Schools are in danger of being by-passed by the information super-highway, according to Apple’s managing director in Australia, Steve Vamos.
He identified the need for more and better hardware, attitude changes, resolution of copyright issues, ease of use and reasonable costs if schools were to benefit from the IT revolution.
Computer ratios of one in 10 or 20 students were not enough, he said. Students needed individual access and access out of school hours and beyond the school walls. Otherwise the information highway would pass Australians schools by.
“”Many schools still cannot share information between classes, let alone between districts or countries,” he told the “”Information Highway and Australian Schools” conference in Sydney last week.
Beyond hardware, though, he warned that information overload could be a problem.
“”Having masses of information on tap [electronically] will itself make no changes to the education environment,” he said. “”The question of content quality and range will become a major issue. . . . Development of critical analysis of content will become even more important and much more challenging.”
Access to electronic information would have to be intuitive and easy within minimum time taken for training.
Copyright issues needed to be resolved so schools were not stymied in their use of information.
The opportunity was there. Vast quantities of information could be brought to any geographic location which would allow students to develop greater skill of research, analysis and problem solving.