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Institutions | Training | Online Education | Papers / Articles
Using Internet for promoting GIS Awareness among the Schools,Colleges and Universities : An approach
P. Jothimani
Geoinformatics Program, Applied Technology Group, Tata Infotech Limited
80 Feet Road, Indira Nagar, Bangalore - 560 038
India., Tel: (080) 528 4681 Fax: (080) 528 4491
email: p.jothimani@tatainfotech.com
The television, computing, home entertainment and telecom industries are obsessed with the talk of technology convergence, essentially voice, data and video over the single network. While the webs destiny is moving towards the television, Net access and cable connectivity are the two key constituents of this revolution. GIS technology and services being emerged as one of the hard-core IT segment , much needed to be done in India. This includes the awareness of the GIS itself. Somehow "the art and science of map making and map reading" as well as computers are not well known to the general public as compared to the popular home videos and cinemas. So it is necessary to inculcate the awareness program on computers and maps to start with that can evantually be used to promote GIS technology for many decision-making processes in ones’ personal life. Various universities with distance learning centres offering Information Technology related courses are on the rise. IGNOU and NIIT has experimented with Virtual Classroom concept and planning to take its education centers to towns which has less than 20,000 population. States like Tamil Nadu and Gujarat are trying to introduce computer education even from the primary level. Indian cable giants Siti Cable and IN Cable have already made television as a mass medium. They now want to do the same for Internet (Sudhir Choduhury,1999).Telephone lines need to be blocked for Internet and has much less penetration to the general public whereas accessability to Cable network is widespread both in urban and rural centers. As against 150,000 PC at homes, CATV connectivity stands at 23 million of which 43 % is in urban and 21% of the rural areas. The Investment seems favouring cable connectivity based Set-top Boxes costing around Rs.12,000 against total cost of approximately Rs. 40,000 for PC, Modem and Telephone line. More voluntary societies promoting GIS and related technologies have started conducting competition for school children viz., MapQuiz by INCA, Indian Society of Geomatics and so on. So this paper attempts to focus on the penetration of computers into schools and homes that could be used to make awareness about the GIS technology among colleges and schools is an efficient manner, including the development of Virtual class room atmosphere at home itself.
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