When personal computers started weaving their way into our lives, they were elevated to a strange god-like status... powerful machines to be feared. The folks in control decided that an all-encompassing understanding of these strange beasts had to be inculcated in our young people. Enter the phenomenon of the "computer room". Children got out of their regular classes, stood in line, and trotted off to the computer room for their computer class, twice a week. There, within the confines of a small, suffocating space, they were initiated into the world of CPUs, floppy disks, hard disks, random-access memory and a whole bunch of other irrelevant components of a computer.

None of this had any bearing on our lives... computers continued to be treated like other-wordly boxes and children got more and more out of touch with what was happening in the world. They did, however, manage to tell the difference between a monitor and a keyboard. WOW.

Several years later, nothing has changed. Unlike pencils and erasers, computers are still not integrated into our lives. How long will it be before teachers and curriculum developers and school boards understand that computers are tools? They have to co-exist with everything else that is familiar to us. If a child needs to write a letter or a report, he will learn to word-process. If he needs to calculate the sum of several numbers, he will learn how to use a spread-sheet. If he needs to share an exciting experience with his class, he will learn to make a presentation. In essence, he will learn Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, out of necessity. All the schools that conduct full-length courses in Microsoft Office, at least at the junior level, are wasting everyone's time. We should be teaching our children to think, and ponder, and evaluate. Instead we waste crucial hours teaching them skills that they can learn on their own. To have a computer lab full of Pentium machines and a computer teacher who is clueless about education, in a country with limited resources, is positively criminal. There are schools all over the world, with just one computer, one telephone line, and one Internet account who are weaving magic into the lives of school children. This can happen here too if teachers would pledge to wake up and try and understand the possibilities of technology and what computers can really do. The Internet is a globalizing medium, it doesn't care whether you are live in Gujranwalla or Silicon Valley... it exists purely because human beings need to communicate. So amidst all this talk of education in the new millennium, this is a plea to the education system to wake up and take a look at some of the projects that children and teachers are involved with all over the world and PLEASE stop believing that you are making your children Information Technology literate by teaching them what a hard disk looks like and how to use a word-processor. Our children need to get out there and show everyone what they can do.

To illustrate the point that advances can be made with limited resources... here is an example of how one teacher made a difference in the lives of a few government school children.

In 1997, Mahenaz Mahmud of the Teachers' Resource Centre (TRC), Karachi became enchanted with e-mail and its amazing ability to transcend barriers of geography, culture and time. Armed with nothing but spirit, she set off for Jutland Lines Government School. The girls of Class V were bored... the prospect of writing letters to children in another part of the world was not enough to immediately excite them. After a few minutes of ice-breaking and treating the children as equals, some of the girls volunteered to be part of the project. By the end of the half hour session, the core group was raring to go.

The girls would write their letters in Urdu. Mahenaz would take them home, translate them into English and e-mail them to a school in Maryland, USA. By the morning, she would have replies... quick translations, from English to Urdu... and the letters would be taken back to the school and read out to the girls.

One morning at 10:30 a.m., Mahenaz asked the girls what they thought their friends in America would be doing. They immediately responded, "They'll be in school of course!" When they were informed that in fact, their friends would be fast asleep, they were surprised and wanted to know if they were on vacation. This led to a discussion on time-zones, continents, the sun, and the moon. Teachers, please note that information, provided in context, sticks in the brain beyond the final exam. A couple of days later, Asma, one of the Karachi girls, wrote to her friend Lisa, about "kheer" being her favorite dessert. Since kids in America have never heard of "kheer", Asma got the opportunity of "teaching" Lisa about our foods and festivals.

Two weeks into the project, the Jutland Lines girls began coming to TRC (the transport was funded by the very cooperative principal of the school) and started learning how to type. English started creeping into their messages. Their communication and writing skills started improving, and their inhibitions lessened. At TRC, they were treated like individuals with ideas and opinions that were worth listening to. They were now sending and receiving e-mail without ever needing to know what the different parts of the computer were. From a purely educational perspective, they learned history, geography, writing, reading, math, English, and most importantly, they learned how to express themselves without fear.

This example illustrates how technology can integrate into the daily life of a child and foster true learning. In some of my future columns, look out for projects that are being done by teachers and children worldwide with ideas for local implementation.