Ashoka International Centre for Educational Studies and Research

Education from the beginning has been defined in terms of basic or essential skills required for survival in the society. The first ever set of basic skills used to define was based on the primacy of spoken word in the society: grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The invention of printing press at the inception of first renaissance changed the survival prima-matter of spoken word to written word; and thus 3 'R's: reading, writing, and 'rithematic . Similarly, the invention and distribution of www / internet heralded three information skills or Info Skills: Information Acquisition - ability to navigate, locate, retrieve, solicit, and store information from internet and online; Information Analysis - ability to process, evaluate, and synthesize information online; and Information Display - ability to organize, visualize, and communicate information online. Just as the printing press caused a change in the definition of what it meant to be educated from oral fluency to print fluency, the internet changed it from print fluency to multi-media network fluency. The inevitable mass-customization of high quality asynchronous learning environments along with multimodal information-interactive instructional technologies has not only determined education as a deeply personal enterprise but also has made the role of academics and information critical.