Høgskolen i Oslo Between “Special Interest” and “a Social Duty”: Reflections on Teachers and ICTs Leikny Øgrim Faculty of Education Oslo Univ. College, Norway Eevi E. Beck Education Research Institute Univ. of Oslo, Norway

Who am I? l NOT a sosiologist –Society, sociality, community, social system? – Knowledge society, epistemic society, scientific community? l Computer scientist l Teacher

Objects? l Object oriented design and programming –containers of processes and attributes, –building bricks of systems –concrete and well defined l ICTs and learning – small, reusable unit of learning material, –shared in different fields and institutions

Objects of knowledge l Shared, open, and under-defined l Lack of completeness l Unfulfilment of wants

Activity theory? Boundary objects? Object?

Teacher’s objects of knowledge l Pedagogy? l Methods of teaching? l National curriculum? l Mathematics? l ICTs?

Three Challenges to teachers l Weakened control over the learning process l Weakened control over pupils l Weakened control over contents

Teachers as experts l teachers are experts in teaching, pedagogy and didactics. l Additional knowledge, for instance language, mathematics, history, and ICTs.

ICT knowledge objects l Computers, programming languages, system development methods, human computer interface guidelines l Members of different professions think they are experts on ICTs, even if only the usage specific to their own profession is a knowledge object to them.

What makes a profession? l Knowledge objects moving from experts to everybody l Changing the meaning of membership in the teacher profession.

“a Social Duty” “Special Interest”