Information technology and the Internet for education
in Iran
THREE EVENTS IN CALIFORNIA
Saturday June 10, 2000
Dinner Gala Presentation and dinner at 7:30 PM
IMAN 3376 Motor Avenue, LA CA 90025
To buy tickets please contact: (310) 202-8181
Mrs. Elham General secretary, IMAN
Sunday June 11, 2000 at 12:30 PM
Southern California International College
3501 S. Harbor Blvd. Santa Ana CA 92705
Admission is Free
Sunday, June 18, 2000 at 5:00-7:00 PM
SHERATON HOTEL 1100 N Mathilda
Sunnyvale, California
FAZ Restaurant, ORCHID Room
Admission is Free
Speaker: Dr. Abbas Edalat Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics
Imperial College, London
At the dawn of the third Millennium, an extraordinary technological
revolution, dramatically illustrated by the rapid development of the Internet,
is unfolding in our planet which is radically changing the way human beings
live, communicate, develop interests, learn, research, produce and trade.
It has had a massive impact on the new generations in the West: Computers
and the Internet have brought about an explosion of perspectives for tens
of millions of children and youth who can use this new medium and technology
as a natural part of their daily lives in order to realize their full potential.
In contrast, this gigantic process is sharply accentuating the gap between
the developed and the developing countries by producing a deeply uneven
and divided world of the digital haves and the digital have nots, with
its striking consequences in terms of global inequality in the years ahead.
However, information technology, and in particular the Internet, has created
for the first time in human history an empowering tool to eradicate effectively
the roots of underdevelopment. The basic precondition is to make the new
technology available and integrated consistently at an early age in the
education of the hundreds of millions of the children in the third world.
The Science and Arts Foundation
(SAF), which was set up as a non-profit-making educational charity on 1st
March 1999, aspires for such an ideal future world.
SAF's first campaign has been in Iran, where school children and university
students have shown their outstanding talents in recent years by a series
of spectacular successes in International Science Olympiads and other major
international competitions such as the RoboCup. Information technology
can enable the youth in Iran to realize their full potential towards the
highest degrees of scientific, technological, cultural, social and economic
progress. By acting now, this vision is within our reach.
In this talk, full details will be presented on how SAF has provided,
in its first year of activities, well-equipped computer sites and Internet
access for 18 model state schools nearly all in deprived areas of cities
such as Tehran, Shahre Ray, Varamin, Isfahan. These are the first schools
in the country to go on-line. SAF has also set up a School Information
Centers at Sharif University in Tehran and is now setting up a similar
one also in Isfahan. These centres provide Internet access to schools,
train teachers in information technology and the Internet, download major
educational and cultural Websites around the globe for use of school children
in Iran. They will also be used to organize Internet based collaborative
projects between schools in Iran and the rest of the world in scientific,
environmental, cultural and artistic areas. Finally SAF's overall program
of activities for the next two years will be outlined.
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