Last week, a local daily under the headline “Nation’s first smart lab set for March 21 launch”, reported that “The progress of the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) smart school flagship application will take a quantum leap when the nation’s first smart lab is launched on March 31” in St. John’s Institution, which has been chosen as the pilot site for the lab.
The lab would be equipped with 30 JavaStation network computers (NCs) and two Netra Internet Servers and the “Smart lab students” would be among the first to be exposed to multimedia courseware developed by the Education Ministry’s Curriculum Department and Education Technology Division in subjects such as Bahasa Malaysia, English, Mathematics and Science.
What I find uncomfortable reading such hyberboles is the wrong impression it is giving to the Malaysian public, firstly that a “smart lab” is a quantum leap for Malaysia - as if Malaysia has become a pioneer in the field of technogy in education in the world.
Research in other countries have shown that for students to learn higher-order skills such as comprehension and composition using technology, the technology must be present in the classroom and integrated into the curriculum. In addition to learning computer skills, students need to be comfortable with technology as a tool to accomplish other goals such as improved literacy and math skills. It is not necessary for every child to have a computer. They can often work in small groups and not every activity requires a computer. As a minimum guideline, schools should have one computer for every five students and a computer for the teacher in each classroom.
A “smart lab” of 30 computers in one school would mean a ratio of 30 students to one computer if the school has 900 students, or 50 to one if it has 1,500 students, which would need to have 180 and 300 computers respectively if the school is to have the ratio of a computer for every five students.
By these standards, a school with only a “smart lab” with a student-to-computer ratio of 30:1 is not so smart as schools with the ratio of 5:1.
In actual fact, the government should drop the use of the term “smart school” altogether. There could be “smart” cards and even buildings could be “smart ready” to incorporate future “intelligent environments”, but it is most inappropriate to call schools using information technology education as “smart schools” - just as it would sound most odd to call books which are in electronic form “smart books”.
The term “smart school” will create the unnecessary and misplaced sense of superiority or inferiority as the case may be between schools which are fortunate to be wired with the latest IT applications and those which are not so fortunate as well as between schools with different student-computer ratios.
The Education Ministry has now said that 91 schools have been selected to be involved in the “smart school” project in January 1999, an increase over the initial 85 announced by the Education Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak, last month. But this still leaves 99 per cent of the 8,500 schools out “in the cold” as far as IT is concerned, raising questions as to whether these 8,400 schools not provided with such IT facilities are condemned to be relegated to the “less smart” status, whether there are enough “smart” teachers to teach the “smart” subjects in a “smart” way in the “smart” schools and the invidious position of the majority of the 250,000 teachers who are not “smart” teachers.
As information Technology is a tool and not an end by itself, it does not by itself make a school or the students “smart”. This is why other countries which are very much more advanced than Malaysia in the application and use of Information Technology in education, and where the majority of their schools are already connected to the Internet, do not use the term “smart schools”.
A good case in point in Singapore, which would have linked all its primary and secondaryschools to the Internet by next year, which is an even earlier date than the United States or France which have set the national goal of connecting every school to the Information Superhighway by the year 2,000 or that of France, whose President, Jacque Chirac announced only two weeks ago that all secondary schools should be connected to the Internet by the year 2,000 to develop computer skills and improve job prospects linked to information technology.
The United States has also launched the Internet II initiative which aims to offer the US research and educational communities advanced Internet connectivity. It has also introduced the concept of an educational rate or “E-rate” providing Internet connection for all US schools and libraries by the year 2,000 at rates 20 per cent to 90 per cent lower than the standard telephone charges.
In Japan, the Ministry of Education unveiled plans to instal 900,000 network-equipped computers to schools by the year 2,000 and with the telecoms operator Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) will jointly connect 1,000 schools to the Internet over the next two years.
In Australia, the government announced plans to equip every school with PCs and achieve a rate of one PC for every secondary student by the year 2,000.
In Europe, Denmark plans to put all schools on-line by the year 2,000 while in the United Kingdom, plans are well advanced in public-private joint initiatives for its “Superhighway in Education” plan.
Quality education has increasingly become the concern of most countries, including the United States where President Clinton in his inaugural second-term state-of-the union speech early last month set out the national goal of “Every 12-year-old must ber able to log on to the Internet; every 18-year-old must be able to go to college”.
However, in the Malaysian universities, like the University of Malaya, students are still unable to have easy access to the Internet and are not given email accounts as a matter od course unless they are at postgraduate level or in certain favoured faculties.