This chapter will explore barriers to information and communication technology (ICT) adoption in the educational context. The first section of this chapter is a brief background to the subject of ICT in education. The second section will be a brief history of how educational theory has influenced ICT adoption in education. Section 3 will be a detailed literature review of barriers to technology adoption faced by educational administrators, instructional designers, educators, and learners. The final section introduces a case study of the Japanese context to illustrate the real-world challenges faced at the national level in providing the support needed to incorporate many of these technologies into an existing educational system.
TopBackground
The proliferation of affordances offered by digital technologies continues to have a significant impact on the learning sciences. The prospects for some benefit from the affordances offered by ICT are appealing but not entirely understood by many educators (Funamori, 2017; Richardson, 2011). Since Gibson (1977) coined the term affordance to represent the relationship between an animal and its environment, affordances have been discussed in educational literature in relation to the application of the various attributes of digital technologies to their possible benefit in the learning process. Likewise, researchers have considered the associations between pedagogies and technology that motivate learning practices. Key affordances associated with this discussion are many, ranging from the portability and the depth of reflection (Ilic, 2021d) offered by mobile technology to the customizable environments offered by Augmented Reality. However, the diverse nature of contemporary information society is mediated through communication technologies, which can lead to questions of information quality and attribution. Researchers have yet to clarify the full impact of this concept on the intersection of technology and education(Code et al., 2022; Gound, 2022; Kefalaki et al., 2022; Lai et al., 2022).
ICT and other modern technologies can be seen as a type of lens that magnifies the existing educational theories and approaches. The educational ideas or best practices may well have existed for hundreds of years prior to the introduction of the technology. However, the convenience of the affordance offered by modern technology allows for the practical implementation of educational approaches such as personalized learning (Whalley et al., 2021; Xie et al., 2019). Likewise, after centuries, the dream of differentiated learning is slowly becoming a reality with modern ICT technologies and data analysis advances. When taking this perspective, educational stakeholders can take time to carefully consider how a new potential technological addition to the current digital ecosystem may enhance these well-known educational needs. However, we are frequently so impressed by new technologies that there is a rush to adopt them, and the educators on the ground are left to determine how best to utilize them after the fact. Well-known educational needs supported by technological affordances are many, including ubiquitous learning, active knowledge-making, multi-modal meaning-making, recursive feedback, collaborative intelligence, metacognition, and differentiated learning (Cope & Kalantzis, 2017; Ilic, 2019a).