RESEARCH WINDOWS
Collaboration Makes the
Ed Tech World Go Round
Remarkable advances in transportation, telecommunications, and the Web have pro- vided unprecedented opportunities for international collaborations that will shape the future
of ed tech as a global phenomenon. Although the
worldwide financial situation has been troubling in
recent years, members of the international ed tech
community have been working together and sharing with each other more than ever. This is largely
due to the many varied opportunities for scholars
and teachers to get to know each other over the
past 20 years through national and international
initiatives, conferences, Fulbright programs, sabbaticals, and exchanges. These global collaborations
have happened primarily in three areas: standards,
conferences, and research.
curriculum, and school organization. The
framework was designed to support the professional development of teachers’ ICT skills to
improve their teaching and collaboration with
colleagues and, ultimately, to help them become
innovation leaders in their institutions.
Standards
The educational standards movement has been
prominent in U.S. schooling since the 1980 National Council of Teachers of Mathematics publication of An Agenda for Action: Recommendations
for School Mathematics in the 1980s. This seminal
document paved the way for a host of other con-tent-area standards as well as the NETS•T, which
were introduced in 2000 and revised in 2008.
Other developed nations (including the United
Kingdom, France, Italy, China, and India) have
initiated national technology standards for
teachers, and the United Nations Educational,
Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
has recently attempted to create a set of international standards for teachers in all nations. These
standards, in the form of the ICT Competency
Framework for Teachers, combine a focus on
information and communication technology
(ICT) skills with emergent views in pedagogy,
Conferences
Perhaps the best opportunities for teachers,
teacher educators, administrators, and other
educational ICT professionals to come together
and share ideas, research, and practices occurs
at international ed tech conferences. The synergy that develops through sharing research, practices, and ideas by interacting with colleagues
from around the world serves as a powerful
catalyst that drives our field forward.
For example, renaming the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) to ISTE’s
annual conference and exposition was more
than just a name change. It represented ISTE’s
commitment to hosting a conference that serves
an international community of scholars and
practitioners interested in furthering the role of
technology in education. For more information,
visit the conference website (see Resources).
Another important international ed tech conference is the World Conference on Computers in
Education, which occurs every five years. Since
1970, the International Federation for Information Processing’s (IFIP) Technical Committee
3 for ICT and Education has organized and
conducted this event at host sites around the
world, most recently in Brazil and South Africa.
Attendees represent all regions of the globe, and
participants engage in “working groups” that
focus on issues in specific areas such as primary,
