Editorial
In the summer of 2005 the World Conference on Computers in Education (WCCE 2005) took place at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, and it had been hoped that we would be able to publish a special edition devoted to papers drawn from those presented at the conference. However, due to one or two technical glitches, this proved impossible and three papers from the conference were published in the last edition (12.1) and four further papers from the WCCE 2005 appear in this edition. The overall theme of conference was "40 Years of Computers in Education. What Works?" and the first two papers in this edition reflect this. Margaret Cox and Gail Marshall in their paper "Effects of ICT: Do we know what we should know?" argue that even after many decades of ICT use in the classroom there are still important unanswered questions about the impact of technology in both the long and short term. They initially explain why it is important to obtain answers to these questions, why the questions remain unanswered. They then suggest that the reasons for the questions remaining unanswered, despite considerable research into numerous aspects of ICT in education, are due to major policy and methodological problems including the lack of largescale longitudinal studies. The main body of the paper focuses on what Cox and Marshall see as the five key problems that "need to be understood and addressed if future research into the effects of ICT on students' learning is to provide results which are robust and reliable." They conclude by suggesting ways forward for Government ICT development policies, teacher training programmes, national curricula and future research projects. In "ICT, Educational Technology and Educational Instruments. Will what has worked, work again elsewhere in the future?" George Louis Baron and Eric Bruillard like Cox and Marshall note the limitations of previous research. Baron and Bruillard suggest that most results were obtained from focused experiments using some form of educational technology and generally a limited number of students, or from large scale surveys that had little control over the kind of activities that the students undertook. The paper then focuses on Educ Inf Technol (2007) 12:57 58 DOI 10.1007/s10639 007 9034 8
Education and Information Technologies