Technology in Education: Meeting the Future Literacy and Numeracy Needs of Society

摘要

In 1913, Thomas Edison predicted that every branch of knowledge would be taught using motion pictures portending the demise of books [1]. Although film is a powerful media often leveraged in the classroom, books remain the instructional foundation for education. With the current proliferation of information technology in classroom, the utility of books, teachers and the classroom itself are now being questioned. However, like the advent of motion pictures, the supplanting of teachers and classrooms by information technology is overdone [2, 3]. Notwithstanding, advances in information technology are having a profound effect on education. As a literacy tool, information technology facilitates acquisition of content knowledge adjusting difficulty to predetermined performance metrics. This frees the educator to engage individual learners to bring about creative achievements as they discover the part/whole possibilities of the acquired content knowledge.