Substantive contributions by educationists to the policy

Indian education system is fortunate to have a large body of individuals and institutions working with the public education system for decades. Many of them are keenly aware of the potential as well as the downsides of ICTs (while technology enthusiasts usually emphasise the former and ignore the latter - the policy draft prepared by GeSCI and CSDMS begins with the line " Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have made a huge impact on Education in most countries in the World.'), and have engaged with both the design and applications of ICTs to school education as well as with the current policy issue.

While most educationists have been ignored by the consultations organized by GeSCI and CSDMS, many of them organized a two day workshop at NCERT on april 29 and 30. The two day consultations were full of discussions on education issues and aims and how ICTs could fit in (instead of the discussions on infrastructure and connectivity which fill discussions organized by ICTD organizations). Many wrote out 'short discussion papers' before the consultations and the workshop discussions were highlighted in a workshop report.

The short papers are available in http://www.itforchange.net/index.php/dis/edu-ict/124-sdp-npise.html
and the report is available in http://www.itforchange.net/media/NPISE/Draft_WKSH_Report_NPISE_Consultation_May2008.pdf
and these documents provide significant inputs for ICT in school education policy.

The biggest concern that educationists have is that a ICT policy can cause great harm to education if it did not align to critical educational principles and perspectives. A set of 'non-negotiable principles' that such a policy should be based on has also been prepared. This is available on http://www.itforchange.net/media/NPISE/NPISE-Non_negotiable_principles_draft2.0.pdf

This busts one of the myths propagated that ' since educationists (traditional domain actors) are not interested in ICTs, we need to involve technologists or ICTD enthusiasts in making ICT policies in that domain.' On the contrary, in the current policy process, the contributions of the domain actors are being ignored by the policy process

Meaningful ICT Policy in education (or any domain) can only emerge when the domain actors and experts design the policy, since policy making requires deep understanding of the domain contexts and challenges, domain aims and priorities, rather than that of technology per se. It is useful to remember that even in the business world, ICTs started to provide returns only when their design and implementation was driven by line departments (such as purchase or manufacturing in ERP systems). First phase implementations in business world driven by the CIOs or CTOs were usually in the area of payroll or financial accounting and had limited impact on business.