The first edition of the International Forum on Education and Technology was held in June 2014 as part of the events of the Catalan Tricentennial. The forum was an international event that brought together 96 specialists from 16 countries and 64 different institutions to analyse the current role played by Technology in Education and its expected role in five years’ time.
Technology has clearly facilitated the design and development of new educational spaces, promoted new methodologies, and blurred the barriers between formal, non-formal and informal education, which increasingly need to be considered together and not in individual compartments. The international context of the forum allows us to generate creation networks for redefining new educational and cultural perspectives. In this context, more than ever, we need to consider education as the true driver of a country's development.
This digital, global and ever-changing context must be monitored to gain evidence of the true effectiveness of applying and using technology in education, and we must do so from different perspectives: public policy, the impact in terms of learning and improving the educational process, the ethical and equitable use of technology to help create a more inclusive, unbiased and just world and the necessary critical look at technological advances to take advantage of their educational applications and counteract their dangers, if any. It is necessary to systematically observe the educational context in order to be able to demonstrate through evidence the real impact, in terms of improvement, of applying and using technology. A well-founded, future-oriented educational strategy needs to be defined.
The research strategy should allow us to ask some key questions and, by analysing real situations, answer them: What public policies would be needed to incorporate technology in the educational process to improve the quality of the education system? What new educational spaces does technology offer us? Are teachers able to take on the challenges of education in a digital context? Do we teach students to build knowledge? What should the ethics of education be in a digital society? What are we talking about when we refer to digital inclusion? And Are the latest technologies a threat or an opportunity? We need carry out research into quality educational technology and have sufficient resources to be able to gain evidence of the real impact of technology on educational process.
Research needs to be carried out from an international perspective for generating networks that promote a global collaborative work context in order to answer complex research questions. This forum aims to contribute to making this possible.
FIET 2020 aims to be a meeting of researchers of international relevance in the world of education and technology so that they can reflect, discuss and make proposals on the role of research into technology and education as a transformative element of education in a digital context. The objective is to contrast and find solutions to some of the current deficits of research into educational technology.
From the outlook of Teacher Digital Competence (TDC) development:
1. Analyze the strategies and the necessity to integrate the TDC in teacher initial education and continuous professional development.
2. Analyze the evaluation strategies of TDC.
3. Define the certification process of TDC in the case of teacher initial education.
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