Chulapol Thanomsing
EDTL 601 Unit 1 Assignment
Information Age

We are still in the "Information Age." Pundits have proclaimed it for years; articles in the popular press have plumbed its implications for every imaginable enterprise; businesses are enamored with it; on-line and print magazines are devoted to it; government is wrestling with it, movies have been made about it; people are talking about it. (James A. Dewar) The information age is likely to have profound effects throughout society – even if the specific effects are hard to see at this point.

At this point I want to suggest regarding the information’s importance. Important, not least, because gargantuan fortunes are there to be made for those who see the future clearly. Important also, because information is affecting a wide variety of human enterprises in significant ways (businesses are "flattening" and globalizing; people are buying faxes, cell phones and computers; schools are wiring themselves in anticipation; governments are scrambling to handle information age problems, etc.). (James A. Dewar) It means the information has an influence in business, research, academic and what not, so those who have abundant information could be leader in this age. This age is the time that the information can be found easily and the information also has much.

In addition, in this section we see the new technologies that are built. And the end-users usually use it for the supporting information that is increasing in everyday. Therefore, those who are able to use it to support, search, find the information have the power. All those wrote above are related with the communications medium that can be stated as follows: 
•	As the first true many-to-many communications medium, the networking of computers is the defining characteristic of the information age, 
•	There has been only one comparable event in the recorded history of communications. It was the first true one-to-many communications medium, and no change since has been as dramatic as networked computers, 
•	The impact of the printing press on its era was profound in breadth and depth, and was directly related to its one-to-many communications capability, 
•	It is thus that I argue the many-to-many capability enabled by networked computers will play a role in similarly broad and deep changes in the information age. (James A. Dewar)

Then, it is networked computers that define the information age. Other definitions of the information age are much broader, encompassing other information technologies such as faxes, cellular phones, non-networked computer applications, few-to-few intranets, and so forth. There are clearly other aspects of the information age. (James A. Dewar)

About learning/teaching, now I think we are in the interactivity class. It does not seem the past that we can study only in the class and ask the teachers in the class or by appointment. Today, the teachers should be the instructors to suggest in the subject that we are studying and give us the topic and/or the case-studies that should be searched. So we have to search the topic by ourselves and bring it to discuss with the other students and the instructors. In addition, the topic can be found more information that we are searching at the internet and then bring it to share the idea to another one in the class. While we have a problem we can contact the instructors anytime that we want via the technology that names “E-mail”. That means we can create and design new resources for multitude of the subject that have yet to be realized.

From above paragraph, I suppose the potential of Information Technology (IT) affect with the learning/teaching process. It draws on the proficiency of teachers and gives pointers to the types of learning environments helpful to maximizing this potential.

The topic and the case-studies of teacher practice present a broad spectrum of learning activities across all curriculum areas and all levels of teaching. The focus is on describing what teachers and students actually have done in using IT as an important tool in their learning/teaching. 

The topic and the case-studies have been selected to have relevance for all teachers. They represent a range of applications from the relatively low tech to more sophisticated applications and from technology poor school environments to situations where teachers and students have ready access to powerful hardware and software and technical support. 

The result of many of these learning/teaching, the teachers (instructors) can be reduced the pressure on the class and the efficiency of student knowledge also can be increased from searching by themselves in the each subject.

At the new education reform, it is able to prevent the parents taking their students out of school and place them into other schools.