The dialectics of poverty, educational opportunities, and ICTs

Abstract

With respect to widening access to education, we understand social justice to mean ensuring fair distribution of resources for education in a way that will help disadvantaged persons to benefit; giving all people equal opportunities to access education; and establishing mechanisms for achieving equality of outcome of educational opportunities, while recognizing that equal treatment will not always result in equal outcomes. In this chapter we examine the contradictions in play between, on the one hand, the potential that information and communication technologies (ICTs) have to be the major means of widening access to education and, on the other hand, the inhibiting, restraining, and constraining effects that poverty has on the abilities of persons and groups to access and make effective use of ICTs, especially the newer ones. ICTs are electronic and nonelectronic technologies, infrastructure, systems, and services used to publish, store, retrieve, and transmit information, to communicate ideas, and to generate knowledge. They provide the means by which to propagate and receive ideas. ICTs are both traditional (such as radio, television, dance, drama, folklore, print, and fax) and new (such as the Internet, the World Wide Web, electronic mail, teleconferencing, and distance learning tools such as CD-ROMs) (Marcelle cited in UNDP, 2000). Concerns about widening access to education through ICTs focus on three areas. First, how to make information available on ICTs that can lead to knowledge. It has been observed that information can become knowledge only if it helps people to participate in decision-making and allows them to make informed choices (Nath cited in UNDP, 2000), which can lead to changes in attitudes and behavior, hopefully in a positive direction. Connected with this is the interest in helping people to benefit from and participate in open learning. Open learning can be achieved by accessing the information that, for example, the United Nations websites and online journals provide. When discussions by stakeholders and documentaries on special issues (farming, medicine, indigenous knowledge, reduction of violence towards women, environment, peace building, poverty reduction, equity, etc.) are available to people on the radio, television, and Internet, such discussions and documentaries can give rise to open learning. Finally, concerns about expanding access to education through ICTs focus on making more structured instruction available to people from all walks of life, through prepackaged courses delivered through correspondence education, videotapes, CD-ROMs, radio and television, and courses delivered through the Internet and teleconferencing. This is distance learning. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.