Is purchasing information communication technology (ICT) the most important investment schools can make?
There is little doubt that a student could have an excellent primary and secondary school education without ever touching a keyboard. This may sound heretical in a country that spent $6.7 billion on educational technology in 1998-99 alone, but human history supports the contention. Yet, as a society we have made the decision to utilize the information disseminating tools of computers, data retrieval systems and the Internet, so the question becomes how can we use these tools to help children learn, not just simply add to the surfeit of information they already encounter in their daily lives? The first thing to remember is that knowledge construction is far more than simply acquiring information. As the technological critic Neil Postman has observed, “knowledge is organized information – information that is embedded in some context; information that has a purpose, that leads one to seek further information in order to understand something about the world. Without organized information,
