ABSTRACT
The traditional role for teachers has been as presenters of ready-made information and as organisers of learning experiences. One way in which information technology can be used in the classroom is to take over these presentational and organisational roles. This has implications for both teachers and learners: the computer, by providing an additional or alternative source of knowledge and information, may reduce the dependency of students upon the teacher. The aspiration is that this will liberate the teacher’s time and enhance the student’s repertoire of learning skills, enabling greater student autonomy. This would allow students to maximise their active role in learning and help to prevent teaching from being construed by teachers as a technical procedure of transmitting knowledge to passive learners. It would also allow a change in the teacher’s role: student autonomy in learning means that teachers no longer need to adopt a didactic approach, but gain the freedom to function increasingly as ‘enablers of quality learning experiences’ (Somekh and Davies, 1991, p. 156). They need to take on a more active and creative role. Through student autonomy, teachers gain the time and mental space to ‘see and influence more of the learning process’ (POST, 1991, p.3). This in turn allows greater opportunities for teachers and students to engage in the kind of quality communication which generates mindful, deliberate deployment of higher-order thinking processes such as synthesising, interpreting and hypothesising. As a result of this change in the nature of interaction, the roles of teachers and learners can become less distinct. Indeed, the roles may even be reversed at times, as students find themselves having to explain their thinking to teachers, in order to enable teachers to understand. Operating in such a classroom environment necessitates active cognitive involvement on the part of learners and teachers: it is precisely this aspiration relating to the use of information technology in developing metacognitive or thinking skills to which we must now turn.
