El saber y las TIC: ¿brecha digital o brecha institucional?

Abstract

The use of ICT has become a fundamental strategy for the achievement of pedagogical change because it generates knowledge networks, modifies the attitudes of subjects involved in learning and substantially improves the quality of education. As a result of this, a discussion has arisen with regard to the enormous amount of work that has to be done with relevant actors both in terms of the training of teachers and students and the problems connected to relations between digital natives and immigrants.

A less prominent but equally complex problem concerns the capacity and flexibility of schools as institutions to deal with the changes related to the incorporation of ICT . Up to now these changes have been realized in terms of curriculum policies - incorporating ICT as a subject that has to be learned by pupils and giving it its place in the established curricular framework - and not as a transverse space cutting across the expected institutional and social change. The clash is not only produced between levels of knowledge or the involvement of subjects with new technologies but also between these technologies and the capacity of the school to accept the profound changes inherent in the introduction of ICT which might be feared to erode its institutional identity, for example the horizontalness and multiplicity of sources of knowledge, free access to knowledge, etc.