Editorial, Reform Forum Number 15

This issue of the Reform Forum focuses on issues surrounding information and communication technologies (ITCs) and education.  In particular, all five articles address lessons learned from the Ministry of Basic Education, Sport and Culture’s (MBESC’s) Computer Assisted Teacher Training (CATT) project. CATT was initiated at the beginning of June 2000 and concluded at the end of March 2002.  During this time, this USAID-funded project worked extensively with staff at the National Institute for Education Development (NIED) to develop skills related to producing online training materials for NIED’s websites, the NIED Home Page (www.nied.edu.na), and the Educational Development and Support Network website (www.edsnet.na) and also worked with NIED and education professionals in the Katima Mulilo, Ondangwa East, Ondangwa West, and Rundu Education Regions to explore how these new technologies can be harnessed to improve education within Namibia.

 The first article in this edition is entitled A Different Approach to Providing Basic ICT Support at Multipurpose Resource Centres: The Educational Technology Trainee Experience in Namibia.  It discusses CATT’s approach of choosing out-of-school youth as a readily available human resource for managing multipurpose resource centres.  While many projects seek highly qualified IT personnel to run these centres, CATT has demonstrated that it is possible to train young people for these positions.  The positive benefits of this approach include increasing the pool of human resources capable of running such centres, reducing staff costs at the centres, and providing jobs to young people.

 Another project activity included working with teams of education professionals in the Katima Mulilo, Ondangwa East, Ondangwa West, and Rundu education regions to develop within them a curiosity for exploring how ICTs can be used to improve education in Namibia.  These Regional Education Technology Teams (RETTs) were developed with project assistance, but were encouraged to develop mission statements and activities on their own.  Todd Malone’s paper, Using Learner-Centred Methodology to Teach Learner-Centred Methodology: Duh (An IECET Learning Process, discusses the process the CATT team took in working with these teams.  In particular, he introduces many of the project’s underlying assumptions regarding how best to encourage new ICT learners to approach integrating ICTs into their daily activities.  One point that he makes clear is that fear, time, and access are perhaps the three most important factors to address when designing ICT training.  Mr Malone also discusses the project’s training design, OSSIAR, which represents an open-ended and constructivist approach to ICT training.

 The third article, Education Technology Programmes: Performance Standards and Teacher Certification Considerations, was written by Jeffrey Coupe and Jeffrey Goveia and discusses issues and ideas the Namibian education system may wish to consider in designing programmes to encourage the acquisition of ICT competencies, within its teaching corps.  This article draws heavily upon experience with introducing ICT competencies within in-service training programmes in the United States.

 The fourth article, Policy Support for ICT in Education: Overcoming Barriers to Communication, Sharing, and Change, was written by Jeffrey Goveia and Alfred Ilukena and discusses how the introduction of technology can create windows of opportunity that encourage change.  To highlight this argument, the piece details much of the policy work undertaken by the CATT project and attempts to demonstrate how ICTs can be used to encourage communication, encourage the sharing of information, ideas, and resources, and encourage educational stakeholders to adopt progressive change.

 Using Technology to Support Teacher Training at a Distance in Namibia, is the final article in this edition.  In it, Jeffrey Coupe and Jeffrey Goveia use the CATT experience in Namibia to discuss different approaches and thinking regarding how technology may be used to support distance education within Namibia.  Specifically, they caution policy-makers to critically analyse approaches that are inconsistent with Namibia’s reform efforts and question whether a teacher-less system dominated by technology represents a move towards or away from learner-centred education.  The article also proposes that there are at least six pre-conditions that must be met before Namibia should consider large-scale adoption of technology for use in its distance education teacher training programmes.

 It is our hope that these articles will encourage conversation and debate regarding how ICTs can encourage and support positive education reform within Namibia.  In addition, we hope that these articles demonstrate the CATT project’s desire to reflect upon their own professional practice over the past two years in a way that may help others develop their thinking in relation to how ICTs should be integrated into the Namibian education system.

Editorial Committee