acquire these by students on their own. All this, of course, is facilitated by new technologies of education.

For many decades, the polemics surrounding educational reform have vacillated between two points of view: those who favor a progressive, child-centered form of education, and those who prefer a return to a more structured, teacher directed curriculum that emphasizes basic knowledge and skills. Today, however, a growing number of educators adhere to an alternative trend, intended to reconcile these opposing stances. This latter view is the theory of a collaborative community of teacher and students, focused on a dialogue and co-construction of knowledge. Such an approach helps resolve the conflict between traditional instructive teaching and constructive-connectivist autonomous learning. In this, too, ICT are playing a key role.

Division of Higher Education: ©UNESCO 2005