Jan 2005 - Volume 4 Issue 1
The State of ICT Skills Education
Papers
Editorial by Drew Whitworth
University of Manchester
Welcome to this special edition of ITALICS, the journal of the HEA-ICS. I am honoured to have been asked to be guest editor of this issue.
In 2002, Reffell and I proposed that certain pedagogical problems affected the teaching of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the UK education sector (Reffell and Whitworth, 2002). We suggested that ICT could and should be treated as an intellectual as well as just a service subject and suggested some elements of a curriculum in ICT skills which was more oriented towards the "I" and the "C" than the limiting "T". It is the overall aim of this edition of ITALICS to expand on that assessment. Have there been developments in the past two years, and if so, what? What are the organisational and technological factors which influence the development of curricula? These questions are addressed in both this opening editorial and the three accompanying papers, all written by academics involved with the integration of ICT into HE.
