The Information Revolution in Education, economy,business, and management and control

The Information Revolution in Education Perhaps the greatest impact for education is that technological developments have overcome the constraints of time and place, age and circumstance. In the past, people had to travel long distances to sit at the feet of great teachers to seek out knowledge. Great centres of learning grew up around monasteries and universities where precious manuscripts were hoarded in their libraries. The printing press changed that, bringing knowledge closer and making it more accessible to people. Mass education became possible. Now information is available at the click of a mouse. It flows readily without regard for borders. Every teacher and every student can break out of the boundaries of his school and have access to great stores of knowledge all over the world. There is too much to learn, too much to know. What is important now is to decide on the fundamental subject content and principles which a student needs to know, and upon which the acquisition of further knowledge is based. Beyond that, students need to be given the necessary tools and skills to access information, extract what is useful and relevant, and distill the information into useful knowledge. For schools, this means that we must develop in every child the capacity to handle information and to learn independently. It is not just the quantity of information that has multiplied. Multi-media technology also provides the capability to present information in a number of new and interesting ways. Animations, visualizations and simulations offer engaging and participative ways of learning and understanding that make otherwise difficult or boring subjects suddenly come alive. the Information Revolution will transform our lives in the next millennium. The challenge for us in education is to exploit the exciting possibilities that Information Technology offers to prepare our people for this information revolution. We need to provide an environment for students to use information effectively as well as to transform information into knowledge. Information Technology also allows this active learning to take place beyond the physical boundaries of the school. It allows students to reach out to form collaborations with counterparts anywhere in the world. This brings an immediacy and authenticity to learning that would not otherwise be possible. But it will not only be the young who will benefit from this Information Revolution in Education. Information Technology will also be a big factor in the next major frontier of education – mass continuing education. With rapid technological change, there will be a need for the whole workforce to continually upgrade and learn new skills and knowledge. On the economy The main feature of the information revolution is the growing economic, social and technological role of information. Information-related activities did not come up with the Information Revolution. They existed, in one form or the other, in all human societies, and eventually developed into institutions, such as the Platonic Academy, Aristotle's Peripatetic school in the Lyceum, the Musaeum and the Library of Alexandria, or the schools of Babylonian astronomy. The Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution came up when new informational inputs were produced by individual innovators, or by scientific and technical institutions. During the Information Revolution all these activities are experiencing continuous growth, while other information-oriented activities are emerging. Information is the central theme of several new sciences, which emerged in the 1940s, including Shannon's (1949) Information Theory[5] and Wiener's (1948) Cybernetics. Wiener stated also: "information is information not matter or energy". This aphorism suggests that information should be considered along with matter and energy as the third constituent part of the Universe; information is carried by matter or by energy.[6] We can outline a hierarchy to distinguish between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. Data are sensations, facts, figures, etc., that are independent and atomic in nature. Information can be described alternately as organized data, the patterns that exist in data, or the underlying meaning of interrelated pieces of data. Knowledge is the ability to comprehend and use information. Wisdom is the ability to make the best use of knowledge. Data and information are easily transferable in the modern world, whether through oral, written or electronic methods. Knowledge, however, is built by one person and transferred (more slowly) through education and human interaction. Wisdom is the least transferrable by virtue of being built upon the other three with the addition of personal experience and reflection on one's experience. Information is then further considered as an economic activity[,since firms and institutions are involved in its production, collection, exchange, distribution, circulation, processing, transmission, and control. Labor is also divided into physical labor (use of muscle power) and informational labor (use of intellectual power). A new economic sector is thereby identified, the Information Sector, which amalgamates information-related labor activities. Information Revolution: Its Impact on business and Firms The impact of the industrial revolutions on all aspects of our society, work and life has, undoubtedly, been substantial. Will all the talk about the information revolution produce similar, far-reaching changes? By examining analogous inventions of the industrial and information revolutions, this paper argues that the latter is on target and that by around the year 2015 it will be at about the same stage of development as the industrial revolution is today. This would mean extensive changes which will affect the way we shop, obtain services, work educate and entertain ourselves. Furthermore, the impact of information technology on firms and management will be considerable, resulting in flat, horizontal organisations and an intensified competitive market place that spans our entire planet as people will be capable of buying goods and obtaining services from anywhere in the world by using computer networks like Internet. information revolution and its impact on society and firms. As is often the case, the speed and the potential benefits of such a revolution have been exaggerated. By now, computers should have been capable of speaking fluently and understanding natural languages, doing automatic translations between such languages, reading handwritten text and being world chess champions, while expert systems and robots should be in widespread use. Although there have been considerable improvements in computer power and affordability, the major use of computers is still limited to word processing, spreadsheets, graphies, data storage and retrieval, and electronic data processing. There are even those who argue that the huge investments in computers and other office equipment have not improved white-collar productivity which remained stagnant between 1960 and the early 1980s and lias increased little since then. A major concern is, therefore, whether Computers and Communications (C&C), the major components of the information revolution, will ever be capable of delivering their promises of creating a revolution whose impact and consequences will be of equal significance to those of the agricultural and industrial ones. This paper examines this concern first by comparing the information revolution to the industrial one, exploring the similarities and differences between the two, while considering major employment shifts over time; second, it discusses what is already available in C&C and what is bound to become technologically possible in the near and longer terni future; third, it speculates about the future environment when the information revolution, around the year 2015, will be at about the sanie stage of development as the industrial revolution is today. Finally, the paper explores the implications of the information revolution on society and firms, and discusses the major changes that will take place when C&C allow the possibility of shopping, obtaining services, educating ourselves, working, and having practically unlimited choices of entertainment in one's own home.