Amongst others, there are four important issues that are guiding this reflection:

1. What has the impact been so far.
2. How has the techno-social scenario changed since they were initially born: increasing adoption of ICTs, importance of broadband, mobile Internet, etc.
3. How has the socio-economic scenario also changed, i.e. the economic and debt crisis in Europe.
4. According to the preceding points, what should be done in the future and how, that is, how public policies to foster the Information Society should be designed in matters of universal access/usage.

In this framework, the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) organized an Expert Workshop on Measuring the Impact of eInclusion Intermediaries in Europe: towards an impact assessment practice?, that took place in May 3-4 in Seville, Spain, and to which I was invited to participate and to contribute with a position paper.

My position paper should verse on the future of telecentres in Europe in 2020, and it was supposed to be what I call a “grounded opinion”: grounded, because it is based on both personal/professional experience and lots of readings; opinion, because, all in all, I was asked to provide my own point of view, what would I do was I to design the policy that would deal with e-Inclusion Intermediaries.

Position paper: eInclusion Intermediaries in Europe: horizon 2020

State of the development of the Information Society

I believe that the development of the Information Society has come not to a dead end, but near a point of stagnation:

• The industry and governments are most of the time still thinking in terms of infrastructures: how much, how are they managed, what is the regulation to bind them and what is they state of usage (usually in percent of saturation).
• Users only care about a huge supply of content and services (for whatever the use) and that these run on affordable infrastructures.

This is, of course, a simplification. But a peek at what governments are measuring and what media are broadcasting gives us an idea of the tremendous bias towards the preceding aspects of the Information Society.

The problem with this scenario is that it has no future, as policies centred in infrastructures are targeting an almost non-existent problem:

• In general terms, physical access is becoming a minor issue (remember: Europe 2020). It already is, especially if we do not take into account as an indicator “households with Internet access”, but “people covered by access to Internet”.
• The former point is due, in part, because many last mile issues have been solved (e.g. with mobile Internet, e.g. with public Internet access points such as telecentres, libraries, cybercafes, schools and many other venues).
• The supply of content and services is buoyant.

The missing gap: capacity building

On the other hand, the two growing problems remain unaddressed by public policies:

• A stable share of ‘refuseniks’, that choose not to use the Internet for several reasons.
• A growing share of citizens that do need digital skills and literacies that they lack or have to acquire when and if possible.

These two gaps have two main consequences:

• An ICT sector which a shortage of supply in terms of highly qualified workers and human capital in general.
• A quality of usage of the Internet characterized by inefficacy and inefficiency, and that many find will be (already is) the core of a second digital divide, deeper that the digital divide of access and more difficult to fix because of its (human) nature.

State of the question, the missing gap and e-Inclusion Intermediaries

How do e-Inclusion Intermediaries face the state of the question and the missing gap? In my own (grounded) opinion, either they change or they will perform badly.

1. Telecentres (understood as not-for-profit and for-development-aimed) will suffer from economic resources shortage, because of the economic crisis and because of Internet penetration. Cybercafes (understood as for-profit and comercially-aimed) will suffer from social sustainability shortage, because of the economic crisis (what solutions are you providing?) and also because of Internet penetration.
2. Most e-Inclusion Intermediaries have traditionally provided or recently began to provide services related to e-skills. The problem is that those skills are becoming much more complex than simple techonological skills and, indeed, it is a set of digital literacies and capacities that is required. Are eI2 responding to that?
3. In the same train of though of literacies, what we have found in our conversion from an Industrial Society to an Information Society is that we have done quite good in learning or appropriating technologies an to applying/adapting them to our usual processes. But we have definitely failed in improving most processes and socioeconomic transformation is but a good bunch of “good practices” that we all know but cannot replicate.

A forecast/proposal for e-Inclusion Intermediaries

• The telecentre should become an eCentre, a centre that is not a physical place, but a reference resource that can actually be located in a specific location, or embeded within an organization. Telecentres should be insourced in other institutions: in a firm, in a civic centre, in a library, in a government, in an NGO…
• Complementary to the former statement, many of the telecentre functions can and should be outsourced. There is evidence that the probability of survival of a telecentre is linked to it being part of a telecentre network: share knowledge, share resources, share contents and services. Outsourcing can take the shape of a core+franchises or a flat network. But reinventing the wheel should be forbidden.
• If we believe in the insourcing/outsourcing pair, partnerships come naturally: e-Inclusion Intermediaries should complement a shared project with their added value, while other partners should be left to do the same. Partnerships with governments in the field of sheer “for development” inclusion or fostering e-government; partnerships with the private sector to leverage the expertise in the field and sell it for the sake of economic sustainability; look out for firms to be included as targets of eI2.
• Of course, purity should be abandoned: no more either telecentre or cybercafe. It’s about e-Centres and it is about to provide knowledge. The function is what matters and not the means: the function is part of the mission, the means are part of the business/operating plan.
• But the function is not fostering ICTs, the function is Inclusion. The ICT centre has to become a Centre-on-ICT-steroids. It is the community — the target — what matters, it is about supporting neighbourhoods, schools, entrepreneurs, living labs… not about supporting ICTs. But we do it with ICTs because we believe in its huge potential.

Some bibliography

Based on my own experience

Bibliography on the impact of telecentres

Before entering the analysis, please note that the NTIA actually provided the reasons for not using broadband at home, while PIP measures the reasons for not using the Internet in general. As the difference between broadband and dial-up at that time (October 2009) was circa 5%, and now (August 2011) being 3%, we believe that comparisons, though inaccurate, do indeed provide good enough insights for a quick analysis.

The first chart shows the reasons that non-users state for not using the Internet, measured in percent of non-users. Thus, the chart pictures the share or weight that each reason has in relationship with other reasons for not using the Internet:

Bearing in mind the caveat on the slightly different variables measured by the indicators, we can easily see that the barriers to access (usually lack of infrastructure, affordability and personal disabilities or lack of appropriate/adapted infrastructure) have decreased drastically in less than two years (Oct 2009 to Aug 2011). Yes, there still is an important 30% of non-users that state that the reason for not using the Internet is infrastructures, but the reason has decreased. More competitive markets, the deployment of infrastructures in remote areas and public access points sure are the main causes for this decrease.

On the contrary, lack of skills has sky-rocketed and multiplied its weight by 13%. It is possible that this figure is not actually true, and that the 3% in 2009 is not gathering non-users because of capability reasons (this is most likely — more on that later).

The interesting thing to notice, though, are the steady “Lack of interest” and “Other” reasons, which almost add up to 50% of the people that do not use the Internet. Besides their high share, it is worth stressing their steadiness or even slight increase. There is a constant share of refuseniks that will not use the Internet whatever the government, the market or their peers do to convince them to do otherwise.

The second chart shows again the reasons that non-users state for not using the Internet, but this time measured in percent of the total of the population. Thus, the chart pictures the share or weight that each reason has in relationship with the whole, then giving us an idea of the aggregate number of people that state a specific reason for not using the Internet:

The good thing to note here is that most reasons are decreasing. This is just natural as the overall adoption of the Internet is increasing. So, by construction, one would expect just that.

The not so good thing to note is that the amount of people stating they are not skilled enough to use the Internet does increase. Even if this figure can be (or is) distorted by the different things that data are depicting, it is consistent with other data and observations around, namely (1) the increase of a second-level digital divide caused by different levels of digital skills and (2) the increase of the amount of people that access public access points (telecentres, libraries, cybercafes) not because of the infrastructures — which most have at home — but in seek of advice or help.

Before this scenario, which is not new, a change or shift of public policies to foster the Information Society should take place. Not that policies aimed at more, better and cheaper infrastructures should be abandoned (or yes, that is another debate), but the provision of digital competences to the citizens should be having an increased if not a major role in public policies.

And, of course, it is about much more than putting computers in the classroom.

Bibliography

Knowing myself very little about quality standards, I was asked to provide the participants — mainly telecentre administrators and other related profiles — with a general framework where they could situate their own e-inclusion projects and, most especially, what was the importance and role of ICT skills in the whole scenario.

Keeping that in mind, and for something more than three hours, I began explaining what the digital revolution was about, that is, what was the outer framework, and went on zeroing in until I ended up talking about digital competence, e-portfolios and personal learning environments. The underlying idea — which almost became a mantra — was that it was not about e-inclusion, but about inclusion, inclusion in an always changing world that required the most valuable skill: being able to learn, to take control of one’s own learning process. And digital skills were there to help people in that.

The speech, Citizens in a Knowledge Society: rethinking education from scratch was structured as follows:

1. In The digital revolution: citizenship and inclusion in a post-industrial society I explained how digitization implied the shift from an industrial to an informational, knowledge-based, network society, and how in such a society institutions (and intermediators in general) have seen their roles and sheer nature radically transformed.
2. Policies for (e-)inclusion: from physical access to meaningful use depicted a comprehensive model of the digital economy and how each and every category of digital development was strongly related with other ones or with some indicators we generally use to measure development.
3. In Netizens: towards a set of digital competences I tried to exemplify how ICTs have become general purpose technologies and are now embedded in the core of our daily lives. Thus, e-inclusion is definitely about inclusion in a very much broader sense.
4. Lastly, New assessment frameworks for new skills provided a comprehensive definition of digital skills which I related, again, with daily experiences and, most especially, with the new ways of learning that Information and Communication Technologies have enabled.

The workshop provided me with two positive feelings.

The first one is that I got the sensation that there was an overall coherence and consistence in the work that I have been pursuing in the last years (I revisited and reused material of my own from, at least, the last four years). Thus, realizing that somehow you’ve been adding up or building around a core idea (and not just producing splattered thoughts) is pleasantly comforting.

The second one is that, at least, most of the theory I handle (of my own and, most of it, by third parties) seems to be having strong strings attached to reality and being ready to provide advice for policy making and project designing. The more feedback I get from people from the terrain, the more I think we’re going parallel (or converging) paths, which, again, is absolutely a good thing to be aware of.

Please see below the slides that I used.

Slides:
Citizens in a Knowledge Society:
rethinking education from scratch.
Part 1: The digital revolution:
citizenship and inclusion in a post-industrial society

Slides:
Citizens in a Knowledge Society:
rethinking education from scratch.
Part 2: Policies for (e-)inclusion:
from physical access to meaningful use

Slides:
Citizens in a Knowledge Society:
rethinking education from scratch.
Part 3: Netizens:
towards a set of digital competences

Slides:
Citizens in a Knowledge Society:
rethinking education from scratch.
Part 4:
New assessment frameworks for new skills

• If they don’t use the Internet, who am I to tell them to: they know better!
• They’ve been living for ages without the Internet and they surely can carry on living without e-mail or Facebook.

Both arguments can, at their turn, be embedded in a major trend now stating that ICTs have neither (positive) impact nor will solve any human problem (economic or not).

After a first era of e-enlightenment were the magic wand of ICTs would eradicate hunger all over the place, now ICTs have become almost useless and, according to some, the drivers of all sorts of evils.

Though pendulums finally reach their points of balance, the problem is that, while swinging, many arguments are centrifuged out impoverishing the debate. I would like to point out why I believe ICTs need being fostered and, more specifically, why we should encourage people to adopt them and use them intensively. At the end, some shades of meaning — and shadows of doubt — will be provided too.

Aggregate economic positive impact.

At the aggregate level — that is, I have to apples, you’ve got none, we’ve got one apple each in average — ICTs have already proven to have a positive impact on the Economy. There is plenty of literature about the economic benefits of ICTs: growth, efficiency, efficacy, productivity, direct impact on employment…

Is economic growth a synonym of development? Certainly not. Will a positive impact on the Economy reduce poverty? Maybe. I believe the Economy to be a means, not a goal. Thus, economic growth (or productivity or efficiency) will just tell us that we’ve got more tools to potentially achieve higher levels of what’s (to me) really the goal: more health, more education and more democracy.

An example? FrontlineSMS:Medic is saving lots of money (and time) by using mobile telephony in the healthcare system. And yes, cost is an important part in the equations of economic productivity and efficiency.

Aggregate and disaggregate non-economic positive impact.

Oh, but not all is about money.

Agreed: Fundación EHAS are contributing to save lives by dramatically reducing the time of reaction to a medical emergency by using wireless technologies between healthcare centres. My own University is providing online education to circa 50,000 students, many of them just able to get their diplomas because they can study from their own homes (or workspaces, or wherever they may roam).

Many people can, for the first time, follow online the plenary sessions of their city councils or their Parliaments, sometimes even being able to have their say and even decide in e.g. participatory budgeting initiatives.

Disaggregate levelling impact.

Of course, the disaggregate level is much harder than the aggregate one. As Matti Tedre put it, the fact that plumbers now attend their customers on their mobile phones won’t rocket the demand up: the demand will remain stable and the mobile phone a cost to kill competition.

Though I mostly agree with this point of view (i.e. ICTs are no magic wands), at least Three comments can be made:

The first one is that, for many knowledge economy jobs, ICTs allow for a leapfrogging strategy, where a minimum investment in capital (technology… we’re taking human capital for granted here) can have high potential returns of this investment.

The second one is that while it may be true that demand can remain stable, diminishing costs of transaction can also and actually trigger some dormant demand. Revisiting the example of online learning, I wouldn’t enrol in a University whose courses I cannot physically attend, but I may consider enrolling in an online one where presence is not due.

The third one is that, even if considering a perfect zero-sum game, where no-one can win without worsening someone else’s condition, the fact that the barriers of entering the knowledge market are much lower than e.g. entering the steel market, make worth considering fostering ICTs an option. I’m here suggesting that fostering ICTs may be good as to level the economic ground we’re all competing in.

Micro level negative impact of non-access.

The last statement is closely related to what is to be stated here: most of the times it is not about the benefits of ICTs, but about the negative impact of no ICTs.

I am convinced that ICTs can make a change, and increasingly convinced that many things have to change for ICTs to make this change. As catalysts, as multipliers, they need an initial effect which to boost or accelerate.

But even to keep the statu quo will need a major adoption of ICTs: if education won’t provide a job, but the lack of education will decrease your chances to get one, ICTs may not improve your well-being, but the lack of physical access to ICTs, lower digital skills or the difficulty to retrieve and produce digital information will certainly increase your risks of being excluded (and not only e-excluded). Like it or not, ICTs have become mandatory even if for staying in the very same spot.

Summing up.

So, in an ideal world, higher efficiency and higher productivity and higher everything would free resources so that more rewarding tasks can be performed. The Agricultural Revolution enabled the creation of civilizations and the Industrial Revolution made possible education and health for all. In an ideal world, the Digital Revolution should be able to provide more for more.

In a real world, promoting the adoption of ICTs is, at least, a way to stay where you are and not seeing your position getting worse. Not surprisingly, the only ones I heard or read talking about the needlessness of ICT adoption were the ones whose odds to get worse were already small if anything.

Ismael Peña-López: The role of governments in promoting the Information Society for reducing the Digital Divide

The main points I make on the interview are:

• During the 250 years of our industrial society, capital owners (capitalists) have been the ones that have ruled the world, the ones that are in power.
• Our democratic system is shaped according to this industrial society and its power relationships.
• In the upcoming knowledge society, the ones that will be able to manage cleverly knowledge by means of digital tools (digerati) are likely to have a higher share or power in all the aspects of life, especially the government (goverati).
• We need to work to make access to knowledge as widespread as possible — access to infrastructures, digital competences, effective usage — so to avoid replacing the existing plutocracy with a new e-aristocracy.

The report provides new and up-to-date calculations of the ICT Development Index, which are then used to back the statement that The digital divide is shrinking slightly. The problem is that, in my opinion, the digital divide is widening. How is it so?

Four years ago I already had this same sort of reflection then concerning the World Telecommunication/ICT Development Report 2006. The ITU’s calculations were then technically right, and nevertheless my disagreement was twofold. On the one hand, I thought that not only euclidean distances but the absolute values themselves of telephone penetration should also to be taken into account; on the other hand, the ITU just did not took into account broadband to define the digital divide, an (in my opinion) unforgivable omission.

This year the problem comes over again. The report repeatedly states that the digital divide is shrinking. To be able to do so, the ITU creates four groups (high, upper, middle, low) in which economies are aggregated; averages are calculated et, voilà, the digital divide is shrinking. But we know the problem with averages: (1) I’ve got two apples, you’ve got none, on average we’ve got one each; (2) my left foot stands in frozen water, my right one in boiling water and, on average, I’m pretty comfortable, thank you very much.

Source: ITU (2010). Measuring the Information Society 2010, Executive Report, p.4.

Let us look instead at what has happened at the disaggregate level. And to do so, let us build a hypothetical model where, in the last year (from 2007 to 2008) every economy would have reduced by a half the distance they had in the previous year with the leader. That is:

IDI^e_y = IDI^e_y-1 + 1/2(IDI^l_y-1 – IDI^e_y-1)

Where e is a specific economy, l is the leading economy (the economy with a highest IDI value), and y is the year. If we plotted the IDI values for year 2007 against these hypothetical values for year 2008, the result is:

Source: ITU (2010). Measuring the Information Society 2010
for year 2007 values (year 2008 are made up).

If all blue dots stayed just on the red line, nothing would have happened. As the lesser digitally developed countries are far from it — while the higher digitally developed ones are closer to it — it means that their IDI values for this year are higher than in the previous one, and they are higher the more distant they initially were in relationship with the leader, whose IDI value has remained constant. This is what a shrinking digital divide would look like.

Let us look now at what has happened between 2002 and 2007 and 2007 and 2008, which is how data is provided in the two last Measuring the Information Society reports:

Source: ITU (2010). Measuring the Information Society 2010.

As can be easily seen, the evolution of the IDI during the 2002-2008 is just the opposite to what we should be expecting was the digital divide really shrinking. Instead, we see that the economies with higher IDI values (i.e. more digitally developed) increased their IDI values during that period much more than the countries with lower values. Yes, all economies achieved higher degrees of digital development as measured by the ICT Development Index, but the richer, the more development achieved, not the other way round, thus increasing the digital divide, not shrinking it.

My calculations could be wrong and my approach could be plain wrong, but aggregates usually are worst approaches than disaggregates. Besides, people wants to hear bad news (the digital divide is shrinking) rather than listening to wet blankets. The problem is that if we do believe the divide is shrinking then we can shift our attention and resources elsewhere, thus worsening a situation that was even worse than admitted.

Update 20100301

Giacomo Zanello suggests in the comments to analyze whether the distance of a specific country with the leader has either increased or decreased. That is, to calculate this (I slightly modify his proposal to adjust it to the nomenclature already used and to produce mostly positive values):

Δ IDI_distance_to_leader^e_y = |IDI^l_y – IDI^e_y| – |IDI^l_y-1 – IDI^e_y-1|

Source: ITU (2010). Measuring the Information Society 2010.

The results are even more clear than the ones I had already used. By using Zanello’s exercise, we do see that the distance to the leader in tems of IDI values increases the less digitally developed countries are. In other words: lesser digitally developed countries are increasingly far from higher digitally developed countries, hence the digital divide is increasing, and it increases more the worst you are.

Thank you so much for the tip, Giacomo!

More Information

• International Telecommunication Union (2010). Measuring the Information Society 2010. Geneva: ITU.
• International Telecommunication Union (2009). Measuring the Information Society – The ICT Development Index 2009.
• World Telecommunication/ICT Development Report 2006: digital divide narrowing?, another article in this blog
• A collection of works by the International Telecommunication Union related with e-Readiness and ICT4D

Three years later we do not speak anymore of Internet access, but of broadband access, as we believe that what increasingly matters is the broadband divide rather a “simple” access to the Internet divide.

And the composition of the digital divide related to access has slightly changed:

Source: Digital Nation: 21st Century America’s Progress Towards Universal Broadband Internet Access.

• 44.6% do not have broadband access because of cost (we can assume that not having a computer or an inadequate one is also because of its cost)
• 37.8% state they do not need or are not interested in the Internet

It looks like skills are becoming less important and that economic reasons become more important. Though slightly decreasing, it is still astonishing that, of those who do not have broadband access, more than a third do not find any utility in going online.

There is something really wrong in here. On the one hand, as the crisis strikes with more virulence, more people is left behind in our Information Society because of lack of access. On the other hand, we are definitely failing in raising awareness that the Information Society is a train that you’ll either take or it’ll run over you: no “leave it pass besides you” option.

ICTs won’t necessarily bring better health, higher quality education, a more transparent and participative democracy, more wealth and jobs for all. But lack of ICTs will most likely decrease the probability to access health services, education, democracy, economic development and jobs at all. The more time I devote to studying the Information Society the lest optimistic I am that ICTs will change the main structures of the world, but I also am the more pessimistic that lack of them will end up with entire societies and ways of living.

When chances are uncertainty of improvement or almost certainty of perishing, we should definitely:

• Enable physical access for those that are not online, maybe through public access points embedded in their communities
• Raise awareness on the impact of ICTs in our society, so that those who could be online but just don’t want are (sorry to be patronizing here) better informed to take their decisions.

More information

After that event, the director of the Review of University and the Knowledge Society (RUSC), Josep Maria Duart, asked me to coordinate a monograph on that same subject, the Digital Divide, but within the framework of Higher Education. This monograph has just been published: Framing the Digital Divide in Higher Education.

The monograph aims at giving an comprehensive overview to the topic of the Digital Divide, from infrastructures to the more philosophic concepts, and from mere access to impact, always related to Education and, most especially (though not exclusively) to Higher Education. Following are the abstracts and links to the full text articles. The introduction is not (only) your usual introduction, but also a sort of a roadmap that wants to explain the structure and rationale behind the monograph. Enjoy your reading and don’t stop you from sending your feedback to the authors. Last, but not least, I want to thank Matti Tedre, Fredrick Ngumbuke, Jyri Kemppainen, Neil Selwyn, Jonatan Castaño-Muñoz (and other persons that at last could not make it) for their support and contribution to this project. I cannot but also thank Elsa Corominas for her tireless editing effort, and Michael van Laake and Shirley Burgess for their empathy and understanding when reviewing and translating the manuscripts. Thank you all.

Framing the Digital Divide in Higher Education (Introduction)
Ismael Peña-López

This is the introductory article to the monograph “Redefining the Digital Divide in Higher Education”. The article describes a comprehensive approach to the phenomenon of the digital divide and digital access, based on Marc Raboy and Mark Warschauer’s research. This approach depicts the evolution from mere physical access to effective use of information and communication technologies in the field of higher education. Within this framework, the articles in the monograph are presented highlighting their role in contributing to a comprehensive approach and reflection on the digital divide in Higher Education.

Download the introduction ( 246 KB)

Infrastructure, Human Capacity, and High Hopes: A Decade of Development of e-Learning in a Tanzanian HEI
Matti Tedre, Fredrick Ngumbuke, Jyri Kemppainen

Tumaini University, Iringa University College in Tanzania began to develop technology-enhanced learning in 1999. At the beginning of the process, the college had no public computer laboratories. The e-learning capacity was gradually developed over the following 11 years: computer laboratories, a local area network, an electronic library collection, a dedicated IT support department, Internet connections, electronic presentations, a B.Sc. program in IT, video lectures, and online learning. In this article, we analyse the complex network of challenges that we faced during the development process. We discuss technical issues with ICT equipment, system administration, and networks, and we analyse socio-cultural issues with training, funding, and pedagogy.

Download the article ( 814 KB)

From Laptops to Competences: Bridging the Digital Divide in Education
Ismael Peña-López

Most of the existing literature that deals with the digital divide in the educational system focuses either on schools or universities, but rarely do we see a vertical approach where the system is considered as a whole. In this paper we relate initiatives that aim to bridge the digital divide in the current situation in higher education. We discuss why policies that focus on infrastructures (e.g. laptops) are not the answer, as they mostly leave digital competences unattended, leading to (or not helping to amend) the digital void in universities in matters of skills. We end by proposing a general framework to define digital skills so that they are included in syllabuses at all stages of the educational path.

Download the article ( 717 KB)

Degrees of Digital Division: Reconsidering Digital Inequalities and Contemporary Higher Education
Neil Selwyn

Whilst many authors are now confident to dismiss the notion of the digital divide, this paper argues that inequalities in ICT use in contemporary higher education are of growing rather than diminishing importance. In particular, it argues that there is an urgent need for the higher education community to develop more sophisticated understandings of the nature of the digital divisions that exist within current cohorts of university students – not least inequalities of ‘effective’ use of ICT to access information and knowledge. With these thoughts in mind, the paper presents a review of recent research and theoretical work in the area of digital exclusion and the digital divide, and considers a number of reasons why digital exclusion remains a complex and entrenched social problem within populations of higher education students.

Download the article ( 349 KB)

Digital Inequality Among University Students in Developed Countries and its Relation to Academic Performance
Jonatan Castaño-Muñoz

Research on the digital divide has shown that it is important to study more than just the differences between those who do or do not have Internet access. Other dimensions that should currently be studied are: Internet skills, time spent on the Internet and, in particular, the use people make of the Internet. For each of these it is important to study the determinants and social consequences. In this paper we first present an overview of these dimensions and their determinants, and secondly analyse the influence of the dimensions with respect to the academic performance of university students. The analysed data, in agreement with international research, demonstrate that a) the effects of the Internet on academic performance are not direct, but mediated by variables and, b) the positive effects of the Internet are more pronounced in those students whose background is already more favourable for achieving better academic results without using the Internet, in agreement with the knowldege gap hypothesis.

Download the article ( 356 KB)

Monograph: Framing the Digital Divide in Higher Education

Download the whole monograph ( 4,199 KB)

Plenary session: Education for the Knowledge Society through Social Inclusion
Moderator: Juan Manuel Villasuso Estomba, Professor at the Universidad de Costa Rica y Director de PROSIC

Digital Divide: Results of a cognitive summation
Jesús Lau, Director de la USBI Veracruz y Coordinador de la Biblioteca Virtual, Universidad Veracruzana

Education makes a difference in technology adoption. But socialization — or the social factor — is even more important. on the other hand, we tend to focus on content, on knowledge, when assessing the success of education, but just seldom focus on skills and competences; though this should be the goal of the school and of Education at large.

Cognitive processes become useful when applied into action. That’s why the shift from knowledge to competences is so important.

Map of skills:

• reasoning,
• oral expression,
• literacy,
• ICT skills and media literacy,
• informational literacy.

While Internet penetration is still low and increases with a very low speed, mobile telephony has a higher penetration and is indeed more quickly adopted by new users. We should probably leverage mobile telephony to foster access to the Information Society.

Some insights:

• The technological divide is an output of the economic development
• Education is determinant for social inclusion
• Cognitive inequality is cause-effect of the digital divide
• We need inclusive societies, and education is an inequality killer
• Policies of informational inclusion are highly required

Multiliteracy, citizenry and social inclusion
Manuel Area Moreira (Catedrático de Didáctica y Organización Escolar. Facultad de Educación de la Universidad de La Laguna

Libraries, historically: expensive, based on scarcity, classy or elitist, individualist. Now, content is free, there is abundance, democratization of the access to knowledge, interactivity.

The digital divide is not only lack of access to technology, but the practices. Illiteracy has always been a factor of differentiation and power. But, actually, the concept itself of citizenship has changed in a digital society. To be a full citizen, several literacies have to be mastered: basic literacy, media, technological and informational. We need multiliteracies.

Two opposite approaches when fostering the Information Society: mercantilist vs. aimed towards inclusion for a democratic development. In the words of Paulo Freire: Banking literacy (I’ve got stock of knowledge and can give it to you) vs. problem literacy (you have to feel you need to know things to solve your problems).

Dimensions of skills:

• Instrumental dimension: know how to access information
• Cognitive dimension: know how to transform the information into knowledge
• Socio-comunicational dimension: know how to express oneself and communicate
• Axiological dimension: know how to use information democratically and ethically

Summing up: without a multiliterate citizenry there will be not a democratic building of the Information Society.

Computer and Informational Literacies (Ci2) in Higher Education
Nieves González Fernández-Villavicencio, Head of the Sección de Tecnología y Sistemas de la Biblioteca de la Universidad de Sevilla. Biblioteca General Universitaria

How do digital natives behave? Concerning just usage (not their skills) it doesn’t seem that there are many different across ages, being “just for fun” the main reason people access the Internet. Hence, digital natives might not be that savvy when it comes to mastering usage (not tools).

Information search and usage techniques: a new subject in the syllabuses of the new degrees at UC3M
Mayte Ramos, Director of the Biblioteca del Campus de Colmenarejo de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid; Raúl Aguilera, Director of the Biblioteca de Ciencias Sociales y Jurídicas de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) offers new opportunities to change the way people learn and, more important, how resources are made available for and used by students. This, of course, puts the focus on students’ competences and, among others, on digital skills, necessary to access digital information.

The library helped in creating a subject on “Search and usage of information techniques”:

• where to find information you can trust;
• ethical use of information, citing and bibliography;
• information retrieving in electronic environments

Comment

I think that most definitions on what digital literacy is, fall short in many issues, especially in the community factor and the strategical factor. Please see Towards a comprehensive definition of digital skills, by myself prior in this blog.

On the other hand, after a debate on “good” or “bad” uses of the Internet, I strongly recommend reading Neuman & Celano’s The Knowledge Gap: Implications of Leveling the Playing Field for Low-Income and Middle-Income Children and Warschauer’s Laptops and Literacy: A Multi-Site Case Study.

Parallel session: Information and technology in the Health system: Initiatives and good practices

Design of innovative practices for a synergistic attention of chronic diseases in the health and social environment with the assistance of ICTs. Rosetta project.
Emilio Herrera Molina

Increasingly, more patients develop chronic diseases, which pose serious problems related to assuming leaving with them, make their treatment economically sustainable, etc.

Different needs depending on whether you’re a patient, a professional, a technician, or a member of a directive board.

The Rosetta project will be applied to three chronic diseases (diabetes, brain-vascular accident, chronic obstructive lung disease) and link a catalogue of technologies with treatments that used those technologies in one of the selected diseases. E.g. someone used video-conference to do tele-assistance for diabetic patients. The idea being to introduce disruptive — while tested — new ways of interaction and assistance.

Indeed, in a world with more disabled people (a result of our longer life-expectancy) this project can bring technologies closer not only to chronic patients but to a larger group of people.

Digital literacy and main initiatives in Open Access in Health science
Jorge Veiga de Cabo

Digital literacy: much more than reading or writing, based in a functional approach. Skills, knowledge, attitudes to be fully functional in the Information Society.

In relative terms, we’re witnessing a (though slow) balancing in the international contribution to open access repositories in health-related subjects. See, for instance, the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR).

Quality management: ICTs as cooperation strategies
Pedro Sa Moreira

From e-Health, the patient is reactive, to i-Health, the patient is proactive.

Quality management should lead to cooperation and be able to catalogue best practices, so to put them publicly available for these upcoming e- or i-patients.

Practice sharing should, of course, be based on open access repositories fed by institutions and individuals (professionals).

Quality management and knowledge management are two sides of the same coin.

A project for a Health Virtual Library for international cooperation
Carmen S. Ardila; Rosa Trigueros Terrés; María García-Puente Sánchez; Juan María de la Cámara de las Heras

Ayudsan, a platform oriented to make development cooperation programmes in Health easier, mainly fed with content by volunteer contributions.

Information in the site:

• Training, including e-learning tools, a directory of professionals and trainers, etc.
• Travelling protocols
• Collaboration section, so that NGOs can interact and network amongst themselves or with individuals (e.g. volunteers)
• Communicaton: f2f, virtual, multichannel, etc. enhanced by the site.
• Virtual library

International collaboration and good practices in the management of complex chronic diseases through Web 2.0 tools: Observatorio de Prácticas Innovadoras en el Manejo de Enfermedades Crónicas Complejas (OPIMEC).
Diana Gosálvez Prados; A. Jadad Bechara; D. Gosálvez Prados; AJ. Contreras Sánchez; A. López Ruiz; F. Martos Pérez; J. Venegas García; E. Peinado Álvarez; A. Cabrera León

Why: chronic diseases are increasing and, due to their nature, pose severe challenges to patients, professionals, families, etc. Many of these challenges can be addressed through collaboration, and here is when Web 2.0 tools come to the rescue.

The OPIMEC (Observatory of Innovative Practices in handling Complex Chronic Diseases) gathers experiences in the field in a collaborative way. The platform is open and aims at helping people to share quality information, enable networking between professionals, etc.

Besides what’s on the website — impressive, BTW — the collaboration on the platform has produced books, directories of experts, etc.

More information

• Gestión del Conocimiento en el ámbito de la Administración Sanitaria – #6 II Conferencia Internacional Brecha Digital e Inclusión Social, notes on the other parallel session by Francesc Gómez Morales

Parallel session: Trends and advances before the digital divide: assessment systems and good practices
Moderator: Concepción Colomer Revuelta, Subdirector at the Oficina de Planificación Sanitaria and Director del Observatorio de Salud de la Mujer del Ministerio de Sanidad y Política Social

Digital and informational divides in a context of digital, cultural, cognitive and generational convergence
Marcelo D’Agostino, Consultant in Knowledge Management, Organización Panamericana de la Salud

Marcelo D’Agostino believes that the digital digital will shrink, necessarily, as the Internet won’t make steps backwards [he seems to forget that the digital divide is actually widening, especially if we take into account the quality of access, namely, broadband access, and what you can or cannot do with that different quality of access].

Advise to bridge the digital divide:

• Don’t be intimidated by technical jargon
• Don’t be afraid of technology
• Nobody is an expert in everything
• Trust first your capacity and then apply technologies
• Be careful where you look for information

Benefits of ICTs for Public Health: a better link between patients and professionals; better and life-long training.

Open access to health and medical information: a challenge before the digital divide
Helena Martín Rodero, Head of the Sección Bibliotecas Biosanitarias de la Universidad de Salamanca

Raghavendra Gadagkar: open-access more harm than good in developing world (published in Nature, comment by Peter Suber) stating the rich world patronising the poor world, in the sense that rich ones might be more interested in poor ones reading rather than publishing.

We are witnessing a crisis in the system of scientific diffusion, that has lead to the creation of the Open Access movement and several international declarations to foster scientific publishing in open access journals (gold access) or scientific self-archiving in open access repositories (green access).

Open access is compatible with peer-review, professional quality, prestige, preservation, intellectual property, profit, priced add-ons and print (originally in Open access to the scientific journal literature, by Peter Suber.

Access to knowledge will necessarily help to bridge the digital divide, and open access publications and repositories is a way to enable a better access to knowledge.

Web 2.0 and Medicine
Dídac Margaix Arnal, Librarian at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia

New generations (digital natives) have been born with new technologies and these are no strange to them. Have different skills towards technology and information, which they manage in different ways.

We might be in an age similar to the Renaissance, where technology feeds cultural and social change, and culture and society feed technological change.

Three kinds of Web 2.0 sites

• The web as the platform: use the web instead of the desktop (e.g. Zoho)
• Remix the web: use the web to mix different content (e.g. Google Maps)
• The social web: it is users what counts, not visits. Users add value to the site (e.g. YouTube)

Medicine 2.0: use of a set of web tools by health professionals applying the principles of open source, open access, etc. It is different from e-Medicine, that is applying ICTs in health issues. There has been an inflexion point that has put humans into technology, from just ICTs to the dimension of community. It is a matter not of technology but of participation.

Some factors:

• “Suppormediation”: support and mediation by non-professionals (in Spanish: Apomediación)
• Collaboration
• Transparency

There increasingly are websites that provide health information on the Internet. We should prescribe more information than pills (or, at least, as much information as pills).

Summing up: new agents, new tools, collaboration, personalization, training.

Internet and Health
David Novillo Ortiz, Agencia de Calidad del Sistema Nacional de Salud. Ministerio de Sanidad y Política social

Related to health, increasingly people get their information from the Internet and less from TV, and more from blogs. In general, e-mail, search engines and social networking sites have entered with strength into the information landscape.

Search for health information in the Internet has gone from 19% in 2003 to 54% in 2008 (Spain, % of total Internet users). There is a gender gap where women score 10 points higher than men, probably due to their role as the person at home that cares for the family members.

In April 2007, the same search terms in 4 different search engines produced only 0.6% of overlap (only 0.6% of all results were the same in the 4 search engines). We should be careful about that, as the information that search engines produce is, by any means, the same one ever.

Indeed, we trust more the people we know that the ones we don’t, that’s why Google Social Search might be adding a lot of value as it will bring personal context to people’s searches.

On the other hand, we can access certified/verified health websites whose information is backed by the reputation of the institutions that publish those websites. E.g. excelenciaclinica.net, a metasearch engine that crawls the best health websites in Spanish.

More information

• Gestión del Conocimiento y TIC en la salud – #5 II Conferencia Internacional Brecha Digital e Inclusión Social, by Francesc Gómez Morales
• Chan, Arunachalam, Kirsop (2009). Open access: a giant leap towards bridging health inequities, via @KevinDonovan
• A collection of literature on Open Access
• Reader on Open Access for Development

Parallel session: Trends and advances before the digital divide: assessment systems and good practices
Moderator: Ana María Morales García, Professor at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Subdirector of the Instituto Universitario Agustín Millares

Project Andalucía Compromiso Digital. A volunteering project to bring ICTs to the andalusian society
Miryam Jiménez

After deploying telecentres through the Guadalinfo project, some people would still not access the Internet. Among other reasons, lack of someone to guide them through would be a major issue. Thus why Andalucía Compromiso Digital, so that volunteers would accompany people on their way towards the Information Society. The volunteering part is, undoubtedly, the new and important part in this digital inclusion project.

Digital guiding is not a technical service, a course, a workshop, or a visit. Is the way volunteers offer their own help and knowledge so that participants in the project approach ICTs.

Guiding can be accessed both at telecentres (Guadalinfo Centres, ICT Centres, libraries) and at home.

The volunteer, more than a technologist, is a person that tries to find out the needs of the user and humanizes the technology, raising awareness, improving skills.

And not only citizens, but private organizations also take part in the project. Not only by sponsoring, but sharing the goals, contributing to the diffusion of the project and, especially, by participating with corporate volunteering.

The project also has some shared resources on a website: training resources, intranet for the volunteers, coordination site for the managers, a call-centre, etc.

More than 1,000 volunteers that have performed more than 34,000 guiding actions.

Good practices in Technological Literacy to bridge the digital divides from Extremadura to Latin America
Evangelina Sánchez

Main goals of the initial plan in Extremadura (Spain, late 1990s): connectivity in all towns and technological literacy for all citizens. Based in free software and training.

Next step: technological cooperation with Latin America, sharing the model based in technological literacy and free software as a locomotive for development. Main tools have been workshops and training sessions which take place online (first with Claroline, now with Moodle).

7 basic gnuLinEx (their own Linux distro) workshops, 2 advanced on gnuLinEx and 2 training-for-trainers courses, followed by more than 1,000 in many countries in Latin America.

In 2008 the Red Iberoamericana para la Cooperación Technologica was created to bring to another level the cooperation between organizations and countries. The Red de Centros de Desarrollo Regional Piri-Inchalá followed to share good practices in telecentres. Red de Mujeres Ciudadanas focuses on the gender divide.

Analyses of Intelligent Community Centres as a public policy to bridge the digital divide in Costa Rica.
Elena Jara Gómez

34% of computers at home, 14% of homes connected.

Intelligent Community Centres: labs placed in strategic communities to foster inclusion, managed by local institutions and coordinated by the Ministry of Communications, Industry and Technology. Goals:

• universal access,
• achieve higher quality of life by means of ICTs,
• strengthen citizen participation,
• empower citizenry with ICTs.

Indeed, e-government services will become the driver through which to catalyse the effective usage of ICTs and actually engage in an active citizenship.

Media treatment of the digital divide in Spain. An analysis of its reference in mass media.
María Cristina Pinto Arboleda.

The media have been transforming the language used to refer to the digital divide, the lack of access to ICTs, etc. But langauge should be homogeneous so that decision-taking happens on a common ground. So, international reports and local newspapers were analysed to map the different concepts around the phenomenon of the digital divide. Indeed, along with the concepts also initiatives to legitimize certain approaches were also analysed.

Initially, the term was about digital access, while now it is a much more complex term, not as much as related to a tool, as with empowerment.

Methodology strongly relying on mass media communication, political communication, discourse analysis, etc. Some of the most interesting topics around the treatment of the digital divide are related with advertising or with myths and metaphors.

Three main groups: Related with ICTs, Related with technologies in general, Related with rights in general. And also related with the structure, the infrastructure and the superstructure.

The term digital divide was related to technological infrastructure; development; exclusion; and the Information Society. And quite often, it was dealt as a very generic concept, without details of the context.

Normally, the relevance of the public factor (e.g. the government) was overwhelming. This meant that the message comes in a quite top-down manner and with lack of debate. It is a very superstructural discourse, very ideological, without practices or applications.

Building a concept of the Digital Divide: Equipment + development + modernization = (- social exclusion) and the Information Society.

Towards a comprehensive model of the Digital Economy
Ismael Peña-López

Please see http://ictlogy.net/?p=2852#hacia

Measuring digital development for policy-making: the role of the Government
Ismael Peña-López

Please see http://ictlogy.net/?p=2852#midiendo

Spanish telecentre portals in 2009: new paradigm for social inclusion
Ana Mª Morales García; Belén Pérez Lorenzo; Fátima García López; Mª Teresa Monje Jiménez

Hypothesis: telecentres are not only educational centres, but drivers of change and progress. What are the characteristics of these telecentres and their services? How to assess them?

Create a set of indicators about the usage of services in telecentres (including all kind of public access points to the Internet).

Before 2002, telecentres last 2 o 3 years maximum, as that was what funding last. From then on, sustainability was taken into account so that they could be established for the long run. Telecentres in Spain skyrocketed from circa 75 in 2002 to more than 6500 in 2008. But there are 14 different telecentre networks in Spain. Why not a single one? There is, nevertheless, a Community of telecentre networks. And the Spanish government is diffusing a catalogue of possible services that telecentres can offer.

This catalogue will be used to build a set of indicators to assess the performance of telecentres, especially in issues related with usage and grouped in categories: e-Administration, e-Learning, e-Banking, e-Health, e-Commerce, internet and Technology, information and services for the citizen, search of information, jobs and employment, etc.

These indicators have also been grouped according to performance criteria: availability, adequacy of services for the user, relationship with other organizations, etc.

More information

• Tendencias y avances ante la brecha digital: sistemas de evaluación y buenas prácticas – #4 II Conferencia Internacional Brecha Digital e Inclusión Social, by Francesc Gómez Morales

Parallel session: Web 2.0 Applications and Access to ICTs in Information Systems
Moderator: Belén Pérez Lorenzo, Consultant and Professor de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Development and application of a blog to publish content on the net and communicate for senior users
Fausto Sainz de Salces; Guillermina Franco Álvarez; Antonio Borondo Cobo

Goal: test, from a human-computer interaction (HCI) point of view, how such a blog should be designed and built so to match specific characteristics of senior users. The end goals being: foster communication amongst elder people, train digital competences, fight the digital divide.

Aspects to improve:

• Colors need to be adapted to the user. Not only to their physical needs, but also to their attitudes and feelings.
• Some concepts with which most users are familiar with, have to be explained to new users or to other kinds of users

Towards the library 2.0: the project of the UC3M library.
Francisco López Hernández

How to turn a passive (library) user into an active one.

Blogs

• 365 Días de Libros, a blog about reading books
• Biblioteca y Música, a blog about the music fund of the library
• Fanzine, on cinema
• Videodrome,on cinema and television

Presence in Social Networking Sites

• Profile in Facebook: aim is to adapt content to the specific user, avoiding replication of content between different sites
• Profile in Tuenti, a Spanish social networking site, very popular amongst teens
• Profile in Twitter
• Forum: reading club
• Campus in Second Life

The Library has to be present in the spaces of the students, but without interfering in their lives.

Access and usage of ICTs in enterprises in Costa Rica
Alejandro Rodríguez Solís

Enterprises see ICTs as ways to support training and improve decision-taking. But most of SMEs entrepreneurs are digitally illiterate and are not even aware of the potential benefits of ICTs (not to mention using them).

Goal of research: find out reasons of ICT adoption. Based on a survey to SMEs in Costa Rica, following the guidelines of the OSILAC.

In general, most enterprises have computers, access to Internet and LAN, though the penetration decreases as the size of the enterprise does. Intranets, extranets, wifi access, use of e-commerce (to sell and buy) and other issues are less and less present in enterprises in Costa Rica.

Nevertheless, there is a major acknowledgement that ICTs have eased communication with customers and providers and have had a positive impact on sales or on cutting costs down.

Consclusions:

• digital divide between big enterprises and SMEs;
• in general, all enterprises are late adopters of technology in many issues;
• urgent need for research on the impact of ICTs on the enterprise so to raise awareness.

Economic and political factors of the digital divide
Sonia Sánchez-Cuadrado; Jorge
Morato Lara; José Antonio Moreiro González; Vicente Palacios Madrid

We tend to think that the basis of the digital divide is economic, a matter of income. But there are many initiatives to bridge the digital divide: search engines, free software, automatic translators, the Wikipedia itself, open access to educational resources (e.g. OpenCourseWare), etc.

Of course, it is true that wealth and education are determinant for Internet access. But there also exists a cultural divide that comes from a lack of a certain level of education, not speaking English, etc.

There are, luckily, plenty of international initiatives to foster content creation and content sharing. Notwithstanding, other initiatives are just going the opposite way: micro-payments to access digital content, illegal downloading of copyrighted content (not judging whether is it a good or a bad thing to do, but certainly contributing to the digital divide), censorship or self-censorship, manipulation of the public opinion, spam, credibility of websites, certain criteria to award grants, etc.

Conclusions: a digital divide due to socioeconomic and cultural reasons; nationalist and business policies that negatively affect the digital divide.

Solutions: multinational initiatives and bring credibility to the content that resides on the Web.

Difusión y reproducción digital de obras de arte por medio de bibliotecas virtuales y
consecuencias de una revolución cultural
Ilia Galán

Factum Arte clones works of art, hard (if able) to distinguish from the original piece. In a sense, what happened with digital products could be happening in real/analogue products, putting into struggle e.g. museums. Dilemma: enable the diffusion of culture through perfect copies, or caring about the originals and their holders? Are we universalizing culture or trivializing it?

The good thing about digitizing the original is that (a) it can be reproduced with highest quality (b) it can be stored at lowest cost by just keeping the digital copy (c) it can be recovered from a backup in case of destruction of the original.

On the other hand, the drawback is that these technologies would be expensive and somehow help to increase the digital divide.

Los sistemas de gestión de contenidos como generadores de sinergias y redes de
colaboración: relato de dos experiencias peruanas
Luis Miguel Arias Martínez;
Carlos Vílchez Román

Sociologia7′s Blog colaborativo de la Sociología Faustiniana, a blog about Sociology made by the students.

He, notwithstanding, prefers Drupal to WordPress.

Libraries 2.0: tools to bridge the digital divide
Belén Pérez Lorenzo; Ana
Mª Morales García; Mª Teresa Monje Jiménez; Fátima García López

[Pérez introduces the concept of the web 2.0]

Why web 2.0 applications can bridge the digital divide? How are they being used by libraries?

Free; low cost to participate; easy to manage; the web as the platform; accessible through any computer connected to the Internet; independent from proprietary software; always up-to-date (perpetual beta).

Web 2.0 apps are collaborative and participative; new models of usage; free and open knowledge; used by digital natives.

Example: the Biblioteca Públcia de San Miguel de Salinas.

Farkas, M. (2007) Social software in libraries: building collaboration, communication and community online. Medford, N.J: Information Today

More information

• Aplicaciones Web 2.0 y el Acceso a las TIC en los Sistemas de Información – #2 II Conferencia Internacional Brecha Digital e Inclusión Social, by Francesc Gómez Morales

Plenary session: Social Impact of Technologies
Moderator: José Antonio Moreiro, Dean and professor at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Spanish and the Digital Divide
Jesús Jiménez Segura, Director of CIDIC, Centro de Investigación y Documentación of the Instituto Cervantes

Beyond phisical access, language is a major issue to be able to engage seriously in the Information Society.

Undoubtedly, political systems — and citizen freedom — have an important impact on the access to the Internet. That might be one of the reasons Spanish is increasing its presence on the Net despite Chinese being spoken by much more people around the world.

But it is also true that while freedom to access content (e.g. P2P networks) allows for a higher access, it also puts some stress on the sustainability of the whole system. So, there is a trade-off: the more free access to digital content, the better for quick adoption; the more access to content is free, the more difficult to stablish sustainable business models.

On the other hand, as visibility is so important always but specially on the Internet, many people migrate form their original mother tongues towards English so that to make themselves accessible to a broader public. This, of course, plays havoc in trying to establish a language on the Internet and provide its speakers with quality digital content.

The Instituto Cervantes has thus put a lot of effort to foster publishing content in Spanish on the Net, among many others through their Cervantes TV platform; by enabling physical access to the Internet at the Institute’s buildings; through the Oficina de Español en la Sociedad de la Información (OESI), which provides an automatic translating service; or the Aula Virtual de Español, which offers Spanish courses.

Security as a digital segregation factor
Arturo Ribagorda Garnacho, Catedrático de Ciencias de la Computación e Inteligencia Artificial de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Functional literacy: how to effectively use the Internet. Despite the zillion advantages, some drawbacks due to the Internet:

• Unemployment? Some sectors negatively affected by automation, etc.
• Isolation?
• Insecurity?

When there’s insecurity, there’s fear and lack of adoption. For instance: almost 40% of people are afraid to use their credit card number online or 47% to do bank transactions; 70% of people think that leave comments on the Internet enables third parties to spy one’s lives; 60% feel there is no privacy on the Internet; 75% feel afraid of the Internet in general and their data scattered around.

INTECO measures security in Spain. In their 2008 survey, most people use anti-virus software, firewalls, anti-spyware… but the problem is that this software needs updating: most people install it for the first time (or just comes installed with the new computer) but never updates, which makes the software totally useless.

How to foster the Information Society from a security point of view:

• Affordability of equipment
• Attractive online services
• Basic citizen training
• Confidence in technical processes

Still, people get information from the Internet but interaction rations drop drastically, reasons being, most of them, related with fear of the Internet: security, doubting what is being bought (in the case of e-commerce), not clear identity of the issuer of information or the online service, etc.

Managing Content
Juan Beitia Gorriaran, Especialista en gestión de contenidos, industria y mercado de la información. Baratz, Servicios de Teledocumentación S.A

In a world where everyone can publish content, Universities and Libraries should educate people to understand all that’s found on the Internet. Indeed, they could even manage that content and sort it in some way.

In Spain, libraries have gone through a deep process of modernization, automation and technological advancement, led by to librarians, who usually are technology lovers.

[Beitia details the advancement of automation of most of the 3,842 libraries in Spain]

The Future Web 3.0 and its Social and Technological Impact. The convergence of the Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web
Luis Joyanes Aguilar, Catedrático de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos de la Facultad de Informática de la Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca

Nova Spivak divides the evolution of the web as follows

• The PC era (1980-1990)
• Social web or Web 2.0 (2000-2010)
• Semantic web or Web 3.0 (2010-2020)
• Web OS or Web 4.0 (part I) (2020-2030)
• Intelligent web or Web 4.0 (part II) (2020-30)

Source of this evolution and a chart: How the WebOS Evolves?.

[Joyanes explores the common territories of the web 2.0 and their main concepts and applications]

Semantic Web: web content that is significant for computers. This is going to happen by means of extended markup languages rich in metadata:

• Ubiquitous network
• Everything open and linked data
• Adaptive information
• Adaptive services in the “cloud”
• Federated data
• Simulated intelligence

But there is no consensus on what the Web 3.0 really is.

Some examples related to the topic:

• Twine
• Harpers Magazine
• Dbpedia and Dbpedia Mobile: A community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web.
• Wolphram Alfa
• Ubiquity
• Google Wave

Discussion

Q: What is the hazard of collusion or monopoly practices on the Net? Joyanes: Huge, indeed, and increasing. Jiménez: we should balance the power of the NTIA or the FCC in the US with international organizations like the ITU or the IGF.

Q: What happens with the long life of data on the Internet? On the other hand, if technology evolves quickly, can we lose information? Ribagorda: increasingly, international institutions are trying not only to agree on standards (e.g. to enable interoperability) but also that these standards are open enough so taht they can interact with past standards and make possible that future standards interact with them.

More information

• #1 II Conferencia Internacional Brecha Digital e Inclusión Social, by Francesc Gómez Morales