Objective
The Web for Schools (WfS) project seeks to make substantial contributions to the creation of the Information Society by preparing the ground for a concerted effort to establish a community of teachers all over Europe, ultimately large enough for self-sustained growth, who are able, in terms of skills and infrastructure, to use and contribute to a network of people involved in the production of electronic educational material.
It should be clear that the Information Society cannot be equated with an infrastructure such as the Internet, but should be regarded as a society of people able to cope with the fast changing Information Technology (IT) and who are skilled in making effective use of IT in obtaining its goals.
Education in this field can not be deferred just to higher education as only some 30% of young people follow higher education in Europe as opposed to 70% in the US and 50% in Japan. Schools must educate their pupils to become the effective change agents of tomorrow. Eventually IT must be employed in classrooms in a variety of subjects, such as art, history, music, mathematics, languages, etc.
Although many local and international initiatives exist in this area, they are mostly directed towards the creation of an infrastructure. While this is an essential prerequisite, it does not constitute an information society. It is the way this infrastructure will eventually be used that will make the difference. Hence, a shift of focus towards community building and skill transfer, the expected problem areas a few years from now, is required. The WfS project focuses on putting the WWW and Internet technology to use in the classroom in a pedagogically sound manner.
In order to reach a critical mass from where infrastructure, skills transfer, and community building will reach a self sustainable growth level, a concerted effort of the different parties involved (including political) must be launched.
The project will undertake the following actions;
Establishing infrastructure in secondary schools. While work in this area will not duplicate other initiatives, a consistent and minimum level of infrastructure must be established as a prerequisite for the skill transfer and community building.
Transferring of skills to teachers and pupils. Beyond the usual e-mail, and browsing, teachers and pupils must learn how to contribute to the Web e.g. by designing their school's home pages, how to design educational material, and how to work in groups and exploit the WWW for the above purposes. Other issues such as 'netiquette' and Intellectual Property Right (IPR) are equally important.
Contributing to the community building process. Once teachers have learned how to perform co-operative work using the WWW this skill must be put to use. The project will moderate special interest groups and provide a structure for a 'Common Information Space'. Apart from being a repository of who-is-who and the special interests, the CIS will in a proactive manner disseminate information on technology and content.
Making results widely available. The above activities will result in material, such as a school starters kit, training and educational material that will be made available through publishers and the WWW itself.
Preparing the ground for a concerted effort for accelerated growth. In order to reach a critical mass, it will be necessary to launch a concerted effort. WfS will prepare the ground by a very directed and specific publicity and by mobilising the socio-political forces through, direct contacts, the demonstrator , and exploiting and adding to existing and expected momentum.
Taking measures to make the activity sustainable. While on the one hand momentum must be created or strengthened, it is important to investigate how to make the growth sustainable.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- social scienceseducational sciencesdidactics
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesinternet
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistory
- natural sciencesmathematics
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Topic(s)
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
ACM - Preparatory, accompanying and support measuresCoordinator
3370 Boutersem
Belgium