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New Technologies Make A Difference page 2 |
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Almost ten years ago in education, it was realised that the main source of information for the student was not the text book they were assigned for each course, or the teacher who directed the learning process, but it was the school’s resource centre, the library. Since then, resource based learning has been the focus of Saskatchewan and North American school curriculums, but oddly enough schools and the public have found this concept hard to understand. In actual fact, the numbers of schools in this province with full time, or even part time teacher librarians, has declined as schools depend on technical help to look after the most important part of the learning institution. Even more confusing is that schools continue to allocate vast amounts of money to purchasing ever more expensive textbooks and continue to provide meagre funds to their resource centres. The people who have recognised the change and adapted, are the students. A student who is given a research assignment, if given the chance, goes to the Internet first to find out the information they want. This is not necessarily the best strategy because they might get much more efficient search direction from their encyclopaedia, but the student recognises the need for the information to be current and they know that if they go to the Internet they will have the most up-to-date source. Of course, the inherent problem with the student’s action is that the Internet is primarily a commercial enterprise. Though originally designed to promote academic research, the Internet has been pretty much co-opted by businesses and individuals selling and marketing their goods and services which means that the student has to sift through overwhelming amounts of material to find what they need. With text books now costing close to $65 a piece and having a life of perhaps three to five years, the cost to fund education, using paper based material, is becoming prohibitive and that is where the new technologies are stepping in. Every computer for the past five years has come with a CD player and compact disks themselves when used to record data, cost less then a dollar a piece, even recorded with CD recorders they cost less then two dollars for the blank disk. (This has become a major problem as the federal government has imposed a tax that could force CDs to triple in price as money is going to the music industry because someone my replicate music on CDs, whereas recorder able CDs are almost exclusively used for storing computer data) This means that for a small amount of money, a whole encyclopaedia or large number of books, can be stored on a single CD and thus the textbook cost can become a fraction of what it is now. |