While educators may legitimately debate strategies and methods, all agree that participation in the world of the 21st century will demand technology competence. Today’s students’ respond to visuals and depend heavily upon television, digital technologies and the internet to gather information and communicate with others around the world. The education sector need to reflect this culture of communication in its pedagogy — using PowerPoint as a ‘tool’ to project imagery and information is immaterial, we are simply using didactic methodologies and glitzing it up. Instead we should be learning from contemporary artists who are adopting new technologies in the studio, deploying them in the gallery, inhabiting them through the internet and making artworks that reflect our society in a stunning range of ways. A common misconception is that any art that has a digital core must be part of the breakaway from more conventional art forms and have little in common with mainstream art. If we familiarise ourselves with artists such as Patrick Tresset, Lane Hall and Lisa Moline or Joan Truckenbrod we will realise that this is not the case.
Unless creative thinking and good educational practice is driving the uses of digital technology in art education, the whole process will become a rote exercise. We must develop our artistic learning environments from teacher-centred to student-centred and it is imperative that we direct our art teachers in this change of pedagogy, what we should be promoting is a renaissance as oppose to a ‘retooling’ of art teachers. Consequently, this will allow students to develop the ability to interpret, use, appreciate, and create images and video using both conventional and 21st century media in ways that advance thinking, decision making, communication, and learning. Making art educators competent and knowledgeable of this change as well as the appropriate uses of digital technology in the art room will be without doubt one of the principal obstacles that will effect the purposeful integration of digital technology
in the art curriculum of the 21st century.