History of ICT

Since the early 1990s, schools have been on the frontline of the ICT revolution. The new technologies
of the digital age have presented school systems and educators with a perplexing mix of promise and
problem. ICT has been promoted as the great hope of new education, the great liberator, the common
currency of the ‘knowledge age’.
The reality has not quite matched up. As a teaching and learning tool-system, ICT has also created the
greatest frustrations and the greatest disappointments. This is as true for the history classroom – real or
virtual – as for any other. But it is also true to say that for history education ICT offers particular
challenges and particular advantages.
A 1999 study on computer use in schools, Real Time: Computers, Change and Schooling,
commissioned by the former Commonwealth Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs,
found that many students are competent and experienced computer users who do not depend on
schools to access information or develop technological skills. In surveying the basic and advanced
computer abilities of primary and secondary students, the research also showed that many computer
skills are picked up at home and that girls and boys have different patterns of computer use. While
there are areas of disadvantage among Indigenous students and students in rural and isolated areas,
approximately 60% of Australian households now own a personal computer and 30% have a home
connection to the Internet.
i
At first glance, these figures support the prediction of Seymour Papert, pioneer of educational
computing, who said back in 1980 that:
Increasingly, the computers of the very near future will be the private property of
individuals, and this will gradually return to the individual the power to determine
patterns of education. Education will become more of a private act … There will be
new opportunities for imagination and originality.
ii
More than 20 years further on, while we celebrate that computers do offer new capacities to learn both
inside and outside the classroom, we more readily ask about the ‘digital divide’, defined by the fact
that 40% of Australian homes do not use computers and over two-thirds are not connected to the Web.
Schools are still the primary providers of experience and learning in ICT for a significant proportion
of Australian students. Yet schools themselves are caught in the digital divide by the uncomfortable
facts of inequitable resourcing; inequitable quality of access to the range of technologies, be it
hardware, software or Internet service provision; and/or inequitable access to ICT professional
development support.
In the light of such realities, teachers of history face great challenges in utilising ICT, but they also
have great opportunities to join students’ enthusiasm for computers with exciting and innovative
teaching and learning in history.
This section of Making History provides some guidelines on how to maximise the teaching and
learning opportunities offered by ICT and how to apply their unique capacities to exploring history
and developing historical skills through the ‘digital dialogue’.