Information Age

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A university computer lab containing many desktop PCs
A university computer lab containing many desktop PCs

Information Age (also known as the Digital Age and Wireless Age) is a term that has been used to refer to the present era. The name alludes to the global economy's shift in focus away from the production of physical goods (as exemplified by the industrial age) and toward the manipulation of information.

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[edit] Information technology

The relatively recent field of information technology concerns the use of computer-based information systems to convert, store, protect, process, transmit and retrieve information. Technological advances in this field have changed lifestyles around the world and spawned new industries around the personal computer.

Early electronic computers were big, costly, and available only to universities and big corporations. Before the 1990s, most discoveries in information technology were driven by full time researchers having access to the high priced equipment.

In the 1980s, however, small computers started to become available. A personal computer, or PC, is generally a microcomputer intended to be used by one person at a time, and suitable for general purpose tasks such as word processing, programming, editing or playing a personal computer game, and is usually used to run software not generally written by its user. Unlike minicomputers, a personal computer is usually owned by the person using it, indicating a low cost of purchase and simplicity of operation. The user of a modern personal computer may have significant knowledge of the operating environment and application programs, but is not necessarily interested in programming nor even able to write programs for the computer.

The term PC was popularized by Apple Computer and soon after many other companies began offering personal computers. International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) developed the first open standard personal computer (IBM PC launched in US markets in 1981; the first deliveries to European markets were in 1982 and 1983), which standardized the software development. For the first time in history, the general public had personal computers. These computers used similar operating systems that allowed their users to communicate by using the same platform.

Soon after, the general public saw the start of what is now known as the current information technology era: personal computers in the public's homes, using communication devices known as modems, to access information on remote servers. The first incarnation of those were BBS servers, setup by education facilities or even individual people, to store both information and allow discussion with chat and messages.

[edit] The Internet

The Internet was originally conceived as a distributed, fail-proof network that could connect computers together and be resistant to any one point of failure; the Internet can't be totally destroyed in one event, and if large areas are disabled, the information is easily re-routed. It was created mainly by DARPA; its initial software applications were email and computer file transfer.

It was with the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989 that the Internet really took off as a global network. Today the Internet has become the ultimate place to accelerate the flow of relevant information and the fastest growing form of media. [1]

[edit] Education

The Information Age means something different to everyone. In 1956 in the United States, researchers noticed that the number of people holding "white collar" jobs had just exceeded the number of people holding "blue collar" jobs. These researchers realized that this was an important change, as it was clear that we were leaving the Industrial Age. As the Industrial Age ended, the newer times adopted the title of "the Information Age".

Of course, at that time relatively few jobs had much to do with computers and computer-related technology. What was occurring was a steady trend away from people holding Industrial Age manufacturing jobs. An increasing number of people held jobs as clerks in stores, office workers, teachers, nurses, and etc. We were shifting into a service economy.

Eventually, Information and Communication Technology—computers, computerized machinery, fiber optics, telecommunication satellites, Internet, and other ICT tools—became a significant part of our economy. Microcomputers were developed, and many business and industries were greatly changed by ICT.

Nicholas Negroponte captured the essence of these changes in his 1995 book, Being Digital. At the time, he was the head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab. His book discusses similarities and differences between products made of atoms and products made of bits. In essence, one can very cheaply and quickly make a copy of a product made of bits, and ship it across the country or around the world both quickly and at very low cost. Parts of the Being Digital book as well as many of Negroponte's articles are available free on the Web.

Nowadays, most people tend to think of the Information Age in terms of cell phones, digital music, high definition television, digital cameras, email on the Internet, the Web, computer games, and other relatively new products and services that have come into widespread use. The pace of change brought on by such technology has been very rapid.

[edit] Formal Schooling

The history of formal schooling has been tracked back to the time of the Sumerian invention of reading and writing more than 5,000 years ago. It takes a lot of time and effort to become skillful at reading and writing. One-on-one tutoring works much better than a class of 20—40 or more students being taught by one teacher. However, when it comes to helping a large number of people become literate, the classroom settings of today are not a lot different than those used thousands of years ago.

The Industrial Revolution in England led to a great expansion in the number of students being taught reading, writing, and arithmetic in schools. Such schools kept children out of the factories and they became the "factory model" of education that is still widely used throughout the world.

[edit] Educational Systems are Slow to Change

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Educational institutions tend to be very slow to change. They tend to be quite conservative—preserving the past rather than attempting to prepare students for an unknown future. The rapid pace of technological and societal change during the past 50 years has been a challenge to the educational system in the United States and in other countries throughout the world. How does one prepare students for a future of still more rapid technical and societal change? One approach lies in a major increase in focusing on computational thinking[2] throughout the curriculum.

Here are a few examples that illustrate the difficulties our current educational system is faced by:

  • When adults are faced by a problem, they feel free to make uses of resources such as the Web and email to seek help from the accumulated literature and from other people. Students, on the other hand, are expected to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in closed book, timed tests, which may cause stress and distort the results. Very few students are currently being assessed in open computer, open connectivity tests.
  • One major goal of schooling is to help students get better at solving problems, answering questions, accomplishing tasks, and "doing" things. Nowadays, computers and automated equipment are good at many of these problem-solving, question-answering, task-accomplishing activities Moreover, such computer capabilities are steadily increasing. Our current educational system spends a lot of time and effort helping students to learn to do things that computers can do quite well. It has not yet accepted the idea that two brains (human plus computer) are better than one.[3]
  • Teamwork, with team members perhaps locate throughout the world, is now a common approach to dealing with complex problems. This is made possible by the world's steadily improving telecommunication system. While our educational system has made some progress in use of project-based learning[4], it is doing a poor job in preparing students to work in a collaborative, cooperative environment in which teams of people and powerful computers work together.
  • To a very large extent, our precollege educational system is still highly textbook based, with textbooks being expected to have a life of six to seven years. Students use a textbook during a course, but typically do not own and keep the book as an information resource after they complete a course. In recent years, some progress has been occurring in teaching from open source materials[5] This is clearly a valuable idea in Information Age Education.
  • Our teacher education system is struggling to provide teachers who are competent and comfortable in providing students with an appropriate Information Age Education. To a very large extent, precollege teachers teach the way that they were taught during the 16 or more years before they became teachers. This barrier to change is strongly supported by our current student and teacher assessment systems.
  • The power structure in current educational system tends to be quite top down, with limited power being given to students, and perhaps a decreasing amount of power being given to teachers. This is at a time when we are steadily developing new aids to teaching and learning that can greatly empower students and their teachers.[6]

[edit] Innovations

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Lallana, Emmanuel C., and Margaret N. Uy, "The Information Age".
  2. ^ Information Age Education Encyclopedia (IAE-pedia): Computational Thinking
  3. ^ IAE-pedia: Two Brains Are Better Than One
  4. ^ IAE-pedia: Project-Based Learning
  5. ^ IAE-pedia: Open Source Libraries
  6. ^ IAE-pedia: Empowering Learners and Teachers

Moursund, David (n.d.). Information Age Education. Retrieved 4/30/08: http://iae-pedia.org/.

[edit] External links

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