Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSS] infrastructure and social equity
From: Mary Hall (mary@CWA.CO.NZ)
Date: Wed 18 Jun 2003 - 04:13:30 MEST
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 14:13:30 +1200 From: Mary Hall <mary@CWA.CO.NZ> Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSS] infrastructure and social equity
Greetings Mark, Ramesh & others
Mark, I think your paragraph
"Of course I am assuming a well-established postal system, literate
population and that you assume radio to be one-way as opposed to
'talk-back' style!"
packs quite a lot into a small package.
One of the big advantages of distance education worldwide, it seems to me,
is that it can free the provider from exactly those preconditions you
mention.
If your population cannot assume what so many of us blithely do in New
Zealand:
- a well-established postal system
- literacy
- sufficient income to devote time to non-essentials, like study
- political & economic freedom to access educational materials
then the advantages you cite such as printed materials, asynchronous
response time, interactivity, become somewhat irrelevant.
In countries with lower discretionary incomes - or people living at
subsistence level, where economic infrastructures are not well established
or robust, where social or political uncertainty makes access to 'tangible'
resources such as textbooks, I believe radio can have a very important part
to play - not as an alternative to the type of delivery you and I are more
familiar with (textbooks, online forums and the like) - but as a means of
building a sufficiently robust social base for such a system to emerge.
As such, it may be a more powerful tool for promoting social justice through
education than any of those more 'advanced' technologies.
Perhaps some of the crucial questions are, what are the intended outcomes of
using radio as an educational medium, and what educational strategies is it
most suited to? Do these change as the social infrastructure of a region
develops?
Mary Hall
Education Project Manager
mary@cwa.co.nz
Phone:64 4 382 6500 xt 212
Fax: 64 4 382 6509
CWA New Media
PO Box 19-090
Wellington, NZ
http://www.cwa.co.nz
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