ICTlogy

As you’d probably have realized, I’ve changed the look of ICTlogy [ai-see-TEE-lo-gee].

Based on Alex’s WordPress CSS Style Competition winner, Pink Lilies, I’ve done some changes in order to:

• have my own colours and removing quite all images
• have two menu bars

There’s still some work to be done, but I feel now more comfortable than with my previous one, actually a slightly modified WordPress v0.72 default template.

This is good news: “Thanks to Uganda Communications Commission’s Rural Communication’s Development Fund, our efforts to expand e-learning to remote areas was successfully achieved last week.”

And Cisco’s Least Developed Countries Initiative is also great: “introduced in July, 2000, as a program to provide opportunities for IT training in an effort to bridge the digital divide in the LDCs of the world”

Talking this morning with Dr. Álvaro Morales, Administrative Director of the Fundación Norte-Sur, we were dealing with the concept of technology transfer. I think that, in general, but even more important in terms of cooperation for development, there’s no use talking about technology transfer but knowledge transfer. And the whole thing is about my eternal speech of content and services driven infrastructures and not infrastructures as a good for themselves.

When providing an intranet or an online learning environment, as we do, the point is not whether we give some platform or some web applications for free but:

• the knowledge enclosed within
• the training or knowledge transfer to appropriate the tools and optimize their use on your own

Thus, this is the reason why, when giving an intranet away, we previously have assessment sessions on what the intranet would mean to the inner organization of the NGO, the hierarchy architecture changes, the information and communication skills and requirements, the pros and cons of web interaction, etc, etc, etc.

And this is also the reason why, when planning online courses (with or without online volunteers), we usually plan previous training for e-trainers sessions so we can “brainwash” traditional teachers and show them what e-learning is all about.

Dr. Morales and I agreed that bridging the digital divide starts much before any technology transfer is even planned, and that it should begin with a serious knowledge transfer on what you are, what you need and, in the end, how could ICT based content and services help you out.

Nice post at elearnspace.

It deals with the differences but close relationship of e-Learning and Knowledge Management:

“elearning is delayed (but tested), organized knowledge”
“KM is chaotic, current (but structurally weak) knowledge”
“KM should feed into elearning (in order for the content of the “course” to remain fresh and to tap learners into a sustained knowledge environment after the course is done). Elearning should feed into the KM environment and provide easy mechanisms for organizing information”

It’s worth the reading :)

I guess this is bad news though it might be considered as good.

Feedster’s searches by “e-volunteering”, “e-volunteer” and “e-volunteers” just show results from this blog, except in a couple of cases (one of them writing about this blog indeed).

Good news is “well, I’ll be found whoever searches according to these keywords”.
Bad news are “am I alone?”.
And yes, setting up this blog was about finding people writing things of my interest and not about having lots of readers. I think I’ve succeeded in this last one goal ;)) but… what about the first goal? I’ve found a good buch of interesting people all around the blogosphere but… still feel quite lonely.

Poor me ;)

My apologies to those reading me through the RSS feed: I had to fix some html tags in quite a lot of posts and all of them will appear unread. So, please, ignore it :((