ICTs in Higher Education Today (2018-2020)

In 2018 (when the thesis from which this content derives was written), the embeddedness of ICTs in HE was extensive. Then (and more so today in 2020), uncountable applications were available. However, three broad categories can enclose the more common applications: institutional digital infrastructure, tools of andragogy, and creation and sharing tools (the following figure contains popular examples of each). These categories are porous: applications such as Moodle and Blackboard are both infrastructural and teaching-facilitative (they are for this reason often labelled “LMS” – Learning Management Systems).

ICTs in Education: Examples in 2018

The following table presents a rudimentary chronology. Perhaps most interesting for the educationalist is the approximate correspondence of events and phases in the timeline with the evolution of learning theories (also observed indirectly by Harasim, 2017). Before 1970, didactic practices were influential; behaviourist systems (such as programmed learning) had greater legitimacy than in subsequent decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, constructivist theories and dialogic practices gained favour. In the 1990s, technologies appeared that could support social learning. In the mid-2000s, online-oriented, network-capable, interactive methods emerged with force. This pattern mirrors closely the increasingly social, non-technical, network-orientation of computing.

A Brief Timeline of ICTs in Education

[1] Records management is a natural activity for computerization, but since record management is not a concern uniquely or particularly related to education, and since records management in education poses no peculiarly technical or administrative challenges, this discussion does not focus on records management. In subsequent chapters, however, the affordances of blockchain with regard to records management in education will be explored.