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About This Site:

We live in a global age and are part of a global society. Barriers and borders are diminishing, and an emphasis is being placed on the importance of learning how to coexist with people from many different backgrounds. These global connections and global sharing are the significant drivers behind the changes of the practice of citizenship from strictly national to more globalized.

This globalization is driven by people and enabled by information and communication technologies. As Thomas L. Friedman in The World is Flat maintains, "Information and Communication Technologies create a global platform that allows more people to plug and play, collaborate and compete, share knowledge and share work, than anything we have ever seen in the history of the world."                  

The ongoing technological revolution requires education to adapt fast to a changing reality in order to prepare students for full participation in this new space carved out by advances in technology.  According to the New London Group (NLG), the mission of education is to “ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community and economic life”. In addition, The NLG believes that "classroom teaching and curriculum have to engage with students' own experiences and discourses, which are increasingly defined by cultural and subcultural diversity and the different language backgrounds and practices that come with this diversity."

The new global and interconnected world we are living in calls for a high emphasis on competencies and skills in areas such as global citizenship, cross-cultural competence, intercultural effectiveness and sensitivity, technological literacy and ethics, among others. This website focuses on how harnessing the power of new globally reaching technologies can play a pivotal role in helping educators and students to form positive connections in an ever more interdependent world.

The goal of this website is to provide resources and information that will expand the perspectives of both teachers and learners on how world interconnectedness and new ways of accessing, creating and sharing information are changing the demands placed on education. 
 
 
EPS 415 Class                                           

Professor: Dr. Nicholas C. Burbules

Co-instructor: Daniel Araya

Technology and Educational Reform
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Created by: Leanne Allbrook, Mai Aly, Fanka Dimitrov, Chaitut Roungchai and Georganne Sadomytschenko