The challenge of ICT integration and cultural change in Asian-Pacific contexts of schooling and education

For different reasons in different cultural contexts, the challenge of ICT integration in education is (a) unanimously agreed to be an important key to future prosperity in the emerging global economy and knowledge society, and yet (b) an elusive goal involving missing links between top-down educational theories and policy on one hand, and typical local practices of learning on the other. This symposium investigates some of the tensions, dilemmas and issues associated with notions of cultural change in Asian-Pacific contexts of schooling and education; in particular, comparisons between typically western and Asian approaches to learning, tensions between old teacher-centred and new learner-centred models of pedagogy, distinctions between similar and different issues for developed and developing social contexts, generational tensions between older generations in local cultural contexts and a younger generation increasingly influenced more by global fashions and imperatives. In terms of the interdependent interplay of pedagogical, institutional and social cultural contexts of learning (which are exemplified by the challenges of teacher education), the symposium will explore two main focus questions in particular: (a) what is needed to most effectively integrate ICT in Asian-Pacific contexts of education and (b) how might we distinguish and yet also build upon local versus global contexts of and requirements for effective ICT integration in education.