Information and communication technology (ICT) is a force that has changed many aspects of the way we live. If one was to compare such fields as medicine, tourism, travel, business, law,
banking, engineering and architecture, the impact of ICT across the past two or three decades has
been enormous. The way these fields operate today is vastly different from the ways they
operated in the past. But when one looks at education, there seems to have been an uncanny lack
of influence and far less change than other fields have experienced. A number of people have
attempted to explore this lack of activity and influence.
Just as technology is influencing and supporting what is being learned in schools and universities, so too is it supporting changes to the way students are learning. Moves from content-centred curricula to competency-based curricula are associated with moves away from teacher-centred
forms of delivery to student-centred forms. Through technology-facilitated approaches,
contemporary learning settings now encourage students to take responsibility for their own
learning .In the past students have become very comfortable to learning through transmissive
modes. Students have been trained to let others present to them the information that forms the
curriculum. The growing use of ICT as an instructional medium is changing and will likely
continue to change many of the strategies employed by both teachers and students in the learning
process. The following sections describe particular forms of learning that are gaining
prominence in universities and schools worldwide.
Technology has the capacity to promote and encourage the transformation of education from a
very teacher directed enterprise to one which supports more student-centred models. Evidence of
this today is manifested in the proliferation of capability, competency and outcomes focused curricula, moves towards problem-based learning, increased use of the Web as an information source, Internet users are able to choose the experts from whom they will learn.
The use of ICT in educational settings, by itself acts as a catalyst for change in this domain. ICTs
by their very nature are tools that encourage and support independent learning. Students using
ICTs for learning purposes become immersed in the process of learning and as more and more
students use computers as information sources and cognitive tools, the influence of the technology on supporting how students learn will continue to increase.
