Comparing Perspectives on the Role of ICT in Education

Abstract

This paper explores the rationales that people with specific educational roles thought should underpin educational ICT use. It provides a brief overview of the dICTatEd project followed by a summary of the analysis of over 2,000 responses to the project’s web-based questionnaire. Respondents were asked to rate and rank the relative importance they ascribed to each of 19 rationales. Analysis indicates general agreement that some rationales represent poor reasons for using ICT in education while others should be important in driving educational ICT use. However, there was substantial variation between the views of the eight groups within the sample about the relative importance of each rationale. This analysis thus supports an underpinning premise upon which the dICTatEd project is founded: that a key reason for the lack of impact of the substantial investments in ICT in education that have taken place is a lack of shared understandings about the rationales for using ICT in education.