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Preliminary Conceptual Framework to Support the Creation of the Proposed Hemispheric Projects
New Technologies in Education
NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN EDUCATION
“We pledge to promote new technologies at the service of education.”
Declaration of Punta del Este - II Meeting of Ministers of Education
September 2001
The challenges of new technologies in education
The heads of government and state, gathered in Quebec, stressed the importance of the
use of technologies to support all educational processes, from basic education to
secondary education, training of labor competences and higher education. They are
fundamental tools to favor employment, personal development and social commitment.1
At the core of the “transformation” envisioned and expected from today’s educational
systems are the processes that allow schools to transform into a community. The school is
at the center of social change and societal transformation. It is the center of the
community and allows for its members to take an active role in shaping the
transformation process. The school allows the community to imagine, learn, and plan the
role the community will take in overcoming the obstacles dictated by the social, natural,
and physical environment, and in doing so, achieve a sense of well-being. Today, schools
play a significant role in facilitating a community's learning, meeting, and interaction.
Countries are coming to the realization that schools provide the community with
unlimited sources for social exchange.
In other words, school must be relevant to every social group, and to its social, economic
and cultural objectives. Basic education has gone through different approaches within our
countries to address diversity issues; such approaches have opened opportunities to
review school administration, the relationship between teachers and students, the
configuration of curricular content and the relationships with the community.
In many cases, the incorporation of diverse communication and information
technological tools within the educational system had the intention of supporting basic
education diversification efforts to reconfigure relationships inside and outside of school,
and between the school and the community. In such cases, the use of the radio, television,
videotapes, satellite broadcasts, computers and the Internet is directed to sustain the
reconfiguration of an educational system that often times resists change.
However, sometimes the use of many of these innovations in basic education are meant
only to justify low cost services provided at the periphery of the educational systems and
as such dimly reflect the achievements of traditional systems. This situation opens up a
debate on trying to identify the real capacity of technological tools in facilitating the
development of alternative and revolutionary modalities in educational systems. In any
case, the debate calls attention to the recognition that the fundamental goal of the
relationship between school and technologies is to obtain effective transformations in all
dimensions of school management.
Chapter 13 of the Plan of Action of the III Summit of the Americas. Quebec – April 2001.
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Preparatory Meeting for the III Meeting of Ministers of Education
Buenos Aires – April, 2003
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Preliminary Conceptual Framework to Support the Creation of the Proposed Hemispheric Projects
New Technologies in Education
For some, a relevant school of today is an institution that:




Does not separate and compartmentalize the curriculum’s reality,
Does not exclude schools from facing social issues,
Does not set the foundations that reproduce authoritarian relationships in
society,
Succeeds in transmitting visions of learning as a collaborative process for
knowledge building, where errors are seen as both legitimate and necessary.
Technologies have the possibility of supporting and strengthening relationships generated
by schools or new forms of school management.
Even when computers and the Internet cannot be considered as tools for low cost
educational modalities, the puzzle in which they are now embedded is not much different
from that of other media at other times in history. Clearly, their potential benefits are far
greater, but the risk of representing an
Internet hosts (per 1,000 people)
expense or a significant debt becomes
300
even higher without an equivalent benefit
280
towards quality and pertinence in the
educational system.
260
Relevant experiences and lessons
Since the eighties, different countries in
the hemisphere have engaged the use of
computers in basic education. Lessons
derived from their experiences are
fundamental in designing a hemispheric
cooperation program.
240
Taking computers into school to guarantee
its pertinence may seem like an act of pure
wisdom. After all, computers already
pervade most realms of our lives industrial, commercial, administrative and
cultural. And, they have become the main
image for the knowledge society.
Nevertheless, experience shows that even
the most solid and comprehensive
educational policies in this area fail to
achieve their main objectives if they do
not take into consideration qualitative
changes in school relationships:
120
220
200
180
160
140
1990
2000
100
80
60
40
United States
Canada
Uruguay
Argentina
Mexico
Panama
Brazil
Trinidad and Tobago
Chile
Dominica
0
Antigua and Barbuda
20
Source: Human Development Report, UNDP, 2002
The United States, the country with the highest number of computers per capita
connected to the Internet, has implemented different strategies to support the
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Preparatory Meeting for the III Meeting of Ministers of Education
Buenos Aires – April, 2003
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Preliminary Conceptual Framework to Support the Creation of the Proposed Hemispheric Projects
New Technologies in Education
incorporation of computers and access to the Internet in public schools.
According to James Guthrie2, despite great projects that have provided equipment
and infrastructure in the country,3 teachers are not using computers in the manner
that was initially expected. The new reasons range from the development of
student’s basic typing skills and to give teachers e-mail access. "Dozens of
thousands of computers underused, abandoned modems and television monitors
accumulate dust in the classrooms."4
On other occasions, the fate of computers in schools in United States has been
similar to that befallen other technological media in the rest of the countries of the
hemisphere: resistance on the part of the institution cancels out the capacity of the
medium to transform organizational and traditional practices. According to
Seymour Papert5, “...school became a conservative tool when it could have been
a revolutionary one”6
If US educational policy has not been particularly effective in increasing quality and
pertinence in public schools by introducing computers and the Internet, then it would
seem, especially given the abundance of resources they invested, that the lessons are not
solely to be found in the provision, but rather how it is integrated into the schools.
Hence, what is it that computers can specifically contribute within the framework of a
restructuring of school management? Can computers redefine relationships across the
school? Why is it relevant to introduce these tools into schools?
Chile, Costa Rica, Brazil and Mexico have also gone through the process of
introducing computers, the Internet and other media into basic education. The
analysis of their experiences in terms of academic assessment, both successes and
failures, should allow us to draw to some conclusions:7

Within the framework of school management, computers and the
Internet, with its pedagogical, administrative and community
linkages dimensions, can facilitate the integration of a world
fragmented by the traditional curricular structure:
2
James Guthrie is professor of Public Policy and Education in Vanderbilt University in USA.
Today 9 of each 10 public classrooms in the US are connected to the Internet thanks to the "E-Rate" , a
tax paid by each telephone line user that generates 2 billion dollars per year to set up and connect
computers in public schools.
4
James Guthrie, Computers idle in public schools
5
Dr. Seymour Papert is a mathematician and one of the early pioneers of Artificial Intelligence.
Additionally, he is internationally recognized as the seminal thinker about ways in which computers can
change learning.
6
David Bennahum, School´s out? A conversation with Seymour Papert, 2002
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To respond to the II Meeting of the Ministers of Education's mandate, the Organization of American
States, through the Unit for Social Development and Education and the support of the Inter. American
Agency for Cooperation and Development, carried out knowledge sharing seminars in Costa Rica, Chile
and Mexico with the purpose of identifying lessons learned in the consolidated programs of "Educational
Informatics", Enlaces Network and the Secondary Distance Education Program for Adults.
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Preparatory Meeting for the III Meeting of Ministers of Education
Buenos Aires – April, 2003
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Preliminary Conceptual Framework to Support the Creation of the Proposed Hemispheric Projects
New Technologies in Education

With the support of teachers, students can turn learning into a
constant process for building relevant models of reality, and then
in turn apply these models within the various disciplines.
The Costa Rican program, "Educational Informatics", is an illustrative example of
the uses mentioned above. The Ministry of Education and the Omar Dengo
Foundation have carried out the program since 1989 in a collaborative fashion.
This program sets up a computer lab in each primary school and organizes
children into teams of three and four to design projects that represent and explain
a phenomenon of their particular interest, using multidisciplinary relationships to
understand it8.
In Mexico, the program, "Secondary Distance Education for Adults", provides
another example of how technological innovations can contribute to reconfiguring
the secondary education curriculum into relevant blocks that are pertinent to the
social and working context of adults. The Red Escolar program (School Network)
is another relevant experience from this country. It provides spaces to develop
projects that reshape the organization traditional curriculum.
The experience of Costa Rica also exemplifies the capacity of computers and the
Internet to have a dual effect. The Internet provides access to resources required
to construct a model of reality that can stimulate individuals' curiosity and
research.9 It can also promote teamwork while teams work to actually build that
model with the computer. This allows the school to establish the notion that
knowledge building is a collaborative task where the expression of individual
theses, errors and agreements become legitimate and necessary. In this sense, the
Omar Dengo Foundation's determination for not just placing computers in
classrooms but instead facilitating collaborative work through setting up teams of
three students per computer is quite remarkable.
Computers can stimulate and support the implementation of horizontal
relationships based on consensus. In this sense learning results are the shared
responsibility of teachers, students and parents. Teachers participating in Chile's
Enlaces program, Costa Rica's "Educational Informatics," and Mexico's Red
Escolar present themselves to their students in a different role. They are no
longer the “authorized source of knowledge” but rather, they join with their
students to select and interpret the information found on the Internet and explore
the possibilities computers afford. Once the curricular canon is melded and
opened teachers themselves recognize that they too are students.
8
At the core of this strategy there's a software package called Micro worlds that enables the student to
program logic-mathematical and multimedia computer applications.
9
In Seymour Papert's words, "The most common element with all kids is that they start off as enthusiastic
learners, but by the time they have been in school for a few years they have stopped being enthusiastic
about learning. The learning instinct is strangled. That makes their lives poorer. It makes society poorer. it
makes the economy rigid and inflexible. It makes for a more rigid society all around. For those kids
computers could make a very big difference by shaping education to fit their approach to learning" in
School´s out? A conversation with Seymour Papert por David Bennahum, 2002.
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Preparatory Meeting for the III Meeting of Ministers of Education
Buenos Aires – April, 2003
Preliminary Conceptual Framework to Support the Creation of the Proposed Hemispheric Projects
New Technologies in Education
These experiences also demonstrate that sustaining the abovementioned quality processes
is a function of the flexibility provided by the educational system. Computers and the
Internet can become just facilitators of "computer literacy" 10 when the school system
does not provide spaces for teachers to constantly make use of computers to review their
teaching practices and curriculum design.
Thus, rural and indigenous schools in Chile and Costa Rica, with multi-grade classroom
and curriculum integration, proved to be the best environments for experimenting in
order to identify the transformative potential of computers in the classroom. Within these
classrooms, computers and the Internet automatically become promoters of a
multidisciplinary approach to teaching phenomena where children from different ages
and levels collaborate in building a structure and foundation that is relevant to them.
Other relevant lessons include the significant capacity for societal consensus building
within the Chilean educational system. Due to this consensus ENLACES was able to
harness many public and private resources. Likewise, Costa Rica's collaborative efforts to
create “spaces for innovation” and improve the curriculum are also valuable lessons.
Although, there are already many solid theories for understanding the benefits of
incorporating computers and the Internet into the classroom, countries with vast
experience within the hemisphere (as well as others at the early stages of this process),
are aware of the long road ahead. All programs developed within the hemisphere are
based on the belief that teachers’ daily experiences carry a wealth of lessons to
systematize and share. Thus, horizontal cooperation is important to help extract the
relevant lessons of success and failure from experiences and programs. Those lessons can
guide the development of other programs in the hemisphere. In addition, horizontal
cooperation is also useful for a collective, theoretical and practical exploration of the
ways in which computers and the Internet promote the achievement of objectives in
quality and pertinence within the classrooms.
Along these lines, the Dominican Republic's Secretariat for Higher Education, Science
and Technology started an initiative to develop a distance learning workshop on "New
Technologies in Education", inviting teachers and school administrators from different
countries in the hemisphere to participate. This workshop aims to use a theoretical review
of Piaget, Vigotsky and Papert' s work on constructivist and constructionist notions to
identify and build ways in which computers can be effectively incorporated into the
classroom.
10
To reach computer literacy, understood as the acquisition of basic skills for using operational systems
and basic productivity tools (excel sheets and word processors), has been satirized by comparing it with
the achievement of skills to use a pencil, when learning how to use a pencil is the result of developing
expression skills through the written language.
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Preparatory Meeting for the III Meeting of Ministers of Education
Buenos Aires – April, 2003
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Preliminary Conceptual Framework to Support the Creation of the Proposed Hemispheric Projects
New Technologies in Education
Recommendations for designing a Hemispheric Program on New technologies in
Education

To integrate those actions pursuing the incorporation of computers into schools with
national programs aimed towards the transformation of the school management
system, with all its dimensions.

To strengthen, within such integrative efforts, those looking for the modification of
relationships between teachers, students and the community. And, to allow schools to
form individuals with the basic knowledge and skills to take advantage of the
possibilities for interactions and collaborative work that make new information and
communication technologies possible.

To make use of the horizontal cooperation mechanism to identify relevant lessons
from programs in the hemisphere and resources allocated to countries in the
hemisphere, like the OAS’ Educational Portal of the Americas and the
possibilities inherent in the use of the Mexican Educational Satellite System
EDUSAT's for transmitting and receiving video and data throughout the
hemisphere.

The contribution that different international experiences make to enhance this
endeavor is critical to those starting to face this challenge already experienced by
many educational systems. Within this framework, a hemispheric project in the
use of new technologies in education suggests an opportunity for a collaborative
work with seemingly endless benefits.
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Preparatory Meeting for the III Meeting of Ministers of Education
Buenos Aires – April, 2003
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