At the 12th Annual Infocomm Commerce Conference organised by the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce & Industry (SCCCI) and IDA,
RADM(NS) Lui Tuck Yew, Senior Minister of State for Education and Information, Communications and the Arts, made two announcements. They are the opening of a second SME Infocomm Resource Centre (SIRC) and a new one-stop online directory of infocomm products and services for SMEs.

Speaking at the event, RADM(NS) Lui called on SMEs to differentiate themselves through innovation in order to capture mindshare and market share. "Enterprises do not have to dig deep into their pockets to market their products and services," he said. "They can leverage infocomm technology, as the Internet offers a ready, low-cost platform for SMEs to effectively market their products and services."

According to the IDA's Survey on Infocomm Usage by Enterprises for 2007, two out of every three SMEs leveraged the Internet to improve their business operations. Almost one of every three SMEs has already established a virtual shop front on the Internet.

IDA leads a contingent of local infocomm solution providers at the SCCCI’s Annual Infocomm Commerce Conference.

However, there is still a substantial number of SMEs who have not
automated their basic business
processes, ranging from inventory management to accounting and finance, noted RADM(NS) Lui.

Making a similar observation, SCCCI President Mr Chua Thian Poh said there is an obvious gap between SME's receptivity to infocomm adoption and how they should go about it.

Almost seven in 10 SMEs have no idea what type of technology could apply to their industry or business needs, he said. "Our responsibility is to address their nagging questions of 'what', 'why' and 'how to'."

To do this, SCCCI has partnered IDA to help establish an SIRC which would offer SMEs the opportunity to learn more about infocomm technology and its applications to specific businesses. Similar to the first SIRC at Singapore Polytechnic, the SIRC@SCCCI will host technology learning sessions comprising half-day seminars, hands-on laboratory learning with online tools, one-on-one business clinic sessions and site visits to solution centres. Quarterly schedules for these activities will be made available from September 2008. SMEs can register with the SIRC at www.sccci.org.sg/sirc.

In a separate initiative, a one-stop portal has been launched to provide SMEs with information about infocomm products and services offered by locally-based companies. The portal - i-Directory - helps SMEs to locate suitable infocomm solutions for their businesses. i-Directory is equipped with user-friendly search features which allow SMEs to search by products or
services, by company name or by industry sector. Infocomm solution providers benefit from joining the portal as they can showcase their products
and services.

Other initiatives under the Infocomm@SME programme include the SME Infocomm Package which allows SMEs to purchase attractively priced
infocomm solution packages from IDA-appointed vendors; the Technology Innovation Programme offered by IDA and SPRING Singapore to help defray the cost of adopting infocomm solutions; and the SME Domain Name Reservation initiative which gives SMEs a discount of up to $30 on their first website domain name registration.

For more information on these initiatives, visit www.ida.gov.sg/sme.

The Ministry of Education (MOE) has unveiled Singapore's third Masterplan for ICT in Education, which is aimed at further transforming the learning environment for students. Speaking at the inaugural International Conference on Teaching and Learning with Technology (iCTLT) in August, Dr Ng Eng Hen, Minister for Education and Second Minister for Defence, said Masterplan 3 represents a continuum of the vision of Masterplans 1 and 2.

"We want greater engagement of students to encourage more self-directed questioning and learning," he said. "An interactive environment using all
our senses will provide greater clarity and enhance content transmission
and retention."

The four goals of Masterplan 3 are to:

• strengthen competencies for self-directed learning,
  
  
• tailor learning experiences according to the way that each student learns best,
  
  
• encourage students to go deeper and advance their learning, and
  
  
• enable students to learn anywhere.
  
  

The masterplan will be armed with four strategies: bring ICT into the core of the education process, improve teachers' ICT skills, improve the sharing of best practices among educators, and upgrade schools' ICT infrastructure to keep up with developments. As part of the masterplan, bandwidth at schools will be increased to 1Gbps, which is in line with the Infocomm Development Authority's (IDA) Intelligent Nation 2015 (iN2015) masterplan.

One of the goals of Masterplan 3 is to encourage students to go deeper and advance their learning.

MOE will reinforce the infrastructure where it is needed, and in phases according to the needs of the schools and their teachers. It will study how to increase the bandwidth speed for schools so that they can engage and empower students anywhere and anytime through mobile learning.

"If we succeed, we expect to see, a pervasive culture of innovative ICT practices across all schools and a corps of specialist teachers in every cluster who demonstrate a deep understanding of how ICT can transform teaching and learning both within and outside the classroom," said Dr Ng.

In conjunction with the announcement of Masterplan 3 for ICT in Education at iCTLT, there was also a preview of the edumall 2.0, a joint-project between MOE and IDA. The edumall 2.0 will provide teachers with resources, learning ideas and approaches from varied providers. These will include the latest resources prepared by MOE, other national and international companies in digital educational materials as well as from partnerships with national institutions. Apart from serving the content needs of MOE schools, it is expected that edumall 2.0 will become a Learning Digital Exchange - a national learning content network that allows seamless access and sharing of teaching and learning repositories related to education for all learners.

Over the next few years, edumall 2.0 aims to provide every teacher with a wide range of interactive digital resources including full length videos, video clips, interactive websites, multimedia activities, lesson plans and visual, aural and textual archived resources. edumall 2.0 will build up a wide database of quality resources from trusted sources and provide an array of easy-to-use Web 2.0 tools and an effective search engine. In the future, edumall 2.0 may potentially even be made accessible to every student in Singapore.

Click here for the full text of the Minister's speech.