https://doi.org/10.31261/CHOWANNA.2003.20.10
The relationship between education and socio-economic development has been recognized for many years, but only now are we beginning to observe the first effects of the mass introduction of digital media into education. In many highly industrialized countries, the widespread use of computers as a medium in the teaching and learning process has led to profound changes in the organization and functioning of education. This article addresses the issue of computerization and informatization in Polish schools, where efforts have been made to introduce computers on a large scale through programs such as “Internet for Municipalities” and “Internet for Junior High Schools.” These programs reinforced existing trends in educational change that had already been observed in Poland. Among their outcomes were the popularization of the idea of equipping Polish schools with computers, raising local communities’ awareness of the importance of information technology, increasing teachers’ interest in IT, providing training centers with experience in mass teacher requalification, and overcoming many school-level barriers — such as principals’ and teachers’ fears regarding the use of computers in everyday school operations. The effectiveness of efforts to spark public interest in information technology and to persuade teachers to incorporate computers into their educational work required the development of a training system based on a selective and practical understanding of IT tools. This approach was both the simplest and most effective way to achieve the intended goals. As a result, these goals were successfully met at the initial stage of integrating information technology into education, and the initiative also received broad social approval. Since the popularization and awareness of the importance of information technology in society brought more benefits for the country’s development than the negative effects of technologizing the educational process, it was incorporated into educational practice. However, continuing this direction of IT education in schools today will lead to a rapid increase in social costs, while the benefits (e.g., promotion of information technology) are steadily diminishing. It should be noted that, in the initial stage, the focus on operating technology was a necessary cost — one that had to be borne in order to move closer to the forefront of European countries in terms of the mass implementation of computers in education.
Download files
Citation rules
Cited by / Share
Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The Copyright Owners of the submitted texts grant the Reader the right to use the pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY SA). The user can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose.
1. License
The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
2. Author’s Warranties
The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International".
ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).
3. User Rights
Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
4. Co-Authorship
If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.
I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.
Vol. 1 No. 20 (2003)
Published: 2025-08-18
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
English
Język Polski