Saturday, March 13, 2010

ICT in Sinhala/Tamil or English


Today I was preparing few presentation notes on ICT subject for O/L , A/L students and those for an upcoming ICT awareness seminar series to be held in some schools in rural areas, Sri Lanka. So obviously the content is supposed to be in Sinhala and Tamil medium. When I went through the Sinhala teachers' manual, all most all the content have been explained well, and the editors have done a great job. As well they have taken a great effort to use our own terms instead of English terms.

But what I felt was whether we will able to generate our own knowledge base at least a glossary in our own mother tongue, for a subject like ICT. For subjects like Chemistry, Physics which are more theoretical the case is different as we have our own scientific terms which were generated a long time back.

But for a subject like ICT, the field is changing rapidly, so the existing information get updated rapidly and new information, technologies pop-up like crazy. So it's quite impossible to generate our own terms, with the present pace of change.
It's a good move if the students are motivated to use English terms themselves rather force them to remember the Sinhala terms. Because after they leave the school, those Sinhala terms are not gonna be valid for them anymore.
 

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