{"id":190,"date":"2009-05-18T08:36:52","date_gmt":"2009-05-18T16:36:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/?p=190"},"modified":"2012-09-27T10:37:06","modified_gmt":"2012-09-27T14:37:06","slug":"memories-of-icts-long-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/ict-in-education\/memories-of-icts-long-ago\/","title":{"rendered":"Memories of ICTs long ago …"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thanks for the great comments, both on my post and on the general topic of priorities in educational investment.<\/p>\n

John Daly’s post about the value of “traditional” ICTs (e.g., TV, radio etc) in capturing the attention of kids reminded me of my own experiences as a child. I don’t remember very much about elementary school, but I certainly do recall the two occasions when the whole school was assembled in front of a black and while television. The first occasion — for the investiture of Prince Charles as the Prince of Wales — was a bit of a bore, but relatively few of us had TVs at home at that stage, so the\u00a0TV itself was more important than what was happening on screen. But the second occasion — Apollo 11 landing on the moon — is what I still recall, almost 40 years later.\u00a0It left a big impact, and\u00a0I’m certainly in agreement that traditional as well as newfangled ICTs have a continuing educational role to play.<\/p>\n

Wayan Vota, in his post “If and when schools invest, teachers first<\/a>“, makes the incontrovertible point that teachers should come first in any educational investment strategy. Rather disappointingly (as this website is supposed to encourage debate) I can’t really\u00a0find anything to argue with\u00a0on that point. I fully agree that teachers should be in the foreground of any discussion of priorities over the limited resources available for investment, though not\u00a0at the cost of depriving students the chance to engage\u00a0with computers directly. If we treat computers in\u00a0schools the same way that my old elementary school treated the TV, something to be watched from afar in awe, then we won’t have\u00a0progressed very far.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ed Gaible asks me to justify my rather trite attempt to link the success of the Republic in Korea in being the “most improved” country in the OECD’s PISA ranking of educational attainment with its\u00a0#1 score in ICT performance, as rated by the ITU\/UNESCO Digital Opportunity Index<\/a>.\u00a0 I fully agree that the link is rather tenuous, but I would argue that Korea’s ICT success, especially as a pioneer in broadband, is one of the factors that has made a difference in its educational scores. Korean families place a high emphasis on the value of education and, according to some estimates, spend on average around one-third of the family budget on educational expenses. Starting around 2000, Korean families started to get broadband at home, and\u00a0online homework\u00a0was one of the early “killer applications”. The quality of computers and networking in schools also improved immensely aroudn the same date. It would be hard to prove a direct link between the improved broadband access and higher educational attainment, but the timing of the two\u00a0processes is surely more than a co-incidence.<\/p>\n

Perhaps, as a future topic, we could tackle the question of how exactly the value of educational investment in ICTs can be evaluated? Any takers for this topic?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Daly’s post about the value of “traditional” ICTs (e.g., TV, radio etc) in capturing the attention of kids reminded me of my own experiences as a child ….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2535,"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions\/2535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}