The ever growing list of ICTs available for education goes on and on.  Can these technologies help the education strategist face the challenges in the previous section? Educators have been told many times before that technologies would remake their world from filmstrips to radio to television. Is it any different this time when we have more sophisticated technologies such as computers and Internet? Will availability of all these change the educational scenario on its own? Let us examine the potential of technologies for education in this section.

1.      A new paradigm? 

The demands and concerns facing the education sector were not created by ICTs and hence will not be resolved by ICTs either. It is going to be very difficult-if not impossible-for countries to meet the objective of effective learning, for all, anywhere, anytime. Our inability to meet this challenge, however, is self-inflicted because we tend to think of linear scaling, that is, using the same model of education (a school constrained by space and time) but more of it and on a larger scale. We need to think differently and radically.

The education model developed for the Industrial Age cannot achieve educational empowerment effectively in the Information Age. With ICT tools, we should be able to evolve the components of the conventional model into the corresponding components of the new model.

2. Technology or technologies?

Policy makers and practitioners tend to refer to ICTs as one monolithic entity, in which case they question the potential of technology-in the singular. Such inquiry is unanswerable because technologies are very different in their potential and use. The potential of different technologies depends on what we use them for. There are at least five hierarchical levels at which technologies may be used: presentation, demonstration, drill and practice, interaction, and collaboration (see Table 1.1). If technology is to be used for representation and demonstration only, investment in computers and connectivity may not be justifiable. On the other hand, the potential for interactive and collaborative learning can best be achieved by networked computers and connectivity to the World Wide Web.

Use	Text	Audio	Video	Computer	Internet
Presentation	X	X	X	X	X
Demonstration	X	X	X	X	X
Drill and practice	X			X	X
Interactive					X
Collaborative					X

Table 1.1 Use of technologies