Educational technology includes all educational resources --- men and materials, methods and techniques, means and media in an integrated and systematic manner to optimize learning. Learning not teaching is the crucial task of the educational process. Technology is one component in this process and can help make learning easy and interesting.A large number of schools have gone headlong into computer education --- not really computer-based education --- and usually what this means is learning how to use a computer for different tasks, including mathematical operations (statistics, spreadsheets, geometric modeling) and desktop publishing (bringing out a class magazine or making posters).Computer-based education, on the other hand, implies the use of computers as a means to educate. Lessons are designed using the capacities of the computer to stimulate, organize information, and present materials that are visual, auditory and text-based, all within the same frame. Such computer-based education ‘packages’ replace or augment the textbook-and-lecture, and offer the students a different sort of learning experience.Discussions and debates on computer-based education, to be meaningful, need to be based on systematic research and methodologically sound evaluations. However, current evaluations are inadequate for several reasons.Consumers of technological innovations often assume that because these innovations are well advertised, they are good. Secondly, evaluations are often reduced to numbers where the amount of money spent, the ratio of students to computers, the amount of time the students have access to computers, etc., represent the value of computer-based education. Perhaps most importantly, evaluations have compared instructional innovation with an existing approach. They do not examine the nature of the innovation, assuming that it is inherently different from another entity simply because it is called by a different name.
Globalization and the attendant concerns about poverty and inequality have become a focus of discussion in a way that few other topics, except for international terrorism or global warming, have. Most people have a strong opinion on globalization, and all of them express an interest in the well-being of the world's poor. The financial press and influential international officials confidently assert that global free markets expand the horizons for the poor, whereas activist-protesters hold the opposite belief with equal intensity. Yet the strength of people's conviction is often in inverse proportion to the amount of robust factual evidence they have.As is common in contentious public debates, different people mean different things by the same word. Some interpret "globalization" to mean the global reach of communications technology and capital movements, some think of the outsourcing by domestic companies in rich countries, and others see globalization as a byword for...
Comments