Changing Horizons in Geography Education - HERODOT Network ...

generating activities, which included research contracts, EU projects, running professionaldevelopment courses for others or through national funding. In other casesthere was central funding available to support these activities.More than half of the institutions (55%) were facing difficulties in maintainingthe quality and technical relevance of the ICT-based courses they were trying torun. They identified the main issues as a lack of up-to-date equipment, having toofew useful resources (including readily available data), financial shortages and lowlevels or even no technical support. A final group of institutions (18%) indicated thatthey were unable to offer any IT-based activities due to inadequate or non-existentfacilities, too many students to practically cope with and the lack of training orexpertise of staff. One-third of the responses also noted that, despite the scientific andtechnological nature of many geographical courses, the obvious needs for employabilityand in some cases the student demands for geo-technology rich learningopportunities, the status of Geography at an official level is still considered to be anon-technical or non-scientific discipline. Hence the levels of funding and supportfor laboratory courses do not realistically reflect the needs of the subject, the studentsand the workplace. Institutions thus need to be supported at national (and European)policy level if they are to have the right conditions to develop suitable courses fortheir students.The use of ICT in higher education has experienced rapid growth in recent years.However in the universities surveyed, the technology appeared to be mainly used byacademics to prepare courses (Table 3), rather than to be implemented or integratedinto the courses themselves. Nor were there any plans in most departments to dothis, as of 141 subject-based initiatives identified in the survey, only 28 were relatedto ICT, 12 of these were concerned with GIS developments and only 8 associatedwith elearning. Specific software developments in geography were hardly mentionedat all. So, the involvement of geography departments and geographers in the use ofICT is relatively low and the profile of online activities and innovative learning islimited. This was borne out by the activities at the HERODOT workshop on ExcitingGeography held in Cyprus in June 2004. Of the 30 members of the network whoattended and presented papers, 12 were teacher trainers and 16 were specialists ingeoinformation or GIS. As the workshop was offered openly to all members of thenetwork, it was clear that few ‘academic’ geographers appear to have embraced theimportance or significance of innovation in learning and teaching Geography. It wasalso surprising that only five of the papers addressed the use of ICT and only two wereabout using elearning in geography. This is worrying if geography is to be deliveredTable 3. Main resources used to develop teaching26Amount of use indeveloping coursesOnline learningsourcesWorld WideWebElectronicBooksOn-lineJournalsHigh 6% 38% 0% 5%Average 17% 46% 8% 29%Low 15% 11% 8% 34%No use 62% 5% 85% 32%