Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 16
A Dialogic Approach to Technology-Enhanced
Education for the Global Knowledge Society
Rupert Wegerif and Nasser Mansour
Graduate School of Education, The University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
The Idea of the Knowledge Society
The claim that education needs to respond to the challenge of the emerging global
knowledge society is now the common sense position in almost every government
educational policy review (Jacoby, 2007). While we may not be surprised that rela-
tively economically advanced countries like the UK, Germany, and the EU shape
education policies to respond to the knowledge society e.g (European Council,
2000), Jacoby finds the same references to the need to compete in the knowledge
society-shaping education policy in less-developed countries such as Bangladesh
and Namibia. The interesting implication Jacoby draws from this is that the idea
of the knowledge society now serves as a vision of a global future that is lead-
ing to a convergence of education policies. Whether grounded on an empirical
analysis of changes in the economy or motivated by a shared vision of a global
networked future, the idea that we are moving into a knowledge society now raises
challenges for educational theories and educational practice and shapes educational
policy across the world.
The basic idea behind the knowledge society is that we are in the midst of a
new economic revolution in which the nature of work is shifting from the industrial
stage dominated by the manufacture and exchange of physical goods towards the
post-industrial “knowledge age” dominated by the manufacture and exchange of
knowledge and ideas in a global context (Drucker, 1969; Bell, 1999; UNESCO,
2005). Manuel Castells, one of the most quoted commentators on the impact of
new technology on society, extends Daniel Bell's earlier analysis of this shift in
the economy and in society by bringing out the extent to which it is dependent on
new information and communications technology. In his trilogy
The Information
Age: Economy, Society and Culture
he analyses data on current trends to argue that
there is a convergence towards a new form of social organization which he calls
“the Network Society” defining this as “a society where the key social structures
