Information literacy in secondary education in the Netherlands: The new curriculum

The Dutch government decided to introduce in 1991 some form of comprehensive lower secondary education for grades 7–9. The Minister of Education and Sciences appointed committees for all fourteen subject areas to prepare attainment targets for these domains. The Committee for Information Literacy and Computer Literacy (ICL) was given the task not only to prepare objectives for a 20-h course on ICL, but also to advise the committees for the other subject areas on how to incorporate information technology into their recommendations. The ICL Committee concluded that a course of 20 h was too little for the subject area of information literacy and computer literacy, and decided to generate objectives for the whole domain of ICL, and to prepare proposals for the strategies by which information literacy and computer literacy can be integrated into the new lower secondary school curriculum

Information technology in The Netherlands : from project initiation to total school commitment

In this session we will examine the process of implementation of technologies into school practice in The Netherlands. Inparticular, we focus on the progression from treating technology as a "special project" to the position in which technology becomesintegrated into the everyday life of the school and teacher. We examine this progression from different perspectives: that of thenational leadership to stimulate new technologies in education, that of the educational software developer, that of the teachertrainer, that of the curriculum developer, and a perspective involving one of the new technologies itself telecommunications. Ineach case we see an evolution from well-planned central support of a "special project" toward systemwide integration and school-based initiatives. The examples we consider include those mentioned briefly in the Spotlight Session, "Going Dutch, By Satellite." In that session, the intention was simply to give an overview of activities in The Netherlands. The purpose of this session is to lookmore reflectively on the evolution of our experiences