Vol. II: Shaping Information and Communication ... - IMA,ZLW & IfU

59
Part Two: Developing Education in the Era of Information and
Communication Technologies
This group of three chapters deals with the issue of education under the impact of Information
Technology IT (or Information and Communication Technology ICT - both terms are used in
parallel according to language traditions in the different countries described here). The
chapters bring together the work of several individuals and partnerships, connected mainly by
their affiliation with the EU-India Cross Cultural Innovations project. Through these
connections ideas and ideals have been propagated and refined so that, without intentional
organization, a remarkably similar range of solutions and problems have been identified and
written about. The three chapters are organised as follows:
The first chapter: This chapter deals with general issues affecting IT education in India,
suggesting new approaches to cater for changing needs. It provides the background and
context for innovations discussed later. It continues to describe the specific application of one
such approach to the needs of the Punjab, supplying a vision for innovative uses of IT in India
and the steps being taken to enable those innovations to occur.
The second chapter: This chapter describes the attempts of implementing ICT education
through a web-based project in collaboration of India and the UK. The chapter deals with the
critical issues surrounding these attempts to promote such collaboration between students in
India and the UK. Furthermore it discusses the issues affecting the success of this
collaboration between faculty members in India and the UK.
The third chapter: This chapter takes up the fundamental challenges of globalisation under
the impact of information and communication technologies. It discusses the questions of how
to decide and how to act in view of these challenges. These are the questions of ethics. We
have to consider and discuss these questions in everyday decision-finding, be it in
engineering, in entrepreneurship, in science and research, in university teaching, or in any
other regard. But more than in any other field, these considerations of values and ethics are
involved in the concepts of education. Educating children, trainees, students, and adults is
necessarily connected with the question of what to teach and how to teach it. Thus we are to
responsibly consider the consequences of our actions. Two partner universities within the EU-
India Project, Delhi and Aachen, have decided on introducing models of university teaching
which pay tribute to these challenges of ethics in education. Their approaches are briefly
described in this chapter.
Each of these three chapters started life disconnected from each of the others. We knit them
together here in order to provide a gestalt which we feel transcends the individual points
raised. We hope to show how a range of perspectives can provide a deeper insight into the
kinds of problems faced as education struggles under the global impact of IT to deal with its
volatile subject matter in a rapidly changing Indian context.
Jon Dron and Vydhehi Rajapillai