THE LINK

                

      3/97              FOR MEMBERS ONLY               June/July 

FROM THE EDITOR

There are about seven "Flagship Applications" outlined by our Prime Minister for the MSC. Electronic Government, Smart Schools, Telemedicine, R & D clusters, National multipurpose card or "Smart Card", Borderless marketing centres and World-wide manufacturing webs are the seven multimedia industries which have been targeted for development by the year 2000 to rapidly catalyze the MSC's growth, and accelerate Malaysia's progress toward Information-Age leadership.

Out of these seven applications, "Smart Schools" & "Electronic Government" seem to have more impact on the teaching profession i.e. the teachers. The government will implement this project "smart schools" in phases i.e. the first three smart schools will be operational by January 1999 and in addition, 80 other schools which are currently implementing technology related pilot projects will be integrated into smart schools. By the year 2000, around 500 schools with approximately 300,000 students will be operationalised.

In order to achieve the targets above, the usage of computers and the Internet will be a must. Due to one reason or another, many teachers have not been trained to use computers let alone the access to the Internet. As the committee of the STU Kuching Branch has foreseen this problem, it is planning to organize some computer classes and Internet Seminars for our fellow teachers very soon.

In fact our Education Sub-Committee has already planned to hold a seminar on Internet in collaboration with CDC Internet Centre on the 19th July. Starting from 4 August 1997 we are also organising a computer course especially for those who have little or no basic knowledge in computers. We hope members will make use of this opportunity to learn about computer as they need only to pay a minimal fee for the course - just to pay for the rental, facilities and lecture fee to the instructor.

By K. C. Chai