Development & Aid, Education, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

EDUCATION-LATAM: The Internet, Friend or Foe of Learning?

Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, Nov 16 2005 (IPS) - A school in the Chilean capital has decided to prohibit students from writing their assignments on computers. “The kids just download material from the Internet and hand it in without making any changes. They don’t even read it. Now they will have to write out their assignments by hand, which means they will have to take the time to read them,” teacher Josefina Arriagada told IPS.

The case of Jaime Eyzaguirre School, attended by middle-class and working-class children in the Santiago municipality of Recoleta, illustrates one of the many challenges facing the introduction of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) into the educational sector, particularly in view of the boom in Internet use since the 1990s.

“ICTs do not simply represent just another means or tool, but are shaking up the very foundations of learning processes and the place occupied by knowledge in contemporary society,” said Chilean educator Emilio Gautier, the coordinator of a research project based on case studies in eight Latin American countries.

The incorporation of ICTs in the educational sphere is one of the main themes to be addressed at the second and final phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), which began Wednesday in Tunis.

The study coordinated by Gautier was organised in 2004 and published this year by the Regional Bureau for Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (OREALC) of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). It addresses experiences in teacher training and the use of ICTs in education in Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay and Peru.

“Teachers who are not familiar with the use of information and communication technologies are at a clear disadvantage in relation to their students. Technology is advancing at a far faster pace in daily life than in the schools, even in remote and impoverished areas where basic services are lacking,” commented OREALC director Ana Luiza Machado.


Unfortunately, she added, changes in the educational system have not kept up with the pace of innovations in ICTs.

Lucy Lagos, 45, a fourth-grade teacher at Santa Teresa Elementary School – a state-subsidised private school in the northern Santiago district of Quilicura – told IPS that her students use the Internet, “but outside of school, for example, to do the research assignments I give them as homework.”

At the school itself, Lagos explained, there is a laboratory with 20 computers for the students and another three computers for the teachers, but none of them are connected to the Internet.

This situation will soon change, however, when the school is incorporated into the Enlaces (Links) programme, a Ministry of Education initiative aimed at providing all of the country’s primary and secondary schools with access to ICTs.

Enlaces was launched in 1992, and now involves the participation of some 100,000 teachers throughout the country. The programme is one of the experiences addressed by the OREALC study in Chile, alongside university programmes for distance education and the training of primary school teachers in the use of these new technologies.

In Bolivia, the Ministry of Education has undertaken a programme for the ICT-supported management and administration of educational facilities, as well as an interactive radio-based learning project addressing the issue of health care.

Three initiatives were studied in Colombia: a university master’s degree programme in ICTs, the incorporation of ICTs in the teaching of mathematics, and a “virtual school” in the department (province) of Caldas, operated with the support of local coffee producers.

Maestr@s.com (from the Spanish word for teachers) is a project undertaken by the Ministry of Education in Ecuador, through which the provincial government of Pichincha (where the capital, Quito, is located) is promoting the incorporation of computers and the Internet in the school system, while providing specialised teacher training with the Edufuturo programme.

The OREALC study also takes a look at the experiences of the Diploma Programme in Distance Education in Mexico and the 21st-Century Educator Programme in Panama, which is funded by a private foundation.

In Paraguay, the Doctor Raúl Peña Higher Institute of Education is carrying out a pilot project for training teachers in the use of ICTs, with instruction provided in both Spanish and Guaraní, an indigenous language. Another bilingual programme, designed for schools in rural and indigenous communities, is called Ñañemoarandúke (Let’s Learn Together) and is aimed at teachers without university degrees.

The School Web project undertaken by the non-governmental organisation Paideia is yet another Paraguayan experience presented in the study.

As for Peru, the researchers looked at the Special Project for Distance Education at the Catholic University and the Huascarán Project, a Ministry of Education initiative that is also geared to distance education.

Gautier, the director of distance education at the private ARCIS (Arts and Social Sciences) University of Chile, stressed in his introductory comments on the research study that practically all of the Latin American experiences linking ICTs and education are carried out through partnerships that break down “the barriers between the public and the private.”

“In a number of them we see public agencies cooperating with private enterprises. We also see trade unions or social organisations working together with professional associations. In summary, there is a coordination of efforts among different actors,” he noted.

One of the most noteworthy examples, he added, was the maestr@s.com programme in Ecuador, which involves the Ministry of Education, the teachers union, the schools and private companies that provide the necessary equipment.

The study demonstrates that significant efforts are being made to adapt teacher training to the new educational needs of the information society, and that this requires a special emphasis on promoting equality of opportunities, in a region where access to the Internet both reflects and gives rise to social and economic inequities.

One major challenge is innovation, a concept intrinsically linked to ICTs, which in the field of education implies updating the design and execution of projects, promoting the production of teaching materials in different formats, and above all, fostering innovative teaching techniques.

Unlike Arriagada, the teacher who blames the Internet for the loss of the reading habit, Ana María Quezada, a 50-year-old public primary school teacher in the west Santiago municipality of Maipú, uses CD-ROM computer programmes in her classes.

“My students work with the Abracadabra programme to learn to speak (well) and write, and they also work with math programmes. The assignments that they used to write out by hand, they now do on the computer,” Quezada, who has been a teacher for 28 years, told IPS.

For the classes held in the school’s computer lab, there is a computer for every two students. “Right now there are a lot of girls and boys who know how to use computers despite the fact that many of them don’t have computers at home. I see this as a positive impact,” she said.

In the meantime, Lagos is clearly disappointed in the results of the Enlaces programme so far, since her school is still waiting for the teacher training and Internet connection that the initiative is supposed to provide.

“The only impact I have seen up until now is that they have installed these wonderful, lovely computer labs. The kids use educational games software, but they are merely games. There is no direct link between what they are doing on the computers and the curriculum for mathematics, sciences or language arts,” she remarked.

 
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