ICT for education?

What Does This Mean for ICT, Education, and Development?

 Increasingly, countries across the globe are embracing a vision for development of Knowledge Societies and adopting policies and strategies to encourage this development. Education is of vital importance in the knowledge society, as a source of basic skills, as a foundation for development of new knowledge and innovation, and as an engine for socio-economic development. Education is, therefore, a critical requirement in creating knowledge societies that can stimulate development, economic growth, and prosperity. It is not only the means by which individuals become skilled participants in society and the economy, but is also a key driver expanding ICT usage.14 12 UNESCO (2005).

Towards Knowledge Societies. Paris: UNESCO, p.2 13 Punie, Y., and Cabrera, M. (2005). The Future of ICT and Learning in the Knowledge Society - Report on a Joint DG JRC-DG EAC Workshop held in Seville, 20-21 October 2005. Seville: European Commission DirectorateGeneral Joint Research Centre Thus, rather than considering ICT, education, and development as separate pillars required to support the knowledge society, one may view education and development as interrelated drivers for socioeconomic development. In this view, ICT is the enabler for both innovation and education – without which a knowledge society cannot be realized, supported or further developed. This is visually captured in the following figure:

Changing digital Technology (multimedia)

As personal computers and their software become more powerful they have the capacity to not only record and edit text, sound, still images, motion pictures and manage interactivity individually, but synthesize all of them onto the same page, screen or viewing, creating new plateaus or forms of composition. Personal computer technology has placed multimedia creation in the hands of any computer user. As multimedia becomes a more prevalent form of communication it is argued that the literacy of ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ using multimedia be taught in schools and other education institutions.

The related study of mass media has long been part of the school program in many school systems either as a separate subject option in secondary schools or more often as a part of general literacy learning. Film Study has also been a school subject in many schools for some time using relatively expensive and complicated equipment to make film or video. The rapid development of multimedia via personal computing means that it is becoming a routine form for a widening group of people not only for just “reading” but for creating the media. The line between mass media and personally authored media is becoming much more blurred if not obliterated. Some non professional authors on the web already have audiences larger than major commercial publications such as major newspapers and TV stations, whether text based blogs or multimedia podcasts. The sudden emergence of short video as a medium for viewing and authoring on sites such as YouTube has illustrated the very rapid rate of change in this area, and the need to learn new forms of literacy

Fernando Buyu 9G/12