Introduction
Ontario
colleges, universities, secondary schools, the Ministry
of Training, Colleges and Universities, the Ministry of
Education, as well as service and technology providers
from the public and the private sectors are investing
significant funds, time and energy on technology in learning.
It may not always be clear; however, how or even whether
this investment will add sufficient value to our education
system. There are sceptics as well as technology evangelists
who rightfully draw attention to the decisions that are
made, or not made, and seek explanation and justification.
As a key complement to a comprehensive vision and strategy
under consideration for Ontario, we need a commonly agreed
upon set of solid principles to guide our current and
future investments for technology in learning.
At
Contact North/Contact Nord, we believe there is
a critical need to articulate the fundamental guiding
principles that drive our decisions and policymaking with
respect to technology in learning. We have a set of guiding
principles, which has guided our planning and served our
Network well over the past number of years. Many of these
principles are not original to us, at least the ideas
themselves, as they have been gleaned from a variety of
sources, but we have synthesized these ideas into a coherent
set of principles and provided our own explanations and
clarification. We thought that it might be useful to share
the following summary of these guiding principles, as
part of our contribution to the dialogue with respect
to a Made-In-Ontario Comprehensive Vision and Strategy
for Technology in Learning.
It
is most likely that all of our decisions as college, university,
and secondary school administrators, instructors, policymakers
and funders have been implicitly driven by some or most
of these principles already, but by identifying just what
these might have been we are more likely to be consistent
and on target. The following is a summary of ten principles
that have had merit for us at Contact North/Contact
Nord over the years, and may have merit for others.
