My reflections on ‘Supporting Community Cohesion Through ICT: The E-Partners Programme in Northern Ireland’

Austin Hunter’s article  discussing ‘Supporting community cohesion through ICT: The epartners programme in Northern Ireland’ , talks about the divides across Northern Ireland and how it became possible to bring schools together from different faith backgrounds, despite the history. Statistics show that the schools in the country consist of 95% of children attending either a Catholic or a Protestant school thus the divide is a huge part of life in Northern Ireland. Over the years a number of schemes were introduced in attempts to unite education system and schools within the country, this included a general curriculum that all schools would use thus creating a shared education but Austin et al’s research focused on how communication through technology within schools and education centers can help demolish the divide.

The scheme introduced was called ‘E-Partners’ and this consisted of 16 volunteer schools, which were asked to used technology to communicate their ideas between pupils this technology was Fronter, using fronter allowed the children to experience new learning environments between school and home. Research has shown that the influence of parental involvement can have a major impact on school readiness and attainment levels from birth right up to sixteen years old, thus fronter isn’t only able to decrease the divide in schools and communities in Northern Ireland, but this can also involve parents in the project. Fronter is also able to become a cross curriculum area for the schools and students as they may have specific tasks but are still able to move between different areas of the learning environment.

This scheme did show the two religions co-operating together, pupils and teachers putting differences aside in order to develop learning. although these 16 schools were able to co-operate together it also became apparent that the issues in Northern Ireland may not/ can not be solved through a task as simple as this. The divide runs deeper as this encounters the threat of terrorism and a political divide. But from Austin’s article and Berners-Lee work that the internet and WWW can be used to improve communication and bringing schools, teachers and communities closer.