MICRO-INNOVATIONS AND STAKEHOLDERS ENGAGEMENT AS DRIVERS FOR SYSTEMIC CHANGE IN ICT-SUPPORTED LEARNING

摘要

The paper discusses the findings and the lessons leamt of two research projects that have worked to understand how to support mainstreaming and scalability of ICT for learning in Europe. These are the VISIR project, which explored how scouting grassroots micro-innovation practices can help to successfully mainstream the potential of ICT to contribute to change in education, and the HOTEL project, which worked on how to appropriately engage stakeholders in supporting innovation in the field of ICT for learning. VISIR (www.visir-network.eu) has tackled the problem of mainstreaming of ICT-for-leaming from a rather new standpoint, that is by focussing on micro-innovation practices: in a nutshell, innovative experience that are micro in terms of implementation scope, size of idea-generator, and degree of actual change, but that bear a very high impact potential. Similarly, the HOTEL project (www.hotel-project.eu) has designed and tested a mechanism to support innovations - and innovators - in the field of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) to move from the pilot and experimental phase to broader mainstream and adoption. In order to do this the project selected a set of innovators and innovations to be accompanied, for a period of time, through a series of interactions with experts, stakeholders' representatives and other critical colleagues who have concretely contributed to strengthen the success prospective of these innovations and contextually reflect on the proposed support in terms of content, process, outcomes and potential impact. Building on the main findings of these projects as well as on other recent attempts to valorise innovation in education, the paper presents some ideas targeted to decision makers, researchers and practitioners, as possible starting points for future bottom-up efforts of innovation valorisation in the field of ICT-supported learning. We argue that active engagement of stakeholders and valorisation of grassroots micro innovation ideas should be two pillars of any innovation support strategy in the field of ICT-enhanced learning. If micro innovation support is a strategy that has been proving to work for example in the US, "inclusive strategies" would represent a unique feature of a European vision in support to innovation, as happens for example in the Living Labs concept.