Lesson 5: ICT and world change.

This week's lesson is about ICT( Information and communication technologies) and world change. Prof started off with introduction to the topic and the various forms of ICT. He also touch on the issues involved ICT over the years and whether ICT is a driver of world change. We had a series of interesting presentations on the related topics of ICT and discussions about those topics. The quote of the week by Dr Gurinder is


ICT is the catalyst the facilitates the knowledge revolution


so what does the above message means to me?

The keyword above is CATALYST. In Chemistry, it means that a substance used to increase the rate of a chemical reaction without itself being affected. In this context, the sentence means is that we are using ICT as the tool to increase the process of knowledge revolution and the term ICT only serves as the purpose the expedite the process of knowledge revolution. So this leads us to the question that whether ICT is the driver of change and how can we capture the potential of ICT to combat issue such as poverty.

Some interesting issue that brought up during lesson was the idea of cloud computing and how much reading has progress since the past. I was not aware of the term of cloud computing prior to this lesson and the video that Dr Gurinder shared actually gives me an idea of how cloud computing work. It actually involves running of a shared data system and everybody will benefit on the changes; Once the system is upgraded and improved, it will be uploaded to the common network and shared with everybody. In the past, information are pass down verbally and in the ever changing world today, informations are passed via various form of media and mainly the internet. Hence, that's a need for cloud computing. The reason is with so much knowledge being pass down, those information has to make sense and being integrated with the information and coming our solutions to those problems. This is actually in line with the quote Dr Gurinder shared with us. In this case, Cloud computing is used as the catalyst for knowledge revolution.

Next interesting point is actually the topic covered by Daniel about the debate of reading online. He talked about the rationale behind reading and reading has shifted from the books era to the modern era, which is make use of internet to do reading. I find his topic particularly interesting because for me, i do not read books very often as I feel that I lack the motivation to read after awhile. However, with the pervasive use of internet, it has actually motivate more people to read since they are online and they can read on information of what they are interested in in just a few seconds. Though as what people might argue is that it cause a lot of distraction, but as what Prof has mentioned, sometimes we need a little distraction before we can really focus on the things we need to do.

I have 2 major key takeaways for this week's lesson. The first key takeaway is actually there's a need for knowing the knowhow for applying technology. There is no point applying the technology for the sake of applying as it will result in more complex management rather than simplifying it. We should actually figure out the process before implementing the correct technology that will benefit us. The next key takeaway is that currently, we are still using the industrial age model of ICT and as a result, we are not about to capture the full potential of ICT and knowledge revolution. We are currently running things in the old way rather than the new way. One problem that we need to look into is actually the digital divide. The disparity will actually cause countries to use old industrial age model rather than moving towards the new model to capture the full potential of ICT. The question that I hope that we can have more time to discuss on is how we can do to actually close up the disparity and maximise the potential of ICT.

This week lesson was rather interesting for me and I would rate this week's lesson 8/10. Although this week's presentation was more and longer, I find it interesting as this week we are covering just 1 theme and hence have more time for discussions related to this week's theme. Before i end my post, i will with u this quote by Andrew Grove,

Not all problems have a technological answer, but when they do, that is the more lasting solution.