The Rationale

Information is not synonymous with knowledge in our society today: information is external whereas knowledge is internal; information may lack meaning, whereas knowledge is always meaningful. It is specific to each person, emerging only after meaning has been attributed to information. One of the most important missions of education precisely consists in transforming information into knowledge.

The Society of Knowledge demands that the Education System undergoes a series of changes among which are the following:

The necessary redefinition of learning: to learn is no longer simply 'knowing things', but now requires the ability to manage information, to confront new problems, and to design new methods of resolving them, … it is to learn to make decisions about the work to be done.  
The necessary redefinition of the work teachers do: what is most important is the “learning”, not the “teaching”; the protagonist of the activity must be the student, because it is the student who must make the information his/her own and transform it into knowledge that is meaningful and functional. Encouraging intellectual habits is one of the keys to achieving this and therein lies one of the major challenges for the education system today.  
The necessary change of the student from spectator to protagonist, from a subject who is acted upon to an agent who does the acting, and the consequent change of the teacher from actor to advisor and guide, from deliverer of information to counsellor, thus transferring to the student the protagonism that is rightfully his/hers.  

The establishment of New Technologies and their ordinary integration into teaching and learning will make these changes possible; not because they facilitate fast access to information, but because they require teachers and students to assume different roles and to no longer treat information in a linear fashion in order to allow for diverse ways for its structuring.

This 9th conference of the European Council for High Ability should serve as the groundwork for a profound analysis of these issues, to come to know the latest advances and possibilities in New Technologies, and to evaluate the ongoing research in this field. Educational Technology is not only for the education of the gifted, but rather, serves the more ambitious purpose of helping to provide a gifted education for everyone: this is our commitment and our challenge.


Javier Tourón
Conference Chairman