Communication and Technology

On the microeconomic scale, companies have used telecommunications to help build global business empires. This is self-evident in the case of online retailer Amazon.com but, according to academic Edward Lenert, even the conventional retailer Wal-Mart has benefited from better telecommunication infrastructure compared to its competitors. In cities throughout the world, home owners use their telephones to organize many home services ranging from pizza deliveries to electricians. Even relatively-poor communities have been noted to use calling cards to their advantage. In Bangladesh's Narshingdi district, isolated villagers use cellular phones to speak directly to wholesalers and arrange a better price for their goods. In Cte d'Ivoire, coffee growers share mobile phones to follow hourly variations in coffee prices and sell at the best price.

This new edition of Key Data on Information and Communication Technology in Schools has for the first time broadened its sources of information to include empirical data collected in the international calling cards and PIRLS surveys. From this it may be concluded that the level of computerization in schools still varies widely from one country to the next. Indeed, there are also significant variations from one school to the next, particularly in countries in which the computerization of schools is less developed. Efforts to achieve progress in this area should thus be sustained and selectively targeted. The report also reveals that a reasonable level of computerization does not necessarily lead to the facilities being used on a regular basis. In some countries among those to have achieved a satisfactory level of computerization, over 60 % of pupils questioned said they had never made use of the equipment available.

In an analog telephone network, the caller is connected to the person he wants to talk to by switches at various telephone exchanges. The switches form an electrical connection between the two users and the setting of these switches is determined electronically when the caller dials the number. Once the connection is made, the caller's voice is transformed to an electrical signal using a small microphone in the caller's handset. Using calling cards the electrical signal is then sent through the network to the user at the other end where it is transformed back into sound by a small speaker in that person's handset. There is a separate electrical connection that works in reverse, allowing the users to converse. The fixed-line telephones in most residential homes are analog that is, the speaker's voice directly determines the signal's voltage. Although short distance calls may be handled from end-to-end as analog signals, increasingly telephone service providers are transparently converting the signals to digital for transmission before converting them back to analog for reception. The advantage of calling service is that digitized voice data can travel side-by-side with data from the Internet and can be perfectly reproduced in long distance communication as opposed to analog signals that are inevitably impacted by noise.

Access to adequate computer facilities is an essential but far from sufficient condition for achieving our aims. In the final analysis, our goal should be to develop the quality of teaching and learning. This latest edition of the report prepared by Eurydice sheds light more specifically on the use of the technology for educational purposes. Official recommendations regarding approaches, curricular objectives and teaching time in this field are examined and compared to how pupils say they actually use the technology. Relevant provision within initial teacher education and calling service teacher training is also described. The findings are encouraging: countries in which information and communication technology (ICT) was not a compulsory subject in the curriculum in 2002/03 are now exceptions to the rule. Yet substantial progress is still required in the area of teacher education. Teachers do not yet as a matter of course acquire skills in the use of ICT for educational purposes during their initial training, even though various Calling service training programmers have been introduced.