Development and the Information Age

Development and the Information Age

Author: International Development Research Centre (Canada)

Publisher: IDRC

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 79

ISBN-13: 088936835X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Development and the Information Age: Four global scenarios for the future of information and communication technology


Physics in a New Era

Physics in a New Era

Author: National Research Council

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2001-07-15

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 0309073421

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Physics at the beginning of the twenty-first century has reached new levels of accomplishment and impact in a society and nation that are changing rapidly. Accomplishments have led us into the information age and fueled broad technological and economic development. The pace of discovery is quickening and stronger links with other fields such as the biological sciences are being developed. The intellectual reach has never been greater, and the questions being asked are more ambitious than ever before. Physics in a New Era is the final report of the NRC's six-volume decadal physics survey. The book reviews the frontiers of physics research, examines the role of physics in our society, and makes recommendations designed to strengthen physics and its ability to serve important needs such as national security, the economy, information technology, and education.


Young Children and Families in the Information Age

Young Children and Families in the Information Age

Author: Kelly L. Heider

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-09-10

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789402401370

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This edited book presents the most recent theory, research and practice on information and technology literacy as it relates to the education of young children. Because computers have made it so easy to disseminate information, the amount of available information has grown at an exponential rate, making it impossible for educators to prepare students for the future without teaching them how to be effective information managers and technology users. Although much has been written about information literacy and technology literacy in secondary education, there is very little published research about these literacies in early childhood education. Recently, the National Association for the Education of Young Children and the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media at Saint Vincent College published a position statement on using technology and interactive media as tools in early childhood programs. This statement recommends more research “to better understand how young children use and learn with technology and interactive media and also to better understand any short- and long-term effects.” Many assume that today’s young children are “digital natives” with a great understanding of technology. However, children may know how to operate digital technology but be unaware of its dangers or its value to extend their abilities. This book argues that information and technology literacy include more than just familiarity with the digital environment. They include using technology safely and ethically to demonstrate creativity and innovation; to communicate and collaborate; to conduct research and use information and to think critically, solve problems and make decisions.


Tendencies and Tensions of the Information Age

Tendencies and Tensions of the Information Age

Author: Jorge Reina Schement

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-04-24

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 1351306022

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The development of technology and the hunger for information has caused a wave of change in daily life in America. Nearly every American's environment now consists of cable television, video cassette players, answering machines, fax machines, and personal computers. Schement and Curtis argue that the information age has evolved gradually throughout the twentieth century. National focus on the production and distribution of information stems directly from the organizing principles and realities of the market system, not from a revolution sparked by the invention of the computer. Now available in paperback, Tendencies and Tensions of the Information Age, brings together findings from many disciplines, including classical studies, etymology, political sociology, and macroeconomics. This valuable resource will be enjoyed by sociologists, historians, and scholars of communication and information studies.


Structuring the Information Age

Structuring the Information Age

Author: JoAnne Yates

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2005-06-22

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 9780801880865

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Structuring the Information Age provides insight into the largely unexplored evolution of information processing in the commercial sector and the underrated influence of corporate users in shaping the history of modern technology. JoAnne Yates examines how life insurance firms—where good record-keeping and repeated use of massive amounts of data were crucial—adopted and shaped information processing technology through most of the twentieth century. The book analyzes this process beginning with tabulating technology, the most immediate predecessor of the computer, and continuing through the 1970s with early computers. Yates elaborates two major themes: the reciprocal influence of information technology and its use, and the influence of past practices on the adoption and use of new technologies. In the 1950s, insurance industry leaders recognized that computers would enable them to integrate processes previously handled separately, but they also understood that they would have to change their ways of working profoundly to achieve this integration. When it came to choosing equipment and applications, most companies ultimately preferred a gradual, incremental migration to an immediate and radical transformation. In tracing this process, Yates shows that IBM's successful transition from tabulators to computers in part reflected that vendor's ability to provide large customers such as insurance companies with the necessary products to allow gradual change. In addition, this detailed industry case study helps explain information technology's so-called productivity paradox, showing that firms took roughly two decades to achieve the initial computerization and process integration that the industry set as objectives in the 1950s.


Digital Dead End

Digital Dead End

Author: Virginia Eubanks

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2012-09-21

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0262294699

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The realities of the high-tech global economy for women and families in the United States. The idea that technology will pave the road to prosperity has been promoted through both boom and bust. Today we are told that universal broadband access, high-tech jobs, and cutting-edge science will pull us out of our current economic downturn and move us toward social and economic equality. In Digital Dead End, Virginia Eubanks argues that to believe this is to engage in a kind of magical thinking: a technological utopia will come about simply because we want it to. This vision of the miraculous power of high-tech development is driven by flawed assumptions about race, class, and gender. The realities of the information age are more complicated, particularly for poor and working-class women and families. For them, information technology can be both a tool of liberation and a means of oppression. But despite the inequities of the high-tech global economy, optimism and innovation flourished when Eubanks worked with a community of resourceful women living at her local YWCA. Eubanks describes a new approach to creating a broadly inclusive and empowering “technology for people,” popular technology, which entails shifting the focus from teaching technical skill to nurturing critical technological citizenship, building resources for learning, and fostering social movement. Important Notice: The digital edition of this book is missing some of the images found in the physical edition.


The Electric Information Age Book

The Electric Information Age Book

Author: Jeffrey Schnapp

Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press

Published: 2012-01-25

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781616890346

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Electric Information Age Book explores the nine-year window of mass-market publishing in the sixties and seventies when formerly backstage players-designers, graphic artists, editors-stepped into the spotlight to produce a series of exceptional books. Aimed squarely at the young media-savvy consumers of the "Electronic Information Age," these small, inexpensive paperbacks aimed to bring the ideas of contemporary thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, R. Buckminster Fuller, Herman Kahn, and Carl Sagan to the masses. Graphic designers such as Quentin Fiore (The Medium Is the Massage, 1967) employed a variety of radical techniques-verbal visual collages and other typographic pyrotechnics-that were as important to the content as the text. The Electric Information Age Book is the first book-length history of this brief yet highly influential publishing phenomenon.


Reconceptualizing Development in the Global Information Age

Reconceptualizing Development in the Global Information Age

Author: Manuel Castells

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 0198716087

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The conditions in which 'development'--the process by which people, individually and collectively, enhance their capacities to improve their lives according to their values and interests--operates have significantly changed in the global information age, a period characterized by the technological revolution in information and communication, the rise of the networking form of social organization, and the global interdependence of economies and societies. This volume aims to redefine the means and goals of development in this new context: first, by characterizing the specific mode of development, informational development, that the authors consider to be the driver of the creation of material wealth in the twenty-first century; secondly, by reconceptualizing human development as the fulfilment of human wellbeing in the multidimensionality of the human experience, ultimately affirming dignity as the supreme value of development; thirdly, by examining the relationship between informational development and human development. After first setting out its analytical framework, the book brings together a diverse set of empirically-rich case studies to illustrate this investigation from across the globe--Silicon Valley, Costa Rica, Chile, South Africa, Finland, the European Union, and China--and concludes by attempting to reconceptualize development. It raises important questions and provides observations, including examining the concept of 'dignity as development', to contribute to a policy debate that should provide specific answers linked to the conditions of each society, and be enacted by democratic institutions in a concerted global effort to save humankind while there is still time.


The Information Age

The Information Age

Author: James D. Torr

Publisher: Greenhaven Press, Incorporated

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Internet has transformed the way people work, play, and communicate. The many questions raised by new information technologies are explored in the following chapters: Will the Information Highway Benefit Society? How Should the Information Highway Be Developed? How Should the Government Regulate E-Commerce? Should Computer Content Be Regulated?