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Misuse of Information Technology (IT)

0 comments Posted by Mastermind at 11:17 pm

It's a new thing in Education apparently, the government is pushing schools and even NIE to lean towards IT (or Information & Communication Technology, ICT) for their courses that I am attending. That's why schools, be it secondary or tertiary, are incorporating Integrated Virtual Learning Environment (IVLE) or Blackboard systems, for example, in their classes. In fact, there's even a compulsory course for trainee teachers to learn how to use ICT for engaged learning.

To quote from, where else but the great Wiki, Information Technology, or to be more in line with MOE, ICT is defined as below:

Information technology (IT) or information and communications technology (ICT) is the technology required for information processing. In particular the use of electronic computers and computer software to convert, store, protect, process, transmit, and retrieve information from anywhere, anytime.
After attending a class on using ICT for engaged learning, I realise, to my horror, that most people do not have a clear idea what ICT is about. The tutor started by giving the example of an online survey and started to preach about how we could use the results of the survey to improve classroom teaching. Everybody was happy with the example.

There's a fundamental weakness in this example. We could have perform the survey with pen and paper and computed the results and use it to improve classroom teaching without ICT!!! Everybody missed the key point in ICT. The two benefits of using ICT in this case is that students can access the survey online in their own free time and the results can be calculated automatically.

In simple, when I want to go through the solution to some problem, I can either write it on the whiteboard, give handouts, write on transparency with OHP, write on pen and paper with a visualizer or misuse ICT to prepare the solution in Powerpoint. But using Powerpoint doesn't bring the advantage of ICT in learning, in fact it is just one in many of the alternatives to achieve our objective - to go through the solution.

Maybe I will share more on my opinions on how to use ICT for learning/teaching, afterall I will have a graded forum component for my ICT module at a later date anyway. For now, I just hope that people don't think of using ICT as only an alternative to whiteboards or transparency and lament at the additional work required to churn out powerpoints. Rather, think of using ICT to value add to the course content and do stuff that otherwise is not possible to do with a whiteboard or even a visualizer. They do not realise the power of the geek side.

 

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