PIPELINE Press Room

All member states have signed the recommendations of The Council of Europe and are obliged to follow them. In Norway, extensive research on and assessment of prison education have pointed to the need for and necessity of integrating ICTs.

The main targeted thematic area
As education changes under the impact of networked technologies, it becomes essential for prison education to adapt to such changes. However, there are tensions and contradictions between educational rights referred to above as well as security measures to attend to. The partners in the PIPELINE project see the need for a principled approach to address and resolve such contradictions. Consequently, the present project has a pedagogical, a technical and an organizational aspect. We will share our efforts, knowledge building, experiments and results so that we can come up with feasible and flexible models for ICT integration in prison education. The ultimate aim is to bridge the potential gap between prison education and schools, thus making it easier for prisoners to be resocialized and gain a foothold in a complex and “technicized” society. This requires a set of new literacies – linguistic, cultural, critical and cultural. Also, it requires that prisoners meet technologies on three levels; 1 as tools in themselves, required for a series of everyday operations in the 21st century, 2 as pedagogical tools that facilitate learning and teaching, and 3 as communicative tools that shape the way we live, learn and work in a modern society.
 
In particular, networked environments provide new opportunities for learning. However, with networks come unresolved security concerns. The project would focus on the use of Learning Management Systems (LMS, “platforms”) and how they can be made flexible enough for a variety of learning styles and opportunities, while robust and secure enough to provide structure and block unwanted actions from prisoners. Technical solutions would also have to include e.g. firewalls and dedicated mail servers. The point is to find routes that can be pursued locally, not necessarily to come up with the final, generic solution.
    
The bottom line is that we would pursue aspects of pedagogy, technologies and the contexts in which they are put to use as an integrated but complex phenomenon that needs to be resolved for prison education.
     
The objectives and expected impact
The main objective is to improve prison education in Europe by making ICT available to learners and teachers in prison education. This will bring prison education in line with intentions referred to in policy documents cited in 1.1 above. Also, in a fast-moving society we argue that bridging the gap between life in prison and life after prison by preparing prisoners for a networked world will limit recidivism. People today need to be multiliterate in today’s society, i.e. they need to be able to navigate in and locate digitally linked resources for professional as well as private tasks.
   
The impact is seen in the form of a socio-technical system that is robust enough to take on security challenges and flexible enough to be adapted locally. The system is scaleable and can be developed and exploited for telelearning purposes and collaborative modes of learning and teaching. The experience gathered from the participating countries and institutions will be pooled into the development of the system. In turn, through dissemination the results should benefit all European countries in their endeavours to develop prison education.
   
The main outputs