Social ICT: Education

How can ICT help education? The answer to this question probably has a million components. To be very optimistic, we could replace workbooks with desktops or laptops, books would not be needed to be carried in backpacks to school, but downloaded from the internet and students would no longer need to write small notes to each other behind the teacher's back, they could IM (Instant Messaging, the likes of MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger)! Not quite, but why not?

We mentioned the project DonorsChoose.org before, and that is one way that education can be facilitated by ICT. Education is a necessary component of any healthy well functioning society. Schools lacking things necessary in instilling that education on their students will be falling short of their goals, not doing as good a job as might be possible. So when projects like DonorsChoose step in and lend a helping hand, it fills in a void that would otherwise hamper the goal of a good education. What is interesting is that it started in a country like USA where people assume they have everything. I smile thinking about the possibilities of such a project carried out successfully in a country like ours where economic disparities are high. We need a link between the low end of that spectrum and the high end badly, and in more sectors than just education.

The Internet is the largest database in the world, and it serves as an important accompaniment to books for students everywhere. However, those who were not privileged to attend technology savvy schools in third world countries are missing out. Some schools might have one computer, or more, but then they might not have internet. They might have internet, but the teachers might not have the right idea of how to use it to benefit the students. So besides having technology, another important criteria is to have a plan or understanding of how to use the technology to better educate.

SchoolSat is a project that was launched to improve Internet speed at schools in Ireland, with the help of the European Space Agency, and the Internet to the schools there were considered a higly useful resource. They used the Internet to search for materials to support the subjects they were already teaching their students. Later they also learned to use the internet to showcase student projects complete with pictures. This way schools could also see what the others were doing and learn from it. The SchoolSat project was supported by the National Center for Technology for Education (NCTE), which was formed by the government of Ireland to advise, inform and support schools on how to use ICT in education. Thus, the technology is there, the purpose is there, and a government body is in place who actively support the use of technology in education. Definitely these are things we, as a country, can emulate.

Another initiative to promote the computer as a teaching/learning tool was the One Laptop Per Child project. This is not a project that just arranges for each child to have access to a laptop, but it was an initiative to design a different kind of laptop that would appeal to a child's imagination and curiosity and also provide software appropriate to children's learning needs. This laptop was named XO. Another goal was to keep the price of the resulting product to a $100. Without getting into whether the price is/was conducive to be really sellable to the third world countries, the rest of the computer was just marvelous. It had a colorful appearance and ran on free Linux operating system which helped keep its price low immensely. It also has multimedia support and assuming that the children in a small village were using this laptop, in relative proximity, they could share their drawings, or other things they worked on. The XO was developed mostly in the research labs of MIT driven hard by Professor Nicholas Negroponte and made all kinds of design decisions like the kind of battery life that would be necessary for surviving in a village to how to avoid the most usual point of failure of a laptop (the connection between the mother board and the screen, the XO's motherboard lies behind its screen) to ergonomics.