Freesh

At many schools, while the pupils think they have great ICT skills, the teachers hold an opposite point of view. Hence, there are different opinions of what constitutes ICT competences, or “digital competence”.

The different opinions can be considered as a gap between generations. This highlights the importance of a common concept of digital competence. If no common understanding
of digital competence is developed among management, teachers and pupils, there is both a risk for diminishing the use of ICT at school level and an increased social divide.

In order for both teachers and pupils to know what to aim for in terms of optimal use of ICT in education, a shared definition and measurement framework needs to be developed.
If you ask pupils and teachers what it means to be able to read and write, you will probably get quite uniform answers – formulated however with different words. But if you ask them what it means to be digitally competent, you will get totally different answers from teachers on the one hand and pupils on the other.
The study shows that there is a great gap between how ICT is used in schools and outside school, where pupils experience that they learn the most about ICT outside school (see Chapter 4). This gap can also be seen as a gap between generations. The pupils
have competences learned outside school that are not acknowledged and not qualified in school. This can be illustrated by a Norwegian 13-year old pupil who submitted an assignment on e-mail. The assignment was in perfect Norwegian, but the short message
in the e-mail to the teacher was in “SMS-language” with a lot of abbreviations. The pupils are becoming bilingual, but their digital language is not acknowledged inside the school.
The digital worlds of teachers and pupils are two separate worlds.
Very few teachers know what is going on in the digital world of a 13-year-old pupil: chatrooms, participating in game clans on the internet buying virtual swords with real money, blogging and constant use of the mobile phone. On the other hand, the teachers are
frustrated by the lack of source criticism among the pupils when it comes to the use of for instance the internet in the schools. The teachers believe that the pupils are the “copy-paste-generation”, who copy information on the internet and turn it in their teachers, as if it was their own work without any critical editing.

This constitutes a severe challenge, because digital competence in Nordic countries is viewed as a basic cultural competence on the same level as reading and writing. There are many different ICT competences, where some are relevant in school, while others are
not. Downloading illegal music from the internet is a competence that should not be learned in school, while an understanding of blogging as a genre probably should. Digital competences are much more than just using the technology, but to really understand what it means, there is a need for a dialogue between teachers and pupils. Ramboll Management recommends a ‘Digital-Competence-Dialogue-Day’ in all schools and a focus on integrating the pupils’ digital world into the ongoing ministerial work on defining digital competences. There is also a need for clear indicators for measuring digital competence in order to get an accurate picture of the actual digital competences among pupils. Ramboll Management assess that this is a great challenge that has to be met, if ICT is to have further impact in the Nordic schools.

Otherwise the gap between generations in the digital area will lead to that the potential positive impact of ICT will not be exploited. Furthermore there is a risk that this will lead to an accelerated social divide, where some pupils become digitally bilingual and use ICT in many different ways at school and at home – while others cannot. The results indicate that different groups of pupils – girls and pupils with other native languages – are more dependent on learning to use ICT in school and this need is not being met satisfactorily.

As inspiration, some of this is already under way in Norway. The Norwegian National Curriculum is under revision and in the new curriculum that takes effect from the school year 2006-2007, ICT is one of five basic skills that are to be embedded in all subject
matters at all levels.