The decision taken by the Higher Secondary Education Board (HSEB) to ban laptop and cellphones in colleges and to bar students from watching movies will definitely hamper the knowledge that students have of international culture. We need to break free from linear text-based education and try newer things in education because the world is turning more and more dependent on technology, and dated educational methods could leave students handicapped when the time comes for implementing what they have learnt in the real world. Because we need to face the fact that a large number of work being done in today’s technological age is being done behind computer monitors. Architects work with AutoCAD and 3DMax to plan and create their buildings and create lifelike 3D models of their designs that make it easier for the people to understand the plans. Writers have a wide variety of applications that help them bring together their research, their plot plans and their actual writing. Educational institutions all across the globe have already started implementing technology in education, and Nepal also needs to understand that there’s no way to stop the evolution of technology; and rather than working on ways to separate technology from education, we rather need ways to combine them.[break]
Teachers need to stop following the same old ways of teaching and experiment and acknowledge that the world is changing and we need education that augments that change. There are many language portals like Golvico.org on the Internet that help students setting up language lessons with native speaker as their guides. There are many talks on TED that inspire and drive students to question not only what they see but also what they learn. There are many lectures recorded in many prestigious American colleges like the MIT and Harvard that can help students understand concepts that they may not have understood in class.
We also need to take into account that as human beings, we’re very visual beings, that what we see tends to affect our judgment more, and technology helps in bringing that visual aspect to education. Who here would prefer a lecture class over a presentation?
We teach students about evolution by telling them about it. We teach students about history by asking them to read; we teach students English by telling them how sentence structures work. Which is all well and fine, but won’t students pay more attention to a movie about history? Won’t students learn more about English through movies and TV series? Teachers try their best to explain theories and concepts to students but with the help of technology, students can actually visualize and picture what the teachers are talking about.
Art is another aspect of technology that to some extent has been absent from school curricula. The Internet is a global platform where anything you do can be seen and appreciated by people from all across the world. We need to teach students to create and not just follow blindly, and this is where technology helps students create because now they have an open platform where they have the opportunity to showcase their talents and ideas.
We also need to acknowledge that many international books are not available in Nepal or are too expensive. This is seen more exclusively in international educational standards like the British A-Levels. During my time in the A-Levels program, we had photocopied versions of the original books and sometimes we had to make do without a book, depending completely on Internet resources. Technology now offers E-Books that can be easily viewed on mobile phones or tablets.
Technology isn’t something that students need to be separated from; rather it’s something that students need to embrace.
HSEB is trying to act as the big brother by controlling students and turning them into their ideal educated robots. But students need to explore and grow on their own. They need an understanding that’s based on experience and not just people who blindly follow. Technology offers that, it offers students to learn to be on their own, to question and find answers on their own. What answers would the vast community on the Internet not have? Students are also crying out for alternate means of education by attending many different workshops.
There are many different aspects of technology that hamper education but there are resources that help learning, too. So, instead of separating technology from education, we need to use it as a resource for education. It’s high time that we embraced technology more and stopped shunning it.
The writer is The Week’s much loved tech guru. Email us your tech queries at theweek@myrepublica.com and we’ll have him answer them for you
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