Marshaling Technology for Development Proceedings of a Symposium (1995) / Chapter Skim
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Educational Technology for Developing Countries
Educational Technology for Developing Countries
Pages 189-209
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From page 189... ...
MATCHING EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY AND CONTENT TO SPECIFIC ECONOMIC GOALS Different situations and goals require different instructional and technological approaches. One key instructional requirement is to make optimal use of tools 189
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From page 190... ...
RECENT TRENDS IN ESTABLISHED TECHNOLOGY In many respects, the problems surrounding the use of educational technology in developing country schools are similar to the problems surrounding its use in American schools.
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From page 191... ...
While it is productive to use such commodity tools as spreadsheets, word processors, and information server clients (for example, Mosaic) to support classroom activities, it is generally not as effective to invest student and teacher time in learning to use a program when that program supports learning only incidentally.
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From page 192... ...
In most cultures, a considerable amount of learning activity involves verbal interactions. Such verbal interactions are costly, however, since they depend on a teacher, who can deal only with a small number of students at a time.
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From page 193... ...
Other ages and other topics also have been investigated. Health education studies have shown that the radio approach is particularly effective for teaching upper primary students the details of oral rehydration therapy delivery and other aspects of gastrointestinal infection in infants.
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From page 194... ...
Because radio also depends on having little or no need for pictorial or diagrammatic information, it would not be the best way to teach physics students how to draw force diagrams or to teach technicians how to operate an intravenous pump in the critical care unit of a hospital. Thus the advantages of interactive radio are very limited for all the reasons that support the use of multiple media in education.
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From page 195... ...
Thus it is best to develop a clear set of learning goals before selecting a training approach. Of the two basic types of learning model described in the rest of this section, one type captures the highly circumscribed approach needed when the goal is to form a highly reliable (but perhaps somewhat redundant)
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From page 196... ...
/ Discovery Tends to anchor acquired knowledge in relevant experience. It can be a long wait before some students will make certain discoveries.
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From page 197... ...
For example, a beehive feeds itself through this combination of reliability, variability, and natural selection. Bees forage somewhat randomly, but whenever a bee finds food, it returns reliably to the hive and does a highly programmed dance to which the other bees respond in a highly programmed way.
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From page 198... ...
It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to generalize from specific experiences while immersed in them. Yet it is not likely that abstract "book learning" will be available in usable form when concrete work situations demand that a worker stretch his knowledge beyond that which has been fully and explicitly mastered.
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From page 199... ...
For example, a prospective machinist might receive courses in trigonometry and mechanical drawing combined with exercises using a manual lathe, turning relatively cheap and workable metals. The problem with such schemes is that in periods of rapid change, intuitions of instructors about real work situations do not change fast enough for them to revise the courses and practice opportunities to support the new jobs.
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From page 200... ...
Recently, I suggested that the same ideas used to develop abstractions of computer software modules and to organize such modules for reuse also be applied to the systematic specification of knowledge requirements for training.~3 Specifically, just as separable pieces of a computer program, called objects, can be organized into abstraction hierarchies (usually called inheritance hierarchies) , so knowledge objects can be specified and similarly organized.
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From page 201... ...
India, for example, will soon be able to build on the base of one of its niches an applications software industry. A Technologically Literate and Innovation-Receptive Population Anyone seeking to exercise democratic citizen rights in complex societal decisions, to understand economic policy, and to participate in high-quality manufacturing, service, or information work, will require some new knowledge.
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i6 Without understanding the systems of knowledge those women started with, researchers found it difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine what they understood and knew after exposure to European-American nutritional ideas. Similar situations arise when people from North America go to western Asia.
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From page 203... ...
Modest levels of access to information servers containing workplace simulations would be a valuable addition and will become feasible as network technology becomes ubiquitous. Assessment Schools needs benchmark quality standards for the education process and for ways of measuring progress in attaining those standards.
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From page 204... ...
It seems sensible, though, to develop a technical education and worker force preparation capability first, deferring the development of elite professional institutions until later. While the latter are important to the maintenance of a country's identity, they are also the most expensive to build, the hardest to maintain at high quality, and the easiest for which to substitute billets at foreign universities.
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From page 205... ...
The country's central educational production facility would then produce a single CD master that would be sent to an industrial producer for mass production. Distributed Information Network Schemes The worldwide information server network that has developed over an extremely short period allows students almost anywhere in the world to access information from almost anywhere else.
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From page 206... ...
This means, for example, that the World Wide Web capability is readily enhanced to include intelligent interactions between the information server and a student requesting information. In my own work building intelligent coached apprenticeship systems, I have found that most of what my system does could be delivered over the Internet since the student response in my system, while it always seems to be rich enough to mimic real work, is actually limited to selections made by pointing to menus and images.
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From page 207... ...
Not only the systems that one is teaching about, but also the very conversations that lead to learning, can best be represented using systems of computational objects. The disciplined use of object-oriented methodology can improve the quality of computer-based simulations and coaches while simultaneously yielding substantial improvements in software development efficiency.
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From page 208... ...
3. Note that within a period of about three years, Bangalore has grown from minimal software industry to being the largest applications software producer region after Silicon Valley!
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From page 209... ...
' that permits access to hypermedia information servers using a convention called hypertext markup language (HTML) , developed initially at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)
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