A different trend, which is sometimes confused with the others, is the growing importance of ICT as a subject of education — one cannot teach ICT without using ICT in the process.

ICT has, and will clearly continue to be, an essential tool for the improvement of education. But although there is an ever growing place for private enterprise in some areas of education, we should remember that education, as a whole, is still a critical common public good which should be available to all, and policy decisions on public and other not-for-profit education systems should be made in that framework.

What are some of the successes and problems with ICT in education?

One of the most evident successes in higher education is through Web-based teaching. Many universities are using this to provide high-quality education, either entirely virtually or in combination with face-to-face teaching, either on the Internet or through local campus intranets. One of the most useful applications has been in teacher education, including improving teachers' ICT competence, where a large, dispersed target group must be supported in improving their skills throughout their careers.

Professional and technical challenges include how to interest and train the teachers, and how to allocate the necessary resources for equipment and infrastructure. Others, more importantly, concern policy. Some universities, particularly in industrialised countries, have seen ICT-based teaching as a cash cow instead of a way to provide better education. So how does one decide to accredit virtual universities, including those based in other countries or regions, and to avoid potentially damaging competition between them and national education systems?

It is improbable that virtual learning should or can be extended to all schools, given the immense expenses that this would entail in ensuring the essential supporting infrastructure and the critical importance of human nurturing and guidance for children. One major challenge is the production of ICT-based educational materials that are appropriate for local use, including use of the local languages.

How relevant is ICT in education to those without clean water or food, much less a computer?

ICT is making telephones potentially available everywhere, and is also used in cleaning water and processing food. Microelectronics and informatics are increasingly being employed as cost-effective tools in all economic sectors. So why should one not use them in education? The uses of ICT are a choice for each country, each community, and each individual to make according to the needs and available resources. It boils down to understanding which technologies are appropriate in particular circumstances, and here there is a need for more research, strategic planning, evaluation and sharing of experience, being careful to consider ICT use in terms of each specific social and cultural context.

ICT in education in India — comments and observations.

India has made major advances in using ICT in open and distance learning through a network of open universities, whose average annual growth in student enrolment is nearly 24 per cent. It also has a number of major institutional support efforts for promoting the use of ICT in education, including the Central Institute of Educational Technology (CIET), the Distance Education Council and National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS). There have also been successful projects at all levels of education, with support of the Central Government, the States, NGOs and sometimes with international partners and national institutes such as the Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIIT).

Is the situation of the developing countries, marked by the `digital divide', different from the overall lag of these countries relative to the industrialised world?

Take India, for example, which in 2002 had a GDP per capita approximately 1/15th of that of the USbut was lagging by factors of about 80 in Internet users per capita and of about 140 in personal computers by capita. Then look at a country like Bhutan whose GDP per capita was about 1/64th of that of the US but which was lagging by a factor of nearly 300 in computers per capita and of about 500 in Internet users per capita. The digital divide is indeed a real phenomenon, which is all the more poignant if one associates ICT with the potential to `leap-frog',to accelerate development.

The digital divide also concerns information content. For example, fluent speakers of English constitute about 8 per cent of the world's population but more than 35 per cent of the world's Internet users, while English content makes up about 70 per cent of the pages on the World Wide Web. English, and nine other of the 6,800 languages of the world, account for 95 per cent of the Web's content. These inequalities in access are mirrored by distortions in the flow and organisation of information. For example, a major amount of Internet traffic within or between developing countries passes through nodes in industrialised countries, and Internet service providers (ISPs) in developing countries pay more for international connections than those in industrialised countries.

While some see these phenomena as results of the digital divide, others see them as a partial cause, leading to calls for a more equitable and transparent system of Internet governance.

The divide may not be as bad as it seems. Figures for numbers of Internet and computer users often do not take account of multiple use of the same facility, for example in a school, a community information centre or a cyber cafe, and it is also possible that users in developing countries are concentrating more on applications that are closely linked to personal or national development, like education, rather than bandwidth-gobbling applications which might be considered more superfluous — like online viewing of a distant sporting event. Analysis of and remedies for the digital divide should, therefore, go beyond simple access to facilities and content, and consider how ICT can be more effectively used in development.

paromita@thehindu.co.in

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