Educational Informatics: The Predicament of a Novel Inter-disciplinary Discipline Introduction Educational informatics has to be regarded as a discipline, since it satisfies

all the customary qualifications for a veritable discipline. Journals, conferences, academic departments and academic degree programs carry the tag "Educational Informatics" with little if no apologetic justification. In this paper, I am not arguing against this but wish to discuss certain foundational problems of educational informatics that have not been sorted out yet, probably due to its very dynamic nature. Education and informatics play significant roles in educational informatics both on the theoretical level and in the practical level. Hence I will be involved with the following two symmetrical questions: (1) Does educational informatics include application of educational theories to informatics and in what manner? (2) Should educational informatics include applications of principles and concepts of Informatics and in what manner? Teachers and researchers often consider the problem of how to use educational theories in order to provide guidelines for the integration of technology in learning environments. Some researchers feel that theories are expected to provide such guidelines, (e.g., Perkins, 1992) while others feel that theories simply fail to deliver such guidelines (e.g., Ilomki, L., Lakkala, M. and Paavola, S., 2006). The situation is not very clear: Are teachers expected to know how to apply educational theories when they integrate the use of technology in their teaching? Do we train teachers to be able to do that on their own? What are the logical conditions for a positive and practical solution to these questions? The opposite question (i.e., (2) above) seems to be extraneous to educational informatics. The term "educational informatics" implies "informatics as affected or motivated by education", in the same manner that physical chemistry is not an application of chemistry to physics but a development chemistry from the point of view of physics. We are not dealing with "informatical education", to coin a new phrase, or are we? Is e-learning a technology affected by learning, or a learning affected by technology? This raises, of course, the question of "Is the tail wagging the dog?" with respect to the order of importance in relating technology with and to pedagogy. How can a educational theory indicate how to use technology pedagogically? Let me first deal with this question as a question of a logical inference. Namely, given any theory of education, of learning or of cognition, T, and let p be a statement of how to use a particular ICT application. Under what conditions there is a possibility that T logically entails p? If we wish to employ logic we must be able to formulate T as a finite set of statements in a recognized language and we must assume that T is logically consistent. From basic logic we know that if the statement "T implies p" is logically true, and if p is not a tautology, then all the terms that appear in p must belong to the language of T . In other words, a necessary condition for the possibility of deriving a useful statement p from T , is that p is phrased in the language of T . This condition is a direct consequence of

the basic properties of logical inferences and has been known since the establishment of model-theory in logic (e.g., Tarski, 1941). Therefore, if we want to derive, from educational theories, statements that refer to the integration of technology into learning environments in a logical manner, these theories must include explicit references to technology. Checking, as representing examples, various versions of Constructivism, from its earliest formulation by Piaget, through the more revised ones (e.g., Perkins, 1999 and others), one must conclude that there is no logical way to directly derive from them any statement about technology, let alone ICT. Some later versions of Constructivism do refer to hypertext and multimedia, (e.g., @@, @@) and therefore, to that extent there is a possibility to derive from these versions conclusions about using hypertext in the application of Constructivism to the design of learning environments. Unfortunately, the concept of hypertext has been diverted from its original meaning (e.g., by @@@, 1981) to a point where it is not clear what the term "hypertext" actually means. Consequently, one may not be able to infer from these versions any practical guidelines concerning the actual design of learning environments in which Constructivism is applied and hypertext is used or employed. Besides direct logical implication, theories can be very helpful when they are expanded by acceptable definitions of new terms. Euclidean Geometry axioms do not speak of triangles or of rectangles, and yet, Euclidean Geometry can be a source of many interesting ideas concerning triangles and squares (e.g. the Pythagorean Theorem). This can happen since we know how to define triangles and rectangles in terms that occur in the axioms of Euclidian Geometry. Feynman refers to this method when he spoke of the use of the theory of physics to other domains of knowledge (1995; p. 64) and I can rephrase to suit our context as the following necessary condition for a logical application of education to the field of technology usage: In order for an educational theory to be useful to other domains of knowledge, by the provision of logical consequences that apply to these domains, the domain in question must supply to the researcher of education with a description of the significant objects of this domain in the language of education. They can say that the students construct a data base (or using hypertext) and the educationalist cannot say anything about it based on educational knowledge. If they will tell him what does constructing a database mean in terms known to education, what happens to the student thinking when the student design the data base? what happens to his or her schemes of problem solving? what happens to the student's understanding of what he or she wants to learn? this is entirely different. Logically speaking, unless we know how to describe precisely procedures of technology usage in educational terms, education cannot tell us how to design technology rich learning environments. If we do not know how to define the construction of data bases in terms known to Constructivism, no theory of it can tell us how to match technology with pedagogy.

Bibliography Ilomki, L., Lakkala, M. and Paavola, S. (2006). Case studies of learning objects used in school settings. Learning, Media and Technology, 31, 249-267. Perkins, D. N., Technology Meets Constructivism: Do They Make Marriage? in Duffy, T. M. & D. H. Johanssen (ed.), Constructivism and the Technology of Instruction: A Conversation. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Eribaum Associates. (Ch. 4, pp. 45-55). 1992. Perkins, D., The Many Faces of Constructivism, Educational Leadership, Vol. 57, No. 3, pp. 6-11. November 1999. Piaget, J., (1954, 1937). Construction of Reality in the Child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.