Information technology in higher education: emergent paradigms

Abstract

Changes in society call for changes in education. We discuss two sorts of changes, both relating to flexibility. One change involves the logistics of participating in education: using technology to bring the sorts of processes that we use in society for communication, information management, and document handling and presentation into the ordinary ways of interacting in higher education. Technology allows easy access to resources, sharing and collaboration regardless of time and distance. This leads to expectations from our students that the same efficiencies will also be made use of in education. The second sort of flexibility relates to new pedagogies. In particular, we discuss an approach to pedagogy where students find or create resources that they share with each other and that can be reused to extend the study materials in the course. This new kind of pedagogical flexibility leads to a students and instructor being co-contributors to a course.