Quo Vademus? The Transformation of Schooling in a Networked World

The Transformation of Schooling in a Networked World " Every student needs a grandparent to link them to the past and a PC to take them into the future. " (UK01-Greenfield) 1. In early 1998, at an informal meeting of the OECD Ministers of Education, the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) was directed to develop plans for a programme on ICT and the quality of schooling. The resulting programme that was approved and subsequently funded by the majority of OECD countries had three areas, Markets and Partnerships, Quality Assurance, and Impact Studies. Areas 1 and 2 have completed their work, which can be found in three OECD publications that are available via the OECD Web site, . Area 3 embarked on two major impact studies: cases studies of ICT and organisational change, which are reported here, and quasi-experimental studies of the factors that affect the learning of ICT and information handling skills, which will be reported in a forthcoming document. An OECD publication containing the combined reports of the two studies is due to appear in June 2002. The current report summarises the findings from 94 case studies done by the 23 countries participating in the study 1. 2. We are deeply appreciative of the work done by the research teams from the participating countries, first in working with us to refine and focus the methodology for this study and then in executing their separate studies and documenting them so richly. No summary can do full justice to the many descriptions, issues, and conjectures presented in these reports and we make no claims for offering any more here than a plate or two from the findings in the sumptuous banquet of case study reports that we received. We hope that the reader will be tempted sufficiently by these samples to feast on the reports themselves, which are publicly available on the OECD Web site identified in the paragraph above. 1 The participating countries are listed in Appendix B. Twenty-one of these were OECD members; the other two were Israel, which has observer status with OECD, and Singapore, which has participated in other OECD activities.