Inclusion’s Final Frontier: Universal Design for Learning – ICT and Innovation in Transformative Education Cover Image

Inclusion’s Final Frontier: Universal Design for Learning – ICT and Innovation in Transformative Education
Inclusion’s Final Frontier: Universal Design for Learning – ICT and Innovation in Transformative Education

Author(s): Alan Bruce
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Education, Higher Education
Published by: European Distance and E-Learning Network
Keywords: Cultural context of e-learning; Educational systems and structures; Learner needs, perceptions and motivations; Learning innovation; Learning psychology; New ICT and media applications in learning; Op

Summary/Abstract: The last two decades have produced ample evidence of the extent and degree to which ICT permeates social structures, economy and the generation and transmission of knowledge itself. While much research has concentrated on the ways in which ICT has initiated, facilitated or accelerated key processes of social change, it is also true to say that social change is shaping our understanding of the social role and potential of ICT. To put it simply, ICT based knowledge generation and transmission systems may play a powerful role in an emerging emancipatory dialectic. Or, on the other hand, they may serve increasingly to restrict human choice and freedom, monitor ‘unacceptable’ behaviours or beliefs and gradually target the intimacy and freedom of human thought and opinion forming. All this poses a fundamental challenge to our understanding of ethics, critical dissent, objective inquiry and the possibility to assert the primacy of human rights and choice in shaping a viable social system within an economic framework many commentators now regard as increasingly restrictive and inegalitarian.

  • Issue Year: 2015
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 382-389
  • Page Count: 8
  • Language: English