Technological development in Information Society - Essay Example

 With the advent of computers, the Internet, wireless communication devices and other innovations, technological advances have not only changed the way the world lives and works but also the way the world learns. Only a century ago, the average classroom was a functional place, featuring little more than a blackboard, desks and a few books. In today's digital age, where laptops have replaced loose-leaf notebooks and the blackboard serves as little more than a backdrop for a multi-media presentation, the classroom of the past would seem inefficient and ill-equipped to teach students anything but the most basic of skills. In classrooms in many parts of the world, today's first-graders do their addition problems behind a computer screen and middle-school students conduct research via the Internet, rather than at the local libraries. Such innovations expose children to computers and give them a basic understanding of their use, but few teachers use technology to its full potential, leaving the students and society at a disadvantage. But some fear that the exciting innovations of this century lead to what is referred to as the digital divide. Whilst not all agree on the precise definition of “digital divide” the United Nations, in a 2004 report on the subject, defines the term as the gap “between the information-rich and the information-poor.” The report says that the divide is an area of concern, and challenge for policy-makers worldwide. Some of the innovations leading to the digital divide are telephones machines, mobile subscribers, Internet hosts, computers and Internet-users, according to the report. The International Telecommunication Union, an organization whose mission it is to close the digital divide, says that the wide array of technologies, services and applications “has led to a digital age of information communications technology in which access has become a key component of peoples’ lives.” Although technological advances tend to improve the lives of those who use them, the rapid growth rate of those advances makes it difficult for many poorer individuals, communities or nations to keep pace. Not keeping pace with current technologies can having devastating effects on a community or nation’s business and economic sector. “The convergence of technologies, its rapid rate of change and its importance in the development of the economic, social, financial and educational sectors, is opening new opportunities from e-commerce to Tele-education and Tele-medicine. At the same time, these changes pose fresh challenges -- especially to those in the developing world. Half the world’s inhabitants have yet to make their first basic telephone call. Even fewer have used the Internet. The majority of the more than 6 billion people who inhabit our planet have been completely shut out of the digital revolution and the promise it holds. As the pace of the technological revolution increases, so does the digital divide. The digital divide concerns governments, the private sector, multilateral organisations, financial institutions, non-governmental organisations and everyday citizens. Together, we have the power to close the digital divide by uniting our resources under a common framework designed to foster the growth of information communications technologies world-wide,” the ITU says on it’s Web site. Concern for the digital divide prompted the United Nations in September to hold a global forum to discuss how closing the technology gap may reverse poverty, hunger and disease from far corners of the world. During the forum, Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan was quoted as saying: “The development promise of science and technology remains unfulfilled for the poor of the world” (http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2005/dev2545.doc.htm) He suggested that the international community create a plan and offer incentives to encourage developing countries to adopt strategies for integrating technological learning into their governments, industry, academia and civil society. “The figures relating to the digital divide make grim reading”, said Malaysia’s Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. “One billion people in the world do not have access to a telephone; around 8,000,000 villages, or 30 per cent of all villages worldwide, are still without any kind of connection”, he said, while people living in developed economies enjoyed five times better access to fixed and mobile telephone services, nine times better access to Internet services, and owned 13 times more personal computers than the 85 per cent of the world population living in low- and lower-middle income countries” (http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2005/dev2545.doc.htm). Trends in the digital divide were analysed by the UN, which found that levels of inequality in access to technology are about twice the average levels of income inequality. The trend suggests that the divide may lay in distribution, rather than income. “The distributions of Internet hosts and personal computers remain highly uneven. Mainline telephony shows small, but steady reductions in inequality. However, the distributions of mobile telephony and Internet users across different countries suggest strong gains in access to mobiles and the Internet and an expansion of ICT access in developing countries in particular. Mobile telephony and Internet usage suggest that the digital divide measured by inequality in these distributions may be reducing,” the UN report says. As technological advances are made, the way in which residents of the global community live and work are shifting. Workplaces worldwide are seeing a shift in the workforce from manual, factory jobs to intellectually-driven service jobs. The world is undergoing major information technology changes and if professors, teachers and facilitators do not take an active role in this reform, deficiencies within the system will develop (Ptaszynski 1997). Societies using computers in the classroom are expected to make greater strides in the digital divide than those who do not. Today's generation, often referred to as N-geners, is the first in history to out pace and overtake adults on the technology track; parents, teachers, and other adults are looking to children for help with computers and computing (Kashmanian 2000). "In Finland, for example, the government has chosen 5,000 N-Geners to teach the country’s educators how to use computers!," Kashmanian writes. "N-Gen is transforming the new media from a cult enclave to a cacophonous cauldron of millions. Through their massive demographic muscle and unconstrained minds, N-Geners are creating a new world. This world is one in which any idea, regardless of how threatening it may be to the contemporary social order, has voice and can spur radical views on such topics as business and the process of democratic governance." N-Geners will soon want power in every domain and will take it. Accordingly, those not keeping up with technology will be at a significant disadvantage (Kashmanian 2000). "The world is undergoing rapid transformation. I think it rather egotistical to think that our colleges and universities will be immune to changes associated with transformation from an industrial economy to an information-based economy. In the past twenty years we have seen massive retooling and restructuring of almost every sector of our economy. Banking, finance airlines, agriculture, manufacturing and retail all have been transformed from what they were when most of us in the academy were getting our doctoral degrees. Down-sizing, right-sizing, integration, total quality management, just-in-time manufacturing, industrial consolidation, mergers and acquisitions all seem like buzz words to academics, but they help to describe the forces of change in our economy." (Ptaszynski 1997). Adding computers to classrooms worldwide is one way which the cultural and digital dives might be closed. Computers can be used to expand a student's world and allow them to travel virtually to anywhere in the world. Many researchers say that children are more open to learning when they understand the purpose for the lesson. Memorizing grammar and math rules are better retained when the student understands the real-world concept in which those rules are applied. A project by LTNet-Brasil allows for international collaboration between students in Brazilian and U.S. schools (Rusten 2001). Such collaborations not only open up a whole new genre of social studies, but intercultural learning also fosters understanding between countries and teaches students to think globally rather than locally. As well, by being globally connected via information systems, schools can participate in educational and scientific research. This is of particular benefit to poorer countries. (Rusten 2001). The first is to recognize that N-geners, who grew up in an age of instant access to information, cable television and cell phones, simply learn differently than previous generations. N-Gen kids think, learn, work, play, communicate, shop, and create in fundamentally different ways than their baby boomer parents," Kashmanian writes. Not all students conform to the traditional classroom setting and can no longer be considered "permissive sponges." (Brown, 2002) His article, Growing Up Digital, reminds the reader that as technology continues to change, the educational environment must change as well. As the chief scientist at Xerox, John Seely Brown hired 15-year-olds to design work and learning environments of the future. Just as electricity transformed the world in the 1800s, the World Wide Web is also a transformative medium with a huge impact on the global community.(Brown 2002). "Here again we have a story of gradual development followed by an exploding impact. The Web's antecedents trace back to a U.S. Department of Defense project begun in the late 1960s, then to the innovations of Tim Berners-Lee and others at the Center for European Nuclear Research in the late 1980s, followed by rapid adoption in the mid- and late-1990s. Suddenly we had e-mail available, then a new way to look up information, then a remarkable way to do our shopping-but that's barely the start. The tremendous range of transformations wrought by electricity, so barely sensed by our grandparents a century ago, lie ahead of us through the Web," Brown writes. Today's youths are constantly multiprocessing (Brown 2002). Doing several things at one time, such as watching television while doing homework or talking on a cell phone while driving or listening to music while browsing the Internet make focusing and concentrating on one thing at a time difficult. This poses a challenge for teachers: How to capture a student's attention and keep it. "Most of us experienced formal learning in an authority-based, lecture-oriented school. Now, with incredible amounts of information available through the Web, we find a "new" kind of learning assuming pre-eminence-learning that's discovery based. We are constantly discovering new things as we browse through the emergent digital "libraries." Indeed, Web surfing fuses learning and entertainment, creating "infotainment." But discovery-based learning, even when combined with our notion of navigation, is not so great a change, until we add a third, more subtle shift, one that pertains to forms of reasoning. Classically, reasoning has been concerned with the deductive and abstract. But our observation of kids working with digital media suggests bricolage to us more than abstract logic. Bricolage, a concept studied by Claude Levi-Strauss more than a generation ago, relates to the concrete. It has to do with abilities to find something-an object, tool, document, a piece of code-and to use it to build something you deem important. Judgment is inherently critical to becoming an effective digital bricoleur," Brown writes. In a study at Stanford University, one professor removed himself from his classroom and provided students with a videotape of the lecture. When the students played the tape, they would pause it and discuss the information before continuing. The end result was that the students taking the videotaped class outperformed the students taking the live class (Brown 2002). The study suggests that forming study groups and allowing the students to discuss the material is an asset to learning. Educators are the most important resource of any learning institution, and to help their students reach their full potential, teachers must be allowed the training necessary to keep pace with the ever-changing technology world (Gilbert 1997). Some research suggests that use of information technology in conjunction with teaching is spreading faster than any other form of curricular change and moving irreversibly beyond the pioneers and well into the mainstream faculty (Gilbert 1997). He writes. "Still in the minority, but in rapidly growing numbers, faculty members are convinced that they can teach more and better by using information technology. They also believe that their students must integrate the use of technology into their lives as preparation for careers, or risk being (further) disadvantaged in the competition for jobs in industry, academia, and other sectors.” Technology should allow students to do what they could never before do in classrooms: design systems models, run simulations, research topics on the Internet, join in global communication, and manage information in non-linear ways. But "technology for technology’s sake" should not be tolerated. Technology should not replace valuable hands-on experiences, particularly among primary-aged learners. Technological advances bring exciting innovations to the classroom, but teachers must be trained to use them. School districts, when planning their budgets and expenditures should include training for teachers to educate them as to how computer systems can be used as an educational aide. They must learn the best ways to implement the technology with the skills needed for youths to survive in life. Along with educational training and skills development of peoples in information-poor countries, the United Nations ICT team also recommends closing the digital divide with a general policy vision, networking and infrastructure, technology development , technology diffusion, diffusion to business and global and international cooperation. “These different policies for ICT show how promoting ICT development needs action across a range of policy domains. Coordinated policy initiatives are needed across different areas to build the local capabilities to master and adapt these fast-changing technologies. Becoming competitive in ICT’s needs effort to develop a range of local capabilities in infrastructure, skills, research and the diffusion and the development of business services. A central body may be needed to coordinate and oversee all policy issues driving competitiveness centrally, to ensure policy coherence across different domains and to make sure that efforts in some fields are not held up by bottlenecks in other areas,” the report reads. Although a society can exist without technology, and many societies do prefer isolation as opposed to global inclusion, most cultures rely on technology to keep pace with the world business sector and ensure that their people will be competitive in the global job market. It is possible to close the digital divide. In its report, the United Nations says that gaps have been closed in ICT development and Internet take-up in different regions and countries. In Asia, for example, The Republic of Korea has prioritized telecommunications and ICT development which has led to gains in the overall business and job sectors (UN). “The government of the government of the Republic of Korea has taken decisive action on ICTs and the Internet from early on. The Korea Information Infrastructure project was launched in 1995 and by 2000, high-speed, high –capacity optical transmission networks had been established in 144 regions. The government specifically sought to provide high-speed Internet and multimedia services at low cost, including discounted rates for Internet access for 10,000 primary, middle and high schools. These efforts have been reqarded. At the end of 2001, 7.8 million people subscribed to high-speed Internet services and 56.6 per cent of the population used the Internet, one of the highest rates of Internet usage in the world,” the UN report says. The Korean government did face challenges in the development of mobile Internet network for wider consumer access. “Mobile Internet has attracted attention as a next-generation communication with the convergence of mobile and wired Internet technology. In wired Internet access networks, one network is linked to many ISPs. In the mobile Internet market, mobile carriers limit the content providers and ISP service options available to subscribers in a monopoly stranglehold over the service. Korean mobile carriers in control of mobile Internet networks locked out competing carriers and prevented them from tapping into their networks to maintain market share and gain more subscribers,” the report reads. At the close of his Technology Source article, Gilbert quotes a Mohandas Ghandi in his final days. "I like the image of a gifted world leader devoting so much time to a young person, affirming the fundamental human urge to connect to future generations - to teach- and, perhaps, to learn," Gilbert quotes Ghandi as saying. Among Ghandi's "seven blunders of the world" are wealth without work; pleasure without conscience; knowledge without character; commerce without morality; science without humanity; worship without sacrifice; and politics without principle, Gilbert writes. Ghandi's grandson added an eighth blunder, rights without responsibilities and Gilbert, his own four. They are, technology without direction; connection without communtiy; teaching without joy and learning without hope. Preventing these blunders by integrating technology in into all cultures worldwide will help to close the digital divide and pave the way for a future global society of filled technologically-equal peoples. Citations Brown, J.S. (2002) Growing up digital: work, education, and the ways people learn, United States Distance Learning Association Journal Gilbert, S.W. (1997). Re-focus on learning and teaching; educational uses of information technology for everyone [Electronic version] The Technology Source Kashmanian, K. (2000) The impact of computers on schools: Two authors, two perspectives, the technology source Ptaszynski, J. (1997) Taking an active role in educational reform [Electronic version] The Technology Source Ruth, S. (1997). Leveraging information technology in education: Better models (and maybe fewer computers) needed [Electronic version] The Technology Source, April 1997 Rusten, E. (2001) Using computers in schools. Retrieved December, 18, 2005, from http://learnlink.aed.org United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (2004) The digital divide ICT development indices 2004 (available online at http://stdev.unctad.org) Brown, J.S. (2002) Growing up digital: work, education, and the ways people learn, United States Distance Learning Association Journal Web Resources International Telecommunication Union Web site: www.itu.int United Nations Web site: www.un.org Read More