Bill Rupp offers practical wisdom from his perch as a Montessori parent of four children and as a self-proclaimed digital immigrant who has spent over twenty years in the information technology field. His list of "Considerations before Making Rules for Technology Use" builds on a positive environment of conversation and communication…

This paper details a framework for evaluating the potential of particular forms of technology for supporting student engagement with mathematics. I propose that, focusing on the strength of affordances to engage in particular ways allows us to begin to build an analytic frame that serves two purposes: (1) to begin to document learning as an…

Telecollaboration for Intercultural Language Acquisition (TILA), is an EU-funded project within the Lifelong Learning Programme that will run between January 2013 and June 2015. TILA's overall objectives are: (1) to innovate, enrich and make foreign language teaching programmes more attractive and effective by encouraging the implementation of…

"Asking why" is an important foundation of inquiry and fundamental to the development of reasoning skills and learning. Despite this, and despite the relentless and often disruptive nature of innovations in information and communications technology (ICT), sophisticated tools that directly support this basic act of learning appear to be…

This paper reports on a study that explored the use of cognitively challenging tasks with low-attaining mathematics students and in particular, their teachers' attempts at scaffolding. A major finding was that responding appropriately to scaffolding opportunities was challenging for the teachers. In this paper two main factors are discussed which…

This paper considers educational technology in the light of both rationalist and existentialist theory, arguing that the predominance of rationalism in educational technology may be a dangerous tendency. Existentialist theory is first considered as a way--albeit with limitations--to begin examining educational technology from an ethical…

In creating and maintaining public safety, risks which entail some amount of danger are necessary. These risks must be rated regarding the amount of benefit and danger they would bring in order to ascertain the worthiness of the risk. It is important to realize that risks can often bring greater safety, that many safety devices themselves involve…

This paper discusses ways to think about the dynamics between oral productions and technologies for recording texts. It addresses the special problems of collecting, interpreting, and transcribing literature of North American Indians. Many of the original transcriptions of these works were done with an Indian translator for whom English was not…

Traditionally, educational technologists have not been concerned with social or philosophical questions, and the field does not have a basic educational philosophy. Instead, it is dominated by a viewpoint characterized as "technical rationality" or "technicism"; the most important assumption of this viewpoint is that science…

At the present time the social sciences implicitly or explicitly start from a normative vision which has a dialectical objective: a reasoning that is at once theoretical and practical, or that is both a political and a scientific discourse. A focus on Jurgen Habermas' theory of communicative action provides possibilities of shifting the frontier…

The computational problem-solving mode of thought that has become widespread since the computer revolution has two aspects. The first aspect is the organization of one's view of the world into "context-free" terms and uniform relations between these terms. The relations that are to hold among these terms are taken to be standardized, and…

This paper argues that it is time to think differently about assessing the role of educational technology in the teaching and learning process. The first section addresses the question, "What is learning?" The second section examines the purpose of education. The third section discusses the knowledge base needed to apply educational…

Differences in training in developing countries can be traced to the experiences of colonization, industrialization, and advancing technology. Since decolonization after World War II, developing countries have had to cope with depleted primary resources and unprecedented and unexpectedly rapid industrialization. Industrialization has taken the…

Summarizes issues raised at the OCLC Conference on the Future of the Public Library, focusing on anticipated trends in technology and the library role. Areas discussed include the use of appropriate technologies, governance, demands for reference services, user fees, and the need for strong library leadership. (CLB)

This document contains the following papers on theory from the SITE (Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education) 2001 Conference: (1) "IT with Integrity" (Savilla Banister); (2) "Applications of Knowledge Based Evaluation in Educational Technology" (Michael Connell); (3) "A Tutor's Advice Trains a Student's…