CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS  1

  ABSTRACT  4

  TECHNOLOGY IN EDUCATION  5

  Introduction  5

  Finding an appropriate definition  7

  What is technology in higher education  7

  Examples for technolgy in higher education  8

  Advantages of use of technology within educational settings (pros)  10

  Motivating effects on students  10

  Technology may support collaboration  11

  Easy access to almost anything  11

  Low cost highly efficiently  12

  Disdvantages of use of technology within educational settings (cons)  13

  Pressure on non- users  13

  Dominance of technology over didactics  14

  Human interaction is mediated by using technology in education  14

  Historically minimal effects  15

  Further commercializing of education  15

  Not all students having access to new technologies  15

2  NA  

  Challenges if using technology within educational settings (challenges)  16

  The human factor keeps beeing the one making the difference  16

  Producing kind of compatiblity and support for all levels of competence  in

  technology  16

  Constant raising of competence in technology of all individuals  16

  Freedom of choice and non-choice  17

  Not just for the sake of using it  18

  Braveness to stop  18

  Discussion  19

  Justification of perspective  19

  Neither Good nor Bad  19

  It depends on  19

  REFERENCES  20

3  NA  

ABSTRACT

Technology – having been seen as evil and promise the same time the truth probably lying somewhere in the middle. Similar might be the situation if it comes to the question of how the role of technology is considered within educational settings. Such consideration is the purpose of this research paper. To do so the term technology in education is distinguished from the term educational technoloy/technologies as well as technology education. As soon it is clear what we are talking about the pros and cons – and the challenges – can be discussed, and will be discussed.

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TECHNOLOGY IN EDUCATION Introduction

I am admitting: I am a fan of all technology (almost a technology geek), especially whenever used in educational settings. I used to publis h about contemporary educational research with blogger.com but meanwhile stopped doing so and keeping an online diary (lifelog) which is of much more private nature (the platform I am using now is a German one as German is my native language and called diary-z). Also I gained my first academic degree via distance education having included excessive use of technology (e.g. seminars via a BSCW server, mailing lists, weblogs) and trying to gain my Doctoral degree that way as well. On the way I learnt to design courses with WebCT, to use a variety of authoring tools (e.g. EasyProf 2.6.1, Mediator 7, Javanti, TurboDemo and ViewletBuilder) and studied the functions of BSCW and ILIAS in depth, both of them being learning platforms.

Taking this background into acco unt the reader might understand that it was a lot easier for the author to list and explain the pros. Nevertheless there are some cons indeed which cannot be neglected at all. Why otherwise should have been Great Britain’s E- Univesity such a flop? The ambitions were high as an article 1 written by David Walker in 2000 and published in the Chronicle of Higher Education proofs: This university “will help realize a promise by Prime Minister Tony Blair -- to enroll at least half the country's young people in higher education by the time they are 30 years old”, “the e-university will appeal to the large number of British high-school students who graduate but do not enter college, a figure that is estimated to be 80,000 annually”, and an world -class provider with globla reach (term used by Brian Fender, chief executive of the Higher Education Funding Council) will be established. The outcome was pretty different. Though founded in 2000 the first courses were as late as 2003 available, just 900 students being this interested in that they were willing to enroll in the end. This situation resulted in costs of approximately 60K USD per student – even a bit more if compared to the average costs being spend for a student immatriculated in Oxford or Cambridge. As

1 http://chronicle.com/free/2000/05/2000050201u.htm

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almost no private funding could be raised, no money is available and even the website is not working anymore 2 . (Roth 2005) The question arising being confronted with such information is: Are we really ready for a virtual education? Or is it vice versa: virtual environments are not ready (sophisticated and easy to use at the same time) for effective use by humans? To find out more about this question technology in edcation will be defined and the pros and cons as well as challenges discussed in the following sections.

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