Why ICT can’t be widely used by students in schools?----MA Junna’s own opinion.

Last session, Dr. Lu told us a research that she did in a high school of Hong Kong. In the picture of that research showed that although the teacher had his class in IT lab, the students in his class didn’t login system and didn’t use computers so often. Why? Why don’t schools’ computers often be used by students? -- I think maybe we could solve the questions in a more economic way.

Firstly, if that school allows students use schools’ computers freely or more frequently than now, school needs to find at least one teacher to take care of the labs. Let’s assume that school will hire an equipments manager to take charge of these computers and school’s internet. Then if we give this equipments manager 20,000 HKD per month, we need to pay him at least 240,000 HKD per year. At the same time, if students use computers more frequently, the speed of depreciation will become much faster than before. So school needs to pay even much more money than now. Maybe at least more than 300,000 HKD a year. However, they can’t see “income” or “benefit” directly. How to evaluate a school? (I mean schools before college.)-----Enrollment Rate! And which kind of exams measure students’ IT ability?----I don’t know any now. Maybe there are some, but few. So will you do something without any “income”? It’s in the violation of the economic person assumption.

You may say that we can see long-term incomes. But how to evaluate these long-term incomes? Hard to say. And if schools won’t let students use these IT equipments so often, why they bought these equipments?

It’s like a “Game Theory”, all about school’s rating, reputation, student resource, and enrollment. Schools without IT labs won’t be a good school. Do you agree with that? Nearly all good schools must have more than one IT lab, and some ICT courses. It is not only a outcome for students, but also a sign of modern and high quality education. Parents won’t choose a school without any modern educational equipment. So a IT lab is also a survival condition for schools. We can evaluate schools by these IT equipments. However it’s hard to evaluate schools’ IT education. If it’s hard to evaluate, and they have already reached their aims. Maybe they won’t use time and energy to do something which they can’t get benefit directly. People all tend to choose the optimal choice for themselves.

Above all, I believe that maybe we’d better find a way which can balance schools’ interest requirement and students’ high quality IT education, and which can instead of “We should”, “We would”, and “We could” in the conclusions.

Anyway, it’s my own opinion. Thanks for reading!



MA Junna, Riley