The Role of Ict in Education
What Is ICT Education and Why Is It Important?
Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) education is basically our society’s efforts to teach its current and emerging citizens valuable knowledge and skills around computing and communications devices, software that operates them, applications that run on them and systems that are built with them.
What are these things? How do they work? How do you use them productively? How are they deployed, assembled, managed and maintained to create productive systems? How they are used in specific business and industry settings? What are the underlying science and technologies behind them and how might those be developed to advance ICT fields?
ICT is complex and quickly changing, and it is confusing for many people. It is so pervasive in the modern world that everyone has some understanding of it, but those understandings are often wildly divergent.
There are many important dimensions to ICT education, including:
• ICT/Digital Literacy – Today, everyone needs a basic understanding of ICT and how to make productive use of it, just to be good students, workers and citizens. Teaching people how to be competent basic users of ICT technologies is an important role of ICT education, so they will be successful in their academic and work careers, and so they can efficiently participate in modern technical society. • ICT Infrastructure and Support Applied Technologists – Beyond a basic user competency, our society also needs more knowledgeable and capable technical people to deploy, manage and maintain ICT equipment, software and systems, so they work well for users. In all industries, these people manage computer and communications hardware, software and applications; networked systems; online information sharing, communication and commerce systems; business processes making use of these systems; and user support. • Specialized Business and Industry Uses of ICT – As enabling technologies, ICT is used
Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) education is basically our society’s efforts to teach its current and emerging citizens valuable knowledge and skills around computing and communications devices, software that operates them, applications that run on them and systems that are built with them.
What are these things? How do they work? How do you use them productively? How are they deployed, assembled, managed and maintained to create productive systems? How they are used in specific business and industry settings? What are the underlying science and technologies behind them and how might those be developed to advance ICT fields?
ICT is complex and quickly changing, and it is confusing for many people. It is so pervasive in the modern world that everyone has some understanding of it, but those understandings are often wildly divergent.
There are many important dimensions to ICT education, including:
• ICT/Digital Literacy – Today, everyone needs a basic understanding of ICT and how to make productive use of it, just to be good students, workers and citizens. Teaching people how to be competent basic users of ICT technologies is an important role of ICT education, so they will be successful in their academic and work careers, and so they can efficiently participate in modern technical society. • ICT Infrastructure and Support Applied Technologists – Beyond a basic user competency, our society also needs more knowledgeable and capable technical people to deploy, manage and maintain ICT equipment, software and systems, so they work well for users. In all industries, these people manage computer and communications hardware, software and applications; networked systems; online information sharing, communication and commerce systems; business processes making use of these systems; and user support. • Specialized Business and Industry Uses of ICT – As enabling technologies, ICT is used