This interesting article in The Australian has interesting statistics and information about internet usage in different countries, including Korea, of course, and how this affects trends in marketing and recruitment of educational institutions.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/social-media-sells-education/story-e6frgcjx-1226113733750
The Article in the Korea Herald of December 12, 2010
The president of the Korea Education and Research Information Service (KERIS) advocated the active use of ICT (Information & Communication Technology) in classrooms. It has proven its value so far in improving learning effects, especially in rural areas which formerly experienced a great lack of schools, teachers and other educational contents. The ICT projects led by KERIS included the digital textbooks and the U-learning classroom system, both of which are under test run in Korea.
He said that ICT is not to substitute the role of teachers or of schools but to seek what they could not do. It is nevertheless an effective tool to open up new views and ground, through which teachers and students may discover a whole new perspective of learning. He also said that, as the field of ICT is still relatively new to the world, its impacts may not be as easily predictable, making many reluctant to embrace the idea fully when it comes to education. Korea, with its excellence both in ICT and in education, should offer the world a leading example in what a combination of both may achieve.
South Korea rose from the ashes of the Korean war to its current status as an advanced, industrialized economy on the strength of hard work and technology development. However, most analyses of Korea’s development over the past half century point to education as a key. The World Bank’s extensive study of Korea’s emergence as a Knowledge Economy came to this conclusion.
Most recently, during the current global financial crisis, Korea is among a handful of major industrial nations that have continued to boost education spending, despite the recession. The others are China, Taiwan, Germany, France and Brazil,, according to research conducted at U.C. Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education and reported in The San Francisco Chronicle.
Fulbright Korea’s U.S. Education Center (link to Korean home page) ( Link to English home page) is part of a global network of more than 400 “EducationUSA” advising centers supported by the Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. Our activities in Korea place us at the cutting edge of the information revolution as it re-shapes academic advising. Consider the following.
All organizations in Korea are adapting to this rapidly changing media environment. For example, the U.S. Embassy has launched a very popular internet cafe (Cafe USA) on Daum, one of Korea’s leading portals. The current ambassador to Korea, Kathleen Stephens, a former Peace Corps volunteer here, authors a very popular blog which is published simultaneously in both Korean and English. The Embassy public affairs office operates an information center blog and posts information to the web about the Embassy’s American Corners.
In relation to all of these efforts, the Fulbright Commission’s U.S. Education Center plays a unique role. Fulbright Korea became involved with “student counseling” back in the 1960s, and its efforts expanded in parallel with the growing numbers of Korean students going to the U.S. for study abroad. The purchase of the Fulbright Building, which was dedicated in January of 2000, augmented our ability to provide web-based advising and information services in the Korean language, to prospective Korean students and their parents, and in English, to U.S. colleges, universities and other educational organizations seeking to recruit Korean students.
In April of this year we are pleased to be hosting a U.S. State-Department sponsored workshop on “Social, Mobile and Visual Media” with the theme of “Advising in the Digital Age.” Fifteen advisors from other EducationUSA centers around the Asia region will join staff from the U.S. State Department and our Fulbright web team in Seoul to explore cutting-edge issues that are transforming the nature of advising in the digital age. More on this topic in later posts.
As some of you who follow this blog already know, I author another blog called koreainformationsociety.com. Quite frequently there are posts on that blog that I think might be of interest to people reading this one. After all, education is one of the major pillars, arguably the most important one, in building an information society. Education is at the heart of South Korea’s progress over the past three decades in building an information society.
Also, I realize that many university administrators and others in the U.S. education sector are interested in Korea’s rapidly evolving digital media environment. This nation’s goal of becoming the world’s first ubiquitous society has definite implications for U.S. schools who currently and in the future will recruit Korean students. The new category, Korea’s Information Society, should help to bolster the existing one on “Recruiting Korean Students.”
Comments and suggestions on this new category are welcome.