Wrong ideas people manifest while explaining phenomena, with respect to scientific paradigms (i.e., people’s ideas are evaluated with respect to scientific ones). The term preconception is adopted when the wrong idea appears before people meet curricular disciplines. The term misconception is used to mark the students’ mistakes in phenomena interpretation.
Published in Chapter:
Between Tradition and Innovation in ICT and Teaching
Antonio Cartelli (University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, Italy)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 7
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-198-8.ch026
Abstract
During the past few decades, the expanded use of PCs and the Internet introduced many changes in human activities and cooperated in the transformation process leading from the industrial society to the knowledge society. Among other things, the above instruments played a special role in education, and two main phases can be easily recognized: the former one where computing and ICT were mostly used to enhance individuals’ learning features (i.e., teachers mainly had the role of educational worker: planning, controlling and evaluating students’ learning processes); the latter one, more recent and centered on ICT use, where teachers had to adopt situated and collaborative learning strategies, build communities of learners (CoLs), organize students’ work for enhancing problem finding and solving, while helping the development of their ZPDs (zones of proximal development, meaning individuals’ cognitive areas marked by the distance between the subject’s knowledge/experience in a given field and the same knowledge/experience in the best skilled individuals in the community). The above transformation modified not only teachers’ functions, but also the whole school environment and the students’ role within it. The same ICT will help teachers and professors in finding solutions to learning problems by giving them new instruments for the analysis and continuous monitoring of students’ learning processes.