This book is another professional entry from Springer. It is well organized and carefully edited. It contains seven parts and 19 chapters. The chapters are the best peer-reviewed papers from the Eighth Panhellenic Conference on Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) in Education, in 2012. The reporting is mostly content rich, timely, and easy to follow.
Part 1, “Situating ICT in Education,” makes the case for the roles that technology can and should play in the classroom. Part 2, “ICT in Preschool and Primary Education,” addresses the use of technology in improving learning competencies with primary pupils. Part 3, “ICT and Teaching Programming,” looks at educational games and robots and the advantages each can accrue to learning. Part 4, “Web 2.0 Tools and Learning,” looks at blogs, wikis, and a method that evaluates courseware at the exam, usage, and content levels. Part 5, “ICT for Learning in Museums,” looks at two very different ways that digital technology is changing the museum experience. Part 6, “ICT and Pre- and In-Service Teacher Practices,” conforms with the now-recognized findings that ICT-based professional development programs have had little impact on transforming teaching practices. Teachers need to learn to integrate technology, pedagogy, and content for ICT to reach its potential in the classroom. Part 7, “ICT for Specialized Uses,” contains three chapters that discuss aspects of ICT not addressed in the earlier parts.
Each chapter is grounded in current literature and contains an extensive reference list. The technology, pedagogy, and instructional design follow best practices and show that the authors are conversant with the experts in their fields. The chapters are not equally content rich. In my opinion, the most interesting and valuable chapter is “Educational Games for Teaching Computer Programming,” by Malliarakis et al. It contains exactly what a reader would want. Rather than delving into statistical findings, it discusses real educational computer games and how they can be incorporated into the learning process.
Now we come to the issue of the target audience. A text that sells for more than $100 should be something that is valuable in its entirety. In American universities, schools of education programs are stratified by grade level. Some of the chapters are of interest to elementary education programs, and others to higher education. It does not seem right to ask students to invest in a text that is only of partial relevance to their studies.
Since e-learning is a substantial part of information systems, perhaps a post-baccalaureate course in ICT could use the book as a primary text. Here again, the same caveat surfaces: people interested in human-computer interaction (HCI) or information technology (IT) most likely focus on identifiable segments of society such as training and development in business, industry, or healthcare; few concentrate on education and even fewer on primary education.
On the other hand, it is too good a book to ignore. After much internal debate, I recommend that several copies be purchased by each university that has education and/or instructional design programs, and put on library reserve for courses at all levels that address ICT. The book is a valuable resource to include in course bibliographies.