Educational inquiry and creativity: developing digital resources in Ireland's Information Age Town.

ABSTRACT

Despite cultural and social barriers to technology adoption, the teachers and administrators of schools in the Irish town of Ennis, with help from the Clare County Education Centre, integrated computers, networking, software, Internet, and digital imagery into the schools' curriculum. Success in technology integration has been achieved in primary education due to persistent and innovative efforts on the part of teachers; however, technology integration has not been as deep nor as broad in the secondary-level schools. Students have produced many new learning materials themselves using computer-based tools, the Internet, and other technologies. The barriers, challenges, and achievements of the community described in this case study may have implications for other small communities who wish to use technology for teaching, learning, and curriculum change.

INTRODUCTION

    As teachers move away from  the lecture method to viewing students    as active learners and  providing for their learning needs in new    ways, technology will  become a natural and integral part of the    classroom, just as it is in  everyday life. (Matusevich, 1997, p. 147) 

In 1997 when Ennis, Ireland, won the competition to become Ireland's "Information Age Town," there were virtually no computers in the schools, and very few teachers had ever personally used a computer: For the most part, educators were skeptical that technology would change traditional teaching and learning practices. This article documents the changes that have taken place since then, with emphasis on the integration of technology into the school curriculum, the efforts taken by teachers to make this happen, and examples of how students constructed their own digital learning materials.

BACKGROUND

Historical Context

Ennis, a town of 18,000 people located in the west of Ireland, was named Ireland's Information Age Town in 1997 after a spirited competition among forty-six Irish towns. Ennis had not experienced the technology and financial boom, usually referred to as the "Celtic Tiger," (1) that other, more urban areas of Ireland had celebrated in the mid-1990s; thus, being named the Information Age Town (IAT) promised to move the town rapidly into the information society (Bangemann, 1994; Castells, 2000; Feather, 1994; Information Society Commission, 2002; Komito, 2001; O'Donnel, McQuillan, & Malina, 2003).

Eircom, the telecommunication firm that sponsored the Information Age Town contest, articulated two goals: "1. To saturate a town with 21st century communications technology and see how people come to terms with such technology. 2. To encourage the town to trial new technologies and applications" (Ennis Information Age Town, 2005b). Education was one of the sectors included in the attempt to infuse the community with computers, software, network technology, and training so that the entire town could become computer literate and benefit from the new tools available to virtually all town residents.

In 1997 Ennis was a busy county market center with a good school system, but there was little technology awareness and use. Even to supply homes with Internet access, the IAT staff first had to provide phone service to six hundred households (Behaviour & Attitudes Marketing Research, 2001, p. 10). Schools were not quite prepared for the loads of computers, monitors, and peripherals that were delivered to their doorsteps (McInerney, 2003). Space had to be found for the equipment, furniture had to be ordered for computer rooms, teachers needed computer training, and lessons needed to be revised if the technology were to be truly integrated into the curriculum. The price tag for the Information Age Town endeavor (1998-2003) was 19 million with 1.9 million of that amount devoted to education (McQuillan, 2000, p. 27; Ennis Information Age Town, 2005a). For a town in the mid-west of Ireland, this was a huge investment; the enormity of the possibilities was not lost on the town's teachers. The purpose of this article is to report on a study that investigated how educators incorporated new technology into the curriculum in the context of a networked community and to highlight projects where students created their own learning materials.

Networked Communities and Education

Rural and remote communities are often those most disadvantaged in the accessibility of information and communication technologies (Marshall, Taylor, & Yu, 2003). The Ennis schools did not have that problem despite their rural surroundings and isolation from Ireland's major urban centers. Like other educators in networked communities, though, the Ennis educators confronted the challenge of how to best take advantage of the technologies for learning, a challenge more daunting than acquiring hardware and software. A similar situation faced the teachers in the Montgomery School System affiliated with the Blacksburg, Virginia, Electronic Village (BEV) project during the mid-1990s. The BEV educators found that, before using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the classroom, it was necessary to adopt learner-centered or constructivist models of education (Ehrich & Kavanaugh, 1997).

In considering models and methods to use in the continual adoption and integration of ICTs, the Ennis educators concentrated on active learning, social interaction, and inquiry-based cognitive learning and teaching, but they needed firsthand knowledge about technology before implementing any of these strategies. In a study of networked communities commissioned by the Rand Corporation, training was viewed by all interviewees as a critical first step to helping individuals go online (Anderson, Bikson, Law, & Mitchell, 1995). Training emerged as a key factor in implementing technology use in Ennis as well. Subsequent sections of this article will discuss educators' adoption of technologies and how they used new-found knowledge to enhance and, in some cases, change the curriculum.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

An investigation of the Ennis schools' integration of technology was a multimethod study where researchers spent extensive time in the Ennis community. It is part of a long-term community informatics study that focuses on various community sectors (Business, Education, Nongovernmental Organizations [NGOs], Public Service, etc.) as the units of analysis. "Community Informatics" (CI) is a relatively new field that studies

    the practice of enabling communities with  Information and  
   Communications Technologies (ICTs). CI seeks to work with  communities towards the effective use of ICTs to improve their  processes, achieve their objectives, overcome the "digital  divides"    that exist both within and between communities, and  empower    communities and citizens in the range of areas of ICT  application    including for health, cultural production, civic  management, and    e-governance among others. (Journal of Community  Informatics, 2000) 

The intention of the research is to create case studies of each sector of the community. The ongoing study began in 2001 and, although educators have been interviewed throughout the course of the research, the Ennis education sector was the primary focus of research during the fall of 2002 and winter and spring of 2003. A detailed timeline with a list of research methods and participant groups is given in Table 1.

Research Questions

The research questions that guided the study sought answers to the following:

* What was the level of ICT use in the schools?

* What processes were used to integrate ICT into the curriculum?

* What were the experiences of the teachers and principals in regard to learning and teaching with technology?

* What were the lessons learned from the Ennis schools' experience?

Research Methods

A literature review focusing on studies of networked communities and educational technology began the process. Issues of the Irish Times and the local newspaper, the Clare Champion, were searched electronically for articles about the Information Age Town. Documents from the Irish Department of Education and Science were read, and the Web site for Ennis as well as those for each Ennis school were examined. In addition to individual and group interviews, self-administered surveys were distributed to 360 teachers in Ennis, with 45 percent of the town's teachers completing them. The results of the survey were entered into SPSS with subsequent reports generated from the software. The purpose of this article is to report on the qualitative aspects of the research. The quantitative results are reported in "Wired Ennis: Learning and Technology in an Information Age Town" (McInerney, 2003).

Participants

The principal investigator, an information scientist, visited Ennis seven times, spending weeks at a time in the community and a total of thirty-five hours observing in the Ennis schools. She conducted interviews with an array of key…