ICTlogy

I have recently been involved in both a project on citizen participation and participation at the University. Not surprisingly — to me at least — both projects share much more than what they differ on. Indeed, they both share a very similar infrastructure:

• They are both initiatives of the public sector (in Spain, private Universities are really a minority).
• They both provide core services that have a central source and whose reliability is based on the legitimacy of that source.
• They both address a large community that is interested not only in getting those services, but in participating in their design, including the transparency and accountability of the whole process.

The central source and need to certify the information generally goes in the opposite direction of participatory design and engagement. The former asks, naturally for centralization, the latter for decentralization.

The fall of transaction and replication costs (the two big constrains of the industrial revolution) make it possible to separate management from participation. It’s like if you could have a football game being played in every player’s living room while still being able to have a game and keep an up-to-date scoreboard and stats.

But, as said, centralization attracts both management and activity to your own platform (the learning management system, the government’s portal), while participation centrifuges activity out to social networking sites.

Simplifying things to the max, my landscape now looks more or less like this (please understand Management in a non-restrictive way):

Education

Government

In my opinion, there is enough evidence that centralization of participation will not work any more. Education is asking for an increasing de-institutionalization and government portals won’t get any participation just because they were built. This leaves out cases I and III as possible approaches to create strategies that try to match management with participation.

The problem with case IV is obvious to me and is about the risks of Cloud Computing which, again simplifying, are twofold:

1. The risks of security and ownership, which are still to be fully addressed and fixed by cloud service providers, and which a public service just cannot afford to leave unattended;
2. and the blurring of the institutional identity, which undermines the main asset of a public institution: legitimacy.

I thus advocate for a mixed solution of keeping your main assets centralized while externalizing all the participatory side (see case II):

• The core value stays “home”: data of the students, syllabuses, data from the government, government plans…;
• Centralized, the core information is legit, certified;
• A centralized management is compatible with a decentralized access: open API and open data provide gateways so that access can be remote but management of data still be centralized, secure, private;
• Your staff has to develop skills to outreach your target while focussing on management, which is your core;
• Your staff has to develop skills to monitor and even capitalize what’s happening outside of your platform, but without needing to interfere in off-core activity;
• Participation is not mediated by management needs or management staff, can freely emerge, and can do it where it pleases.
• And, most important, participation has the fuel to fully engage with all the information possible;
• If communication and information channels are open and work in two-ways, the (virtuous?) circle closes and the cycle starts again.

In my Predictions for Social Media in 2010 I revisited the importance of the ePortfolio and the institutional website. As I there said, I plead for the construction of the (e-)portfolio, for a return to the personal or institutional website, using social media as a game of mirrors that reflects us where we should also be present.

In October 2009 I had the chance to be one of the participants that took part into the Open EdTech Summit 2009: Exploring Learning Solutions Together.

The aim of the event was to reflect on the future of education. To do so, a hypothetical assignment was put onto the participants: to create, from scratch, a brand new university for an imaginary country. There were only four conditions to that assignment:

1. Access to high-quality education should be available to all, and open content is a key part of providing such access.
2. Informal learning and mentoring are effective and well-proven approaches to engaging with youth and stimulating critical thought.
3. Personalized learning is critical to student success, but will require learning standards that allow students to continue their learning where ever life takes them.
4. Tools such as digital video, mobile devices, social media, and the global network all have important roles in learning and should be available to all learners.

The results, a Call to Action, identified five major tasks that are perceived as critical to meeting the needs of students, namely:

1. We must encourage the reuse and remixing of rich media.
2. We must embrace the full promise of mobile devices as learning platforms.
3. We must award credentials based on learning outcomes.
4. We must enable a culture of sharing.
5. We must take care that open resources include the context that will enable their use and understanding.

Though I subscribe to the aforementioned points — I was there and I really do —, some shades of meaning have escaped this necessary but short summary of the debates that took place (formally or informally) during two days.

This manifest call to openness (remixing, mobility, outcomes, sharing, context…) is, as far as I can remember — and always according to my own feelings and opinion — a call to de-institutionalization. In general, I perceived (and still do) three main philosophical shifts or movements:

• A possibility to detach content from the container: the digital revolution has made possible to separate books (paper) from what it’s told in them. Unbundling opens a new way to understand content and knowledge. But, this unbundling also applies to knowledge holders per excellence: teachers. Digitizing is to books what telecommunications are to people: everyone’s knowledge is at a click’s range. Thus, why should I stick to a bunch of people (i.e. Faculty)?
• A claim to detach learning from institutions: if content can now be found (and retrieved and copied) from anywhere, and if we can get rid of a closed, limited, selected group of individuals, why stick to their “holder”, the institution? If there is abundance of content and knowledgeable people, how do universities, schools, libraries, etc. still make sense?
• An effort to detach the object from the supporting structure: but it’s not only about content and people and institutions. Why (oh, why on Earth) should a specific institution give credit for what I’ve learnt? How did that got credit for that? Why, if I learn 24×7 (because my brain just won’t stop — what I learn is another debate), should I limit my learning to a specific place (school, university…) and a specific time (class hours)? Why building artificial scarcities and barriers when there’s (almost) none?

I’m not expressing here a personal wish — though I find most of these questions really appealing and even compelling — but an underground roar that is increasingly becoming mainstream, not only in education with the edupunk “movement”, but also in other fields like e-Government and e-Democracy.

We are witnessing a move towards de-institutionalization, from an education that works for the institution towards institutions that work for education, or from a democracy that works for parties and governments or parties and governments that work for democracy.

But, as always, the interesting question is not what is happening, but why. Why all this being fed up with institutions? What is the problem with them? And, moreover, why still so many people — especially policy-makers — are so deaf to hear (not to speak about listening to and reflecting about) and address these questions?

The problem with tampering with education is that the results (a) are unpredictable (because of the complexity of the subject) and (b) will only show up in the long term, when the harm (and a big one) has already been made. I think the movement towards openness and de-institutionalization in education is unstoppable (time will tell, though). So institutions (governments, universities, schools, parents associations, etc.) would better accompany the movement, so to avoid that people that exit institutions just find themselves out in the void, and try instead to engage in a debate to move towards a planned de-institutionalization or, at least, re-institutionalization.

More information on the Open EdTech Summit 2009

• Communiqué: Open EdTech 2009 A Call to Action ( 126 KB)
• Open EdTech Wiki at the New Media Consortium, with notes of the sessions and other materials
• Visual Meeting Notes (gorgeous!)
• Archive of the Twitter stream at Twapper

Notes from the Fourth IPID ICT4D Postgraduate Symposium 2009, held in the Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, United Kingdom, on September 11-12th, 2009. More notes on this event: ict4d_symposium_2009.

The Social Construction of ICT as a Strategy for Development in Jamaica
Michelle “afifa” Harris

Development challenges in Jamaica: high crime rate, unemployment, inadequate resources, etc.

According to the e-Readiness Report 2006, Jamaica has inadequate ICT infrastructure, limited contribution of ICT to GDP, unreliable electricity, limited Internet connectivity, low computer ownership, low innovation in the area of ICTs.

Why ICT policies, though? Are particula perspective shaping ICT policy? Are particular interpretations of realities shaping policy? What are these interpretations of the reality?

Research questions

• How have decision makers interpreted ICT as a developemnt strategy for Jamaica?
• How do these interpretations construct the need for using ICT as a development strategy? What are the discourses associated with this construction?

The national ICT strategies are being analysed to see what the backing discourses are, and which the underlying assumptions and conceptions around ICTs that policy-makers used in their discourses. The research, in the end, wants to provide a critical analysis on the process of policy creation and therefore the ideas and perceptions behind the adoption of National Strategies, deepening the discussion on the role of discourse in agenda setting.

Initial findings on the meanings and interpretations of ICT4D-Thematic areas:

• Us the power of communication to make us better
• About empowering people
• About enabling people
• Using the IT sector to generate development

But this was placed in the context of what “modern” development required particularly with definitions which seem to underscore the importance of creating a “knowledge based economy”.

Initial findings on the reasons for ICT as a tool for development

• Ability to drive development
• Necessary Government action
• Responding to Global developments

Initial findings on the themes and areas of Discourse

• Education and e-Learning Jamaica projects
• Agriculture-ABIS system for Farmers
• Community Development-Community Access Points

Open Educational Resources for Development. Let’s be realistic about its potential!
Annika Andersson & Mathias Hatakka

Do open educational resources (OER) have any impact in education and/or developing countries? There’s a good amount of literature that state one or the other one or both, so this research pursues testing it in a real environment.

The problem is how to measure the impact of OER on development, as development itself is a complex concept. So, the research will look at its use, how are they looked at and what’s the impact on development.

ICTs regarding to use: OER are seen as a commodity, supporting development activities, as a driver of economy (increases productivity, efficiency), and directed at specific activities.

ICTs views: OER as a tool (OER as seen as a way to build your own resources), computational, ensemble, proxy (OER as an enabler for empowerment).

ICTs impact: OER as a replacement, the increase of a phenomenon, OER as a transformation.

Issues/hypotheses:

• Tertiary effects are hard to measure?
• OERs do not contribute to development?
• OERs are not designed in a way that they can contribute to development?
• OERs are not used enough to have an effect?

Re-shaping ICTs for nation building: the Ethiopian case
Iginio Gagliardone

In Ethiopia there were some projects that costed a total amount of 300,000,000$, coming from the government treasury (not the donor agencies), projects that you wouldn’t find in the richest countries of the World. How did they came to think of, design and implement such projects? What was the mindset behind them? How was the political discourse embedded in technology?

In the late nineties, the minority from Tigray came to power and are since building a federalist while centralized state. There’s thus a need to decentralize to suport their ideology but also to exert a central control to make sure they can stay in power. Here is where ICTs come to the rescue.

Videoconferencing technologies for political administration, or broacasted lectures for education, are indeed being used to disseminate discourses about the nation at the grassroots level and among those in power. On the other hand, they reinforce the presence of the government around the nation (just for the record, all the web servers and their related services are hosted at the president’s seat).

This is a clear case where technology is not created to empower but to control.

Downloads

• Video of the session (part I) (235 MB)
• Video of the session (part II) (84 MB)

Notes from the Fourth IPID ICT4D Postgraduate Symposium 2009, held in the Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, United Kingdom, on September 11-12th, 2009. More notes on this event: ict4d_symposium_2009.

A New Educational Program in Tanzania. A Rought Road to Success
Matti Tedre, Tumaini University, Tanzania

Project held in Tumaini Univeristy, a University in the Iringa region, to build the B.Sc. Program in IT.

A contextualized programme: practical, problem-based, interdisciplinary, context-sensitive, internationally recognized, research-based (the six pillars).

Learning is a strong commitment for the whole community: the community collects money to send one member to the University. This person becomes aware of the importance of learning and of strongly committing with his own learning. Hence, students usually collaborate and learn together.

Main problems: corruption, politics, natural disasters, economics, ecology and recycling, geography and climate, tropial diseases, bureaucracy, tampering and theft, illiteracy, power problems, scarcity of basic hardware, gender roles, lax standards, cultural conflicts, local purchase and manufacturing, manufacturer policies, customs and shipping, transportation, maintenance problems…

Things that you would have liked to know from the start:

• Double check: remind people about stuff, double-check, follow-up, attend lectures to check lecturers are there, use a penalty clause in contracts to enforce them
• Be flexible: adapt to the environment (my way is not the only way), plan short-term, readiness to change the plans, agile methods, democratic leadership might not work
• Make budget locally
• Make rules clear: very different “unspoken” rules, decide what you can’t give up, listen to others’ views, make the rules clear, share the pain
• Clarify goals: to students (IT as a profession, life-long learning), to all colleagues (goals of their work, goals of education), find out motivations
• Recruit early: staff, students, sudden changes, plan to recruit more than you need
• Communicate: spoken and face-to-face is preferred, talk face-to-face even when you know it’ll end in a clash (you’d better face it), try to have someone who can smooth out the friction
• Create ownership: if you install some infrastructures (e.g. a computer lab), you have to assign ownership of the lab to the community or to specific people, and they will take care of it. If there’s no ownership, it’s noone’s… or everyone’s
• Don’t panic: most of the anxiety is needless, take it as it comes
• See the big picture: try to distance yourself, try to see how your actions change the dynamics of the place

Summing up, some questions about what’s really important in this kind of work:

• Why am I here
• What is the most important thing I want to achieve in my work
• What should i do today to get closer to my goal

Downloads

• Video of the session (105 MB)

Notes from the course Competencias digitales: conocimientos, habilidades y actitudes para la Sociedad Red (Digital competences: Knowledge, skills and attitudes for the Network Society), organized by the CUIMPB, and held in Barcelona, Spain, on July 16th and 17h, 2009. More notes on this event: competencias_digitales_cuimpb_2009.

La Caixa: from e-learning to collective intelligence
Gerard Vélez and Laura Rosillo

The Virtaula project was born in 1999 at La Caixa [one of the largest banks in Spain] as an e-learning platform to train the employees. But the framework has deeply changed: the Internet has moved form the Internet of enterprises to the Internet of people, becoming more social. The Internet becomes multichannel, user-generated, social networks based, etc.

The institution has also evolved and been restructured, from a hierarchic institution to a matrix-based management.

The new Virtaula implies savings in the field of collaborative work: meetings, work groups, professional development, training, etc.

Virtaula was born as an e-learning platform to reach 25,000 employees, all over Spain, without no boundaries of time or space, giving a quick response, in few time. It was intended also to transmit corporate values (especially to new employees) and to transmit corporate procedures. Training paths were followed by each and everyone, and these paths were generic and non-transversal.

The new focus is to give answers and solve problems that the needs of the business, of every day work, require. The idea now is to reinvent e-learning based on internal bi-directional communication. The new training design it not generic but segmented, needs-focused, applied, practical.

There’s been a shift from 100% employees following formal training courses to 40% employees following formal training courses. But employees keep on logging onto Virtaula looking for informal learning and knowledge sharing among peers. These open spaces are built on demand: besides formal training, the rest of the platform and the rest of training initiatives work on demand and to answer the needs and requirements stated by the employees.

Of course, a minimum of commitment is asked for: behind any demand made to Virtaula some requisites need to be matched: fora responsibles, online mentors, etc. that usually come from the same group of people that asked for a new virtual space.

The organization of virtual groups replicates the natural organization of groups within the firm, as it has been proved that it is also the natural unit of knowledge sharing. These units work as a top-down channel for information diffusion, and also as a bottom-up and peer-to-peer platform for knowledge sharing. In these units, the blog has been acknowledged to be the king tool.

Virtaula is full of “solutions” uploaded by the employees to give answer to the situations they find in their daily work, and everyone benefits from contributing to the knowledge platform, being trust in their peers the main value.

What has changed is not (only) the platform, but what people do in it. In Virtaula 1.0 people enrolled in a course, followed training paths, took part in fora by formal (organization- and hierarchy-based collectives), accessed materials and asked a tutor. In Virtaula 2.0, everyone manages their own training, generates content, write blogs and upload videos, lead and mentor virtual spaces, gather around interests (not organization charts), manage information and build their own networks.

Main changes from Virtaula 1.0 to Virtaula 2.0

• Spectators became the starring characters. Knowledge shifted from being shared to being built;
• And learning moves from autonomous learning to collaborative learning;
• From consumers to prosumers;
• Expanded authority: it’s better a shared collaborative document, than copies from the original; we have to compete outside, not inside (the firm)

In Virtaula 1.0 trainers were “real” trainers and were asked to answer the students back, mark them and lead a specific group. The new paradigm is that everyone can be a trainer provided they’re willing to lead a topic. People are now agitators, ambassadors, producers, turn tacit into explicit knowledge, share and collaborate, etc. And they are all volunteering to do it.

Main digital skills worked with the employees

• Know how to search (e.g. Google)
• Know how to read (e.g. Google Reader)
• Know how to store (e.g. Delicious)
• That should lead the employees to be able to publish whatever on Virtaula

Q&A

Mercè Guillén: why is it that the Virtaula platform has so little corporate imaging? Laura Rosillo: It’s made on purpose. The idea was that Virtaula were not an intranet but the Internet. On the other hand, the purpose was that it should not be a corporate space, but a place for the employees, for the people. La Caixa already has an intranet, and Virtaula should be detached form it.

Q: Have you thought about using already existing social networking sites for other purposes? Gerard Vélez: yes, and the work done in Virtaula should empower the employees to “colonize” other parts of the Internet.

Q: What’s the participation level? Is people aware that this way of working will have any impact on profits? Gerard Vélez: out of 25,000 employees, 15,000 have accessed the platform, 6,000 are in work groups and 1,000 are highly active users. And people do it because it has a positive impact on their daily work.

More information

• Competències digitals. Coneixements, habilitats i actituds per a la Societat Xarxa (7), by Joan Carles Torres

Notes from the course Competencias digitales: conocimientos, habilidades y actitudes para la Sociedad Red (Digital competences: Knowledge, skills and attitudes for the Network Society), organized by the CUIMPB, and held in Barcelona, Spain, on July 16th and 17h, 2009. More notes on this event: competencias_digitales_cuimpb_2009.

Participatory Media and Participatory Pedagogy
Howard Rheingold

It’s better to talk about literacy (or literacies) than skills, are skills are bound to the individual, and literacies have a social component: skill + community. There’s a social component to knowledge tied to the new media we’re witnessing.

For instance, we can buy a book online, but the fact that you can not only access the “objective” information that it’s online about the book, but also the opinions of others, this enriches the information. And the consumer more and more needs a context, a frame. And this frame heavily relies on reputation.

Thus, education also needs a context, a frame. Again — and especially in education — it is about reputation, and about the social factor.

Tools like Friendfeed just do that, letting people to follow people and know what they do. With social bookmarking and the help of tags, searching is more clever. You can browse several platforms following a tag. Searching through tags is a way of exploring another one’s knowledge database, see their rationale and, most specially, the collective rationale behind a specific thing, a specific concept, a specific tag.

All in all, these are several and alternative ways of storing, sharing and retrieving knowledge. And the good thing is that you can combine these several platforms.

Q&A

Ismael Peña-López: how big can the trusted network be? A: It depends on granularity and how much you trust who. You have to learn how to build your own filtering practices, how to attach different degrees of trust to people or platforms or feeds or tags. Indeed, you can have several networks you trust differently, depending on their composition. And the skills required to manage digital technologies can be learnt and developed.

Ismael Peña-López: where to begin with, for the newcomer, in network building? A: In a near future, family — parents — should encourage and train their kids to build their online identities and their own network, whatever it is and whatever the topic. It is likely, though, that at this stage it’s easier to begin with professional networks. In the end, it’s about creating trust around some interests one might have. To begin to create your network of trust, you should observe and find who’s building attractive knowledge.

Carlos Albaladejo: social media and communities of trust, is it for digerati? has it gone mainstream without anyone noticing? A: I don’t think it’s about digerati at all. The production of online content has boosted in the last years. Of course, there still is a lot of people unconnected or not wanting to connect at all. But the number of smartphones is climbing up, and these are phones intended to lots of uses beyond voice. On the other hand, and for the same reason, the digital divide is (in general terms) no more about access to technology, but about people being skilled enough to use it. So there is an increasing divide between the people that can use (and use) these technologies and those who don’t. We’re most likely seeing social media e.g. for political engagement in its early stages, but the trend seems to be that adoption will increase in quality and quantity.

Q: how will educational institutions use social media for education? A: Institutions are always slow in adopting new technology and, especially, new methodologies. We should begin to educate parents. And educate in what is accurate (information) and what is false. But we have to rethink about the whole educational process.

Q: how do we deal with information overload? A: We have to train our attention. Information overload is an information problem, but also an attention problem, and our attention — just like any other skill — needs to be trained, to learn what to do with the information that keeps coming, to learn what information needs to be managed immediately and which one can be just overridden. And along with training attention, we have to build attention filters.

More information

• Competències digitals. Coneixements, habilitats i actituds per a la Societat Xarxa (5), by Joan Carles Torres
• Competencias digitales para la sociedad red (I), by Emilio Quintana