Over the last two decades, institutions for higher education such as universities and colleges have rapidly expanded and as a result have experienced profound changes in processes of research and organization. However, the rapid expansion and change has fuelled concerns about issues such as educators' technology professional development. Despite the educational value of emerging technologies in schools, the introduction has not yet enjoyed much success. Effective use of information and communication technologies requires a substantial change in pedagogical practice. Traditional training and learning approaches cannot cope with the rising demand on educators to make use of innovative technologies in their teaching. As a result, educational institutions as well as the public are more and more aware of the need for adequate technology professional development. The focus of this paper is to look at action research as a qualitative research methodology for studying technology professional development in HE in order to improve teaching and learning with ICTs at the tertiary level. The data discussed in this paper have been drawn from a cross institutional setting at Fontys University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands. The data were collected and analysed according to a qualitative approach.
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The objective of this paper is a reflective discussion on the validity of the construct Information Literacy in the perspective of changing information and communication technologies. The research question that will be answered is: what is the impact of technological developments on the relevance of the Information Literacy concept? Technological developments that will be discussed are: - content integration (federated search engines) - amateur publishing (user generated content) - use of social networks to find information - personalisation and push technology - loss of context / fragmentation of information. Research methods: desk research and critical analysis of the results that were found. The analysis of the influence of the discussed technologies on the Information Literacy concept is represented by arrow diagrams. Findings: The Information Literacy concept refers to a set of sub skills varying from retrieval skills to critical use of scholar information. Changing technologies reduce the significance of the more instrumental sub skills of the Information Literacy concept. On the other hand, higher order cognitive skills (for instance critical evaluation of resources and analysis of content) become more and more important for students and professionals who try to solve their information problems. The paper concludes with a description of the facets of the Information Literacy concept that need extra attention in the education of the knowledge workers of the future. [De hier gepubliceerde versie is het 'accepted paper' van het origineel dat is gepubliceerd op www.springerlink.com . De officiële publicatie kan worden gedownload op http://www.springerlink.com/content/n32j3um878720h40/abstract/]
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A social media architect is an appealing new profession that entails crossovers between communication and IT & Design. There are no study programmes for this job. Important questions are how to interest secondary school pupils for such a new job, and how to prepare them for these jobs or jobs that do not even exist today? This research aims to set an example by presenting a realistic job profile of a social media architect by linking the ‘21st century skills’ to the context in which he/she operates.
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