E-voting: an example of collaborative e-teaching and e-learning

Information and communication technology (ICT) is increasingly used by universities and other higher education institutions around the world. Most universities and educational policy makers seem to agree that this is a positive development. Consequently, huge amounts of resources are committed to the increase in scope and scale of ICT in higher education. At the same time educators are often not sure how to use these resources and in many cases reject these technologies outright. Furthermore, there are often technical problems with hardware and software, questions of compatibility, network problems, and open questions regarding the sense and purpose of technology in education. These and other problems can jeopardise the success of e-teaching and e-learning. There are many issues that influence whether eteaching and e-learning are successes or failures but most of them are implicit and seldom discussed coherently. Among these issues we find financial considerations including the opportunity costs of eteaching. Then there are fundamental questions of the role of education in societies and consequently the role of educators in universities. Questions of pedagogy play an important role as do questions of metaphysics which determine the choice of pedagogy. In the everyday experience of e-teaching all of these aspects play important roles but they are rarely made explicit. An exacerbating factor is that e-teaching is often charged with ideology and organisational politics which makes it even harder to objectively reflect on the complex set of issues involved. This paper will present a case study of one particular example of the use of ICT in university education, namely the use of laptops for the purpose of peer-reviewed grading of student presentations. This application, which allows the students to vote on each other’s achievements, will be called “e-voting”. The term should not be mixed up with e-votInteractive Technology & Smart Education (2005) 2: 101–111 © 2005 Troubador Publishing Ltd.