Recent developments in the information and communication technology (ICT) have had remarkable impacts on all economic activities worldwide. Although the direct impact of ICT investment on productivity has been shown in many studies, little is known about the spillover effects of ICT, specially at the international level. In this paper, we study the ICT spill over effects on the labor productivity applying an augmented neo-classical growth model. Our data consists of a panel of 69 countries for the period 1993-2003. We use ICT investments in other countries weighted by imports as a proxy for the spill over variable. The results show that both ICT and its spillover have positive impacts on the productivity worldwide, but the effects are stronger in developed countries.

The advent of technology and modern techniques of communication is of the present world characteristics and its effect on development and improvement of countries is to the extent that it is called the silent revolution. Internet as a media and information technology as an industry are of great importance. The issue of electronic cities and villages which are the subset of information society thought has been raised in the world in the recent years. Today, development and improvement of communities and organizations are due to the emergence of proper beds and the most important of them is information and communications technology, regardless of concerns about the location and their distance with centers of civilization, capital and equipment, it is possible by relying only on their knowledge and management abilities. Different countries, consistent with their present conditions, have taken new policies in the field of ICT development in rural areas; Iran along with many of the leading countries of the world has taken actions towards rural ICT development and by signing the Declaration of Principles of the Information Society in Geneva is committed to being of great influence in the structure of information society. Since 31.54% of the population of the country live in villages and a huge capital of the country lies in villages and since villages and villagers are the basic resources of national production and economic growth in any society, it can be inferred that taking advantage of information and communication technology (ICT) leads to the empowerment and conscious influence of this forgotten stratum in the process of rural development of the country and considering rural ICT can be of great affect in different dimensions of rural sustainable development. ICT in rural areas can be included in the concept of empowerment and empowerment may include different aspects such as education, health, marketing and trade, income, tourism, interest, etc. In this research, we tried to pay great attention to the University of Shoushtar Research Journal/ 9 importance and role of ICT in rural areas, and at the end, the village Shahkooh has been noted as a successful example in the development and application of ICT in the country. Conducting Methods of this study is descriptive, analytic and data collection is of library sort and document-based.

Currently various issues including globalization, ICT, cultural diversity, and the like have affected the curriculum. The present paper aimed to articulate ICT Based curriculum principles on the basis of various documents including, "Comparative studies on development of ICT in the world", "The first draft of philosophy of education in the Islamic Republic of Iran", and "Report on characteristics of the ideal human being in the Islamic Republic of Iran with a 20-year horizon". In comparative studies, both theoretical and practical issues associated with ICT development in four countries were examined and integrated in order to elicit principles of curriculum development using deductive methods.

The purpose of this study was to do a survey on the status of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Islamic Azad University and the extent to which they benefited from ICT facilities in its branches. The population of the research consisted of all ICT managers in all 12 zones of IAU. All the ICT managers acted as samples. To collect data, a researcher-made questionnaire (with 28 close-ended items and two separate open-ended sets of items) was used. To measure the psychometric features of the questionnaire, its content validity was confirmed referring to a group of experts' opinions. Cronbach α was applied to measure the internal consistency among the items (a=0.873). The result of a single group t-Test showed that there was a significant difference between sample mean and the theoretical mean in 23 items, except in using internet to link with other parts of the organization, using ICT to refer to the administrative procedures and correspondence, using ICT in evaluating the staff, infrastructural capacity to benefit from digital library, and the level of internet bandwidth to use digital library. Considering these differences between the mean score and the mean score of the samples and the theoretical mean ( m = 3), it can be concluded that the status of all 12 zones of IAU was less than average in most aspects except the variables of " using on-line courses for professional improvement of the staff", "budgeting for employing ICT experts", "ICT training to staff", "using digital library". It was higher than average regarding the last four variables.