ICTs and Education – Can we afford to miss the bus?
There is a perception amongst certain quarters of the education fraternity that the introduction of ICTs in education is not very meaningful for a variety of reasons. These reasons may extend from lack of electricity to operate the ICT devices or the dominance of corporate led models which seem to be the only providers of ICT content in education thereby making it expensive and unaffordable. However while all the arguments mentioned above may be true, what is equally compelling and what needs to be answered is whether one can really afford to ignore this opportunity and what are those conditions which need to be encouraged to create an inclusive environment for ICTs in education.
The moment the state of our schools comes to our mind, any ‘ICTs in schools’ thinking can be expected to receive a serious jolt. And yes we cannot and should not ignore this elephant in the room. But having taken account of it, what do we do with the ‘ICTs in schools’ policy issue. Do we just junk it? That would be an important policy perspective and needs to be discussed.
Many of us often under-estimate the extent to which the new technologies are changing our world. And it is not only a matter of either having and using these technologies or not doing so. The changes are much deeper, and impact almost all social processes and structures. One can write tomes on the nature of such changes. But to keep the thing simple, it may be useful to proceed form the other direction, and in fact analyze which sector of the society, and which social structures and processes today are unaffected (I even dare say, not headed towards some kind of structural transformation) by ICTs induced changes. The analogy often given is of the Industrial Revolution and its impact on every social institution – very certainly, on education and schooling systems as well.
Today around us, under the impact of the ICTs, the very nature of civil society - its structures, levels and kinds of activism etc – has changed, the global economic system has changed, strong contestations are taking place on intellectual property issues which will redefine the contours of our economic structures, and so on. Global policies, local governance, media… every sector is impacted. Most of these changes have started to express themselves strongly at the micro levels – which may be of our direct interest, but I won’t go into trying to elaborate further on this.
So what we are trying is to figure out is where does the Indian public schooling system get placed in this fast changing ecology…. And as those interested in policy, we need to look at it in a sufficiently futuristic manner (and future in these fast changing times is often closer than it appears to be). The questions that we face may range from the fairly obvious ones – like could the Indian public education system be producing students that do have basic familiarity with digital systems, when soon even a job at a small shop will require such skills, to more complex ones of what educational material is available to the students in public educations systems, in absolute terms, and also as compared to other schools, what goes into construction of this educational material, who constructs it, how can it be much more participatory than it is at present, how can digital systems work towards increasing accountability of school teachers in far flung areas … etc etc… Or do we just leave the public education system entirely out of such an loop. What would be costs of this policy direction?
When confronted with deep skepticism about introducing any kind of digital systems in Indian schools, I often try the example of how would it be when reading / writing based systems and then print based education system were brought into societies that relied on oral methods of education. In fact it is possible to imagine existing societies with such oral educational systems, and think of efforts to introduce read/write/print based systems to them. Can one tenably hold the view that it is better to invest scare resources only in strengthening the existing system rather than introducing the new ones, which no doubt are much more resource intensive? And this is not an entirely a made up example. A senior educationist associated with government of India’s Mahila Samkhaya program once recounted how when they took their literacy outreach efforts to some tribal areas, there were people (not the tribals themselves, but from the mainstream/ dominant civilization system) who were of the opinion that such efforts may destroy oral methods in these communities, and perhaps we should not be pushing literacy in these groups.
So instead of keeping a distance from the new ICTs – which are both very useful at their core, and largely inevitable in terms of their domination of civilisational systems – and advancing low-resource based, or cultural arguments ( both no doubt valid in many ways), we need to see how technologies can actually be adopted in a manner, that the ensuing changes in the social processes and systems are as per the values that a group or society espouses, rather than as per values that get pushed by the dominant groups, often under the cover of neutrality of technologies and its adoption. If we abstain from the discourses and policy forums of technology adoption and shaping of new techno-social process that come with them, we will be helping the agenda of these dominant groups and forces.
So while asking questions regarding the more basic issues of resource availability in our schools today, we must also ask critical questions, on larger issues of teachers being trained by technology companies and on their monopolistic platforms, which, among other things, are subjects of adverse judicial pronouncements and penalties in many countries. What does this technology-lock-in of our educational system mean to us? To whom does the massive collective effort and output of computer adoption in our schools contribute ‘value’ to? Where does this value flow to? How do we see the ‘charity’ of these companies in helping governments with school ICT programs vis a vis the ‘ value’ that they skim off, in a somewhat perpetual manner? What do we have to say to our governments when they are making ICTs in schools policy?
Meanwhile, on another note, I think Open Educational Resources (OER) is an area which should get central importance in the ICT in school policies. There is a lot of literature on OERs. I am forwarding an article I saw today which speaks about open text books.
Wikipedia Founder Proposes Support for Open Textbooks (http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20080401/cm_huffpost/094418 )