Objective or means?

Translation of post "Fine o mezzo" of March 11th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

A colleague of mine, teaching literary subjects refuses any right of citizenship to ICT in schools. In fact ICT is there (or should be there) in many situations, even if we (she) doesn't see it.

Let's take it as a fact: for some reason ICT is in our schools. Why? How can we interpret this presence we might sometimes feel, frankly speaking, uneasy with?

As a first approximation, I'd say that a way of seeing it is as an "objective": we must teach our students some technological abilities (probably because these are needed in the enterprise and corporate world) and the ICT periods at school are directed to this aim.

In some technical or professional school studies this is certainly the case: there are ICT contents the students have to learn, like programming or systems building or admin'ing. In other cases, I think you will agree with me, we've lost before starting the race: "they know more than we do", our students are the digital natives while we are just immigrants, to use a metaphor that's quite fashionable today.

Or we can consider ICT as "means", a "medium" (or "media") to reach something else. I like this perspective more, because it opens up a question: to reach what? I am provoked by this question: which abilities/competences are reachable through technologies, by means of them? In my opinion this might help us to give an answer to the question about the dignity of technologies in schools, too.

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