Using New Media
by Clara Chung-wai Shih and David E. Weekly
Download this report in PDF format
|
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction (Home)
Preface
1) Distribute print media electronically
2) Use CD/DVD
3) Use Internet media
4) Encourage reading on computer monitors
5) Select appropriate materials using proven methods
6) If possible, teach computer use
7) The trend is in technology's favor
8) Conclusions
Glossary
References
About the International Academy of Education
|
The Trend is in Technology's Favor
Global trends in technology and the economics of technology.
Research findings
Several recent phenomena are helping to make
high-quality, highly-available technology available worldwide. One
concerns hardware and is called "Moore's Law" - the other concerns
software and is called "Open Source". While wholly separate, they
both are achieving the same end of affordable computing for all.
Moore's Law is named after Gordon Moore, a
computer chip engineer. He predicted that every year and a half,
computer chips could get twice as fast. Even though he made this
prediction over 20 years ago, it has held remarkably true for the
time since then. As new computer chips get faster and faster, the
old chips get cheaper; the cost of a "good, cheap, new computer" has
fallen five-fold in the past ten years. If this trend continues,
reasonably good computers will be affordable to an increasingly
large number of people in the world.
Open Source is another
fascinating phenomenon in the development of computer software. A
very large number of computer programmers worldwide have decided to
use their free time to not only create pieces of software that they
will give away without cost, but to also give away the instructions
and source codes that create the software. When they do so, other
programmers find and fix problems with their instructions as well as
add new features to the software. Often times an important piece of
software will have literally hundreds of contributors.
In this way, problems are fixed quickly and new
features are added on a regular basis under the undirected
cooperation of a large number of programmers around the world. While
it sounds like a crazy experiment, this development model is
actually responsible for most of the software that runs the Internet
today! Almost everything from the way email is handled to how web
pages are served was developed by the Open Source community.
Needless to say, some commercial companies are not happy about this
trend, since they'd like to have people paying for all software. But
for poor areas, the opportunity to use powerful software free of
charge is compelling.
Practical applications
There are an increasing number of Open Source
software packages that can be very useful to a school. Here are but
a small number of the powerful, free pieces of software that can be
used in place of expensive commercial software at a school:
Next Page >>
|
![[x]](../../x2.gif){kind=small}
-
