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IGNOU VC’s call to use technology From Our Bureau DIBRUGARH, March 22 – At least a hundred colleges affiliated to the Dibrugarh University are likely to be taken into the fold of the Directorate of Distance Education (DDE) under the Union HRD Ministry. This is will go a long way in digitally empowering these educational institutes. Speaking as the chief guest at the eleventh convocation of the Dibrugarh University today, the Vice-Chancellor of Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), Prof VN Rajasekharan Pillai, dwelt at length on emerging academic trends, centreing around technology and electronic communication. He is also the director of DDE and assured the Dibrugarh University that its proposal to rope in as many as a hundred colleges under distance education would be actively considered.

"The need of the hour is to advance the reach of the education delivery mechanism with the help of technology," he said and added that positive exploitation of the massive global repository of knowledge is the key to remain afloat in the present times. “For this, we need a seamless integration of technology and communication, and for this, technology has to be made available at a cheap price,” he opined. He mentioned of a UN effort to develop a laptop computer which would cost the customer US $ 1, to drive home his point. While he congratulated the graduates and above for achieving their academic credentials, he said one will have to thank the teaching community and the parents of the scholars for this. “But you should not rest on your laurels, and one will have to keep seeking knowledge and information for the betterment of society for all times to come,” he advised.

He quoted Sri Aurobindo to say that for every learner, the first lesson he/she has to learn “is to unlearn” for better comprehension and conceptualization of what he/she has been taught. He said that a person must be ready to say that I know only this much, and I need to learn further, and that this humility makes the individual to learn ever more. Prof Pillai said that the recent phenomenon of greater stress on sunrise academics like IT, biotechnology, etc., at the cost of conventional streams like humanities, social sciences, languages, the arts, is an undesirable development. He called for a greater integration of academics to glue in the modern and the conventional. He said a solution towards this could be the emergence of multi-disciplinary, multi-faculty varsities. assam tribune Home