Impact of Digital Technology on Education

Traditionally education is centred on sources such as schools, teachers and print media. The learners reached the information sources by enrolling with schools, teachers and libraries. Prior to the digital era, information was not accessible by the majority of people, and even those accessed were unable to obtain current information with respect to today’s context. The modern society wants to know the information as it happens and when it happens, and the world is moving from an information society to a knowledge society. Thus education is given the highest priority and brainpower is becoming the most valuable asset of an organisation. Advances in digital technology have opened up many avenues of learning. Technology has made information accessible / transmittable from anywhere and by / to all groups of people. Education has reached most parts of the world and ICT has become an integral part of human life. This paper describes the process of generation, creation and acquisition of knowledge through the technology. The use of ICT to manage and organise explicit knowledge is highlighted. The paper also describes how technology is used to access and apply such knowledge. The paper relates how these technologies have been used in education and its impact in general. Using examples the paper highlights some of the changes that has taken placed in the Sri Lankan education sector. 1. TRADITIONAL EDUCATION In Sri Lankan context, formal education was traditionally centred on schools and pirivenas at village level while non-formal education was centred in libraries at central places in the form of newspapers and books. Teachers delivered the formal education either following a textbook or notes prepared using books and their experiences. The learners enrolled and visited the places that offered formal education. The libraries offered supplementary reading material to enhance their learning as well as reference facilities. A teacher has to be well educated and knowledgeable to be able to educate others. Also they have to acquire the skills of retaining student’s attention and deliver content in an effective way. Thus teaching is an important profession and people respected them as they guided and assisted the learners to be useful citizens of the country. Due to the respect earned by the society teaching was one of the social service activities. Also most activities people then used to do were centred at village level and teaching too was carried out at villages where small populations used to live. With emerge of industrial and commercial cities people have moved out of villages to these cities for various forms of employment. When the population increased the demand for learning also goes up and thus the traditional schools or pirivenas could not cope with the demand. Thus new schools had to be created and existing schools had to be expanded, and new teachers were required to deliver education. To meet the demand inexperienced, under qualified and under trained personnel were used and thus the profession has changed from a social service to a commercial business. Business is governed by remuneration and when it is lower the capable people tends to seek other employment offering higher remunerations. Past governments used this sector as an employment creation section thus contributing towards the deterioration of the sector. 1.1 Electronic and Digital Era Electronic era commenced with the use of wireless electronic communication over 100 years ago. Transmitting telegraph messages and the radio are among the important applications of this technology. The messages were passed through the air, invisibly, on radio waves. Since then the technology use has moved from radio, to recordings, to movies, to television, to computers, to CDs, CD ROMs & the Internet [11]. This technology was very useful to convey instant urgent messages and well as to make people be aware current local and international news. This has become an informal but effective form of education. The transformation of analogue signals to digital emerged a new technology that was capable of eliminating transmission errors and performing the same task some efficiently. Digital technology has been around for over 50 years with the wide use of the technology for computers and other electronic equipment. Since early 1960s educators and computer scientist began using computers for teaching purposes. Initially it was used as reading and typing text to provide instructions of how to use the computer due to its low-level interaction with users and later to solve some time consuming problems. However with the invention of affordable microcomputers and the integration of text, graphics and colour there was a rapid spread of computers in business, educational institutes and homes [1]. Computers first came to Sri Lanka in the late 1960’s and around the same time computing was introduced to the curriculum of University of Colombo. Learning about computers grew from understanding how computer works, to programming it to perform specific tasks, to use of it to perform daily activities. Computers also evolved from manipulation of text and numbers to interaction via text, graphics, voice and pointing devices. The ability to network many computers to share information and resources was another step forward. With all these advances there has been a steady and dramatic decrease in cost of a computer. Along with these courseware and better integration of text, graphics and colour appeared making education material more effective. Graphical power and use of mouse on a par with keyboard made the most impact with respect to attracting laypeople to use computers. The growth of the Internet from a small group of academics and government officials exchanging textual material into a world wide resource, with millions of people using it for diverse activities such as shopping, banking, researching, forums, exchanging and sharing information, access to digital libraries and of course e-learning have already made an impact to the society. This has and will transform everything we do. 2. SUPPORTING TECHNOLOGIES AND APPLICATIONS There are a number of technology components available to built knowledge management systems [2]. Local area networks, Internet and Intranets are the backbones. They provide transparent speedy transfer of knowledge among people and applications. Internet applications built using software and tools allow collaborative intelligent access to knowledge. Appropriate access and authentication layers ensure the security aspect of such systems. Data and document bases act as the repositories to generate the knowledge. 2.1 Organisation of Explicit Knowledge Organisation and managing explicit knowledge includes generation, creation or acquisition of knowledge. Such activities could be performed through tools such as RDBMS and EDMS.