Friday, June 24, 2005

I've got no strings to hold me down...

Mauritius landscape
Mauritius landscape,
originally uploaded by anna-qu.
Came across two articles today about what Mauritius is doing with ICT. Firstly a BBC report on Cybercity in Mauritius sounded interesting. Using their "Cyber Caravan" to educate and train people in ICT parallels things that were done in Scotland some years ago when ICT was being pushed but was still relatively rare in schools.

This BBC report is a couple of years old now, so I'm not sure why I stumbled over it today. However, in my email to day was another Mauritius story... The second story describes something that might be even more ambitious: Mauritius deploys first country-wide Wi-Fi. It will be interesting to see what effect (if any) this ubiquitous Internet access has on schools. Partly the effect will depend on how it is used. For example, in theory, every school in Scotland has a broadband Internet connection but anytime, anywhere access by pupils in every classroom is still a long way off in most schools. And even when the pupils can get access, it is often restricted access (no chatrooms, no blogs, no search engines...) so that the value of the Internet access is severely diminished.

Puting the infrastructure in place is the easy bit, making good educational use of it is tricky! Does anyone out there have any good stories that could be used to illustrate this? I'd be interested to hear them.

Tags: | |

No comments: