Use of the Information Age Education resources continues to grow. For a list of IAE’s six major resources and data about three of them, go to http://iae-pedia.org/Main_Page.

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You are familiar with the idea of reading and writing across the curriculum. Our educational system helps students learn to read and write, and then expects students to use reading and writing as aids to learning each discipline they study.

Of course, we recognize that it takes a very long period of instruction and practice for a student to become skilled in reading and writing. Considerable additional effort is required to extend these skills to the various disciplines. Post secondary education continues a student’s education in reading and writing across the curriculum.

Information and Communicating Technology (ICT) provides a broad range of aids to communication, thinking, and problem solving. I find it useful to compare and contrast reading and writing across the curriculum with ICTing across the curriculum. First, think about what students learn about ICT on their own or from their peers. In essence, they learn personal communication and entertainment across their own personal areas of interest. They become fluent in certain modes of communication and entertainment. They adjust to new hardware and software that is used in the areas that interest them.

Now, let’s extend the ICTing to the school environment and curriculum. In terms of reading and writing, we expect a student completing the third grade to be making significant progress in using reading and writing as an aid to learning the various school disciplines. By the seventh grade, more than half of instruction is based on students reading and writing in the various disciplines they study. This increasing emphasis on reading and writing across the curriculum as an aid to learning continues on into higher education.

What about ICT? Is there an orderly progression of students gaining ICT knowledge and sills in a manner that empowers them to get better and better at ICTing as a routine aid to learning the school curriculum?

National Educational Technology Standards (NETS)

The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) has developed standards for ICT in education. Details of what is expected both for teachers and for students at various grade levels are available at http://www.iste.org/standards.aspx. I was the Executive Officer for ISTE when work on this NETS project first began, and I certainly had many opportunities over the years to provide input to the development of these standards. The ISTE standards have provided significant help in both the education of teachers and the education of students.

However, I feel they have significant weaknesses. Here is a quote from an article I read recently about use of supercomputers in Europe. The article is available at: http://cordis.europa.eu/fetch?CALLER=OFFR_TM_EN&ACTION=D&DOC=16&CAT=OFFR&QUERY=0133e6cfe7a7:b72b:21e5e81a&RCN=7026.

Driven by supercomputer processing power, simulation has steadily become the third pillar of scientific research, along with theory and experimentation. European scientists can now simulate the fusion in the sun, create new climate models and eventually build a biologically-accurate virtual humans thanks to EU-funded research that has developed a European infrastructure for supercomputing.

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These results were made possible through the efforts of the 'Distributed European infrastructure for supercomputing applications' (DEISA), which has now completed two phases spanning seven years. Its work has delivered one of the most advanced distributed 'High performance computing' (HPC) facilities in the world. [Bold added for emphasis.]

Notice the emphasis on computer simulation now being the “third pillar” of science. We can think about ICTing in general, and then ICTing in the various disciplines. ICT is now one of the three pillars of science. Does our precollege education system acknowledge this fact and help students learn to ICT in the sciences? (That is meant as a rhetorical question. I believe we do a terrible job in this aspect of precollege science education.)

How about ICTing across all curriculum areas?  Here is a 2006 quote from Jeannette Wing, a highly respected Computer Scientist. (See http://iae-pedia.org/Computational_Thinking.)

Computational thinking builds on the power and limits of computing processes, whether they are executed by a human or by a machine. Computational methods and models give us the courage to solve problems and design systems that no one of us would be capable of tackling alone. Computational thinking confronts the riddle of machine intelligence: What can humans do better than computers, and what can computers do better than humans? Most fundamentally it addresses the question: What is computable? Today, we know only parts of the answer to such questions.  

What ISTE has failed to do in its standards is to push strongly for ICTing across the curriculum from a Computational Thinking (computer modeling and simulation) point of view. ISTE Standards have not yet captured the essence of human brains and computer brains working together to solve the types of problems and accomplish the types of tasks that students study in school. (See http://iae-pedia.org/Two_Brains_Are_Better_Than_One.)

Each year the capabilities of computer brains increase significantly through a combination of better software and better hardware. The educational gap between student knowledge and skills in ICTing across the curriculum and what they could be learning continues rapid growth.

Final Remarks

What can teachers, parents, and others do to help increase ICTing across the curriculum? A good starting point is to raise the topic in discussions among themselves and in discussions with students. 

Pick any academic discipline. (Let's call it XYZ). What useful and cost effective educational rolls can ICT play as part of the content of XYZ, the teaching and learning of XYZ, and assessment in XYZ?  I believe every teacher at every grade level needs to be be able to provide grade and discipline-appropriate answers and routinely implement these answers.