Education for the information society

While the discussion of ICTs is often posed in relationship to a 'knowledge economy' or an 'information society', the latter is usually taken to mean an advanced industrialized economy where service industries account for a very large proportion of the national economy. While this economic structure is identifiable in some nation states, there are very few roadmaps for how such an economic state can be achieved by developing countries and in this respect Asia Pacific is no different from the rest of the world.

There are five novel processes that characterize the Information Society in published literature. Identifying these processes provides an insight to the kind of policy responses required to prepare a population for this emerging society:

1. Global networks of finance capital are rapidly expanding, with economic advancement often based on the ability to shift informationalized capital between markets. This suggests the need for an international perspective and experience and a certain level of cosmopolitanism and outwardly-focused thinking among business owners.
   
   
2. Information itself is increasingly commodified. That is, there has been significant growth in the sales of 'information products' and media as a proportion of economic activity. This intensifies the need for literacy and for a critical capacity to assess information.
   
   
3. Lifestyle and consumption choices increasingly define diverse social structures, requiring businesses to have a more sophisticated understanding of cultural issues and empathy with their chosen markets.
   
   
4. Services are becoming an increasingly important economic category, suggesting a shift in the traditional policy focus on science and technology and increased emphasis on human disciplines such as the arts, humanities and social sciences.
   
   
5. There is the recognized emergence of significant 'informal' economies, which direct the flow of money outside of the formal market mechanisms where more open relationships take place. For example, most areas of the creative industries are heavily dependent on personal relationships. Skills in relationship development are necessary in more informal environments.

As a representative and influential example, Manuel Castells' view is that there is a new mode of development, which he calls informationalism, that is driven by changes in the mode of capitalist production. According to Castells (1996, p. 27), this trend is linked to the rise of the service industry and the informational economy, where the workplace is focused on the generation, manipulation and interpretation of text, images and other symbolic information. The result of these changes is the emergence of a 'skill bias' in changing employment opportunities under information-intensive economies, where jobs requiring manual labour are disappearing and new jobs require higher levels of information literacy and knowledge. Economists have put forward this notion of 'skill-biased technological change' to explain the growing overrepresentation of the least skilled workers in unemployment figures in many countries over the last two decades. Greenan et al. (2002, p. 10) note that this change 'induces an upward drift in the relative efficiency of skilled workers and a downward drift in the cost share of unskilled workers', leading to increased wage inequality without affecting aggregate wage and employment statistics. This is important in ICT4D because regional and national aggregate statistics are usually used as evidence for ICT-induced economic gains but may in fact be coextensive with decreased economic well-being for a majority of people.

While many jobs have been lost through ICT development, many new ones have been created. However, aggregate economic statistics such as job growth, usually used as evidence to support IT-supported economic gains, shed little light on the kinds of jobs that are created and lost in this transformation. Where are the contemporary skills shortages that must be addressed? These are often difficult to map and little is known about changes in on-the-job training. Certification may often be simply for convenience, providing barriers to entry rather than reflecting true business need. For example, the Microsoft Certified Software Engineer (MCSE) qualification became increasingly popular because it provided the type of ICT skills that were/are thought to be relevant in the labour market, but it rapidly produced over-supply (South Africa Human Resource Development Data Warehouse 2004).

There is widespread agreement that education is one of the most important issues in preparing people for the information society and in particular in adapting to technology-enabled networks. European researchers have highlighted three kinds of ICT skills that are important: ICT User Skills, ICT Practitioner Skills and e-Business Skills (European Committee for Standardization 2006):

• ICT user skills, such as using the Internet or desktop processing programmes, generally lead to productivity improvements for organizations and allow individual users to get higher paying work.
  
  
• ICT practitioner skills, such as software development, enable the development of new industries. These generally require a higher level of training and result in an individual who has a career in the ICT sector.
  
  
• e-Business skills (or what we might call e-organizational skills) are related to an understanding of changes in markets, policy and organizational structures which are occurring due to the rise of the Internet and ICTs. These skills are gained through education but also often by the experience of the user working in a particular field.

Chennells and van Reenen (2002, p. 199) suggest that while there is considerable agreement about skill-biased change, there is little research analyzing the means by which technological change translates into higher demand for skills. Their work points to organizational changes made possible through ICT, such as 'delayering, decentralization and giving greater autonomy to workers' as the link between technology and higher skill requirements or professionalization. While computer interfaces have not changed the knowledge that manufacturers must have about their production process, they do provide far more second-by-second information about the process that needs to be interpreted (Shaw 2002, p. 232). Consequently, firms develop highly skilled job designs that reflect this need for interpretation and cognitive skills.

In ICT4D in Asia Pacific, we can see this reflected most clearly in the changes in the telecentre movement. As Raihan and Habib point out in the Bangladesh chapter, a content-based approach gives a new direction to the global telecentre movement. Previously, a telecentre was essentially a technology learning centre and communication centre (with an Internet connection and telephones) which largely relied on the information processing capabilities of the end users. Now, telecentres are able to provide the core information and knowledge service for things such as market opportunities or information on the visits of aid organizations. These functions are unthinkable without ICT. However, ICT use is not the goal but simply a means for the telecentre to become an effective social and informational hub.