ICTlogy

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The Knowledge Society demands that we leapfrog ahead in our education systems, build a new digital literacy, and improve soft skills (creativity, innovation, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking, among others) that could help all 21st century citizens become productive, effective knowledge workers. Educators, policymakers, business leaders, parents, and youth must identify and develop new sets of e-skills and e-competencies to help youth succeed, and build a capacity for success toward the 22nd century.

This is the framework in which the e-Competencies conference will take place on October 31, 2008. Taking place in Mexico DF and organized by FLACSO-México, University of Minnesota and University of Toronto, the purpose of the conference is to identify, project and discuss the e-skills and e-competencies required for success in the 21^st and early 22^nd centuries.

I am one of the speakers at that conference and I’m presenting a brief reflection — Tuning personal competencies to the Information Society — on how the Information Society is changing our landscape and how should we be adapting our own competences according that change. Here are the materials I will be using:

Slides in English

Slides in Spanish

More information

• Slides download and citation instructions
• Official site (English)
• Official site (Spanish)
• Attend the conference online (English)
• Attend the conference online (Spanish)
• Videos of the conference (accepted communications)
• Conference channel on Twitter

Recommended citation for bibliographical purposes:

(Continuation from: From Social Networks to Virtual Communities of Practice. Beyond e-Inclusion through Digital Literacy (I): the Case of the Crafting Community)

In a seminar on Tuesday 21st October 2008 — ICTs, development and e-government 2.0: empowering the citizenry — I extended the case of the crafting community and compared it to several civil society actions closely related to e-government, mainly projects led by MySociety.org, but also others about political campaigning, or Health and Education.

Some of those examples came from existing communities, or ended up in the creation or communities that built around interests in common.

The Case of the Catalan e-Justice Community

Compartim [let's share] is a grassroots-born initiative now led by the Justice Department of the Government of Catalonia (the Spanish region whose capital is Barcelona). It’s aim is to share knowledge, by promoting learning by practice sharing. It’s original promoters and target — now spread to the whole Department — were public servants working in the Justice system in Catalonia (professionals from different specialized branches directly dealing with the public: psychologists, lawyers, criminologists, mediators, trainers…) that needed and wanted to share questions and doubts, procedures, solutions… everything that could make their works easier and to provide a better service to the citizen.

The already existing (explicit, though informally though the hierarchies) community, went online and created a blog to keep the community informed, built several communities of practice at the Justice Portal where interaction would take place (the portal includes also “official” blogs closely related to the activity on the portal) and engaged in a richest exchange of knowledge which, at the moment, has produced several main outcomes:

• an increase in the flow of information and knowledge within the Justice Department
• a higher implication of the community members, both in quality (more implication) and in quantity (more people involved)
• impact on the “real” lives and works of the community members
• reaching consensus on key issues at the practical level (no hierarchies involved, no power stresses implied)
• articulation of the real community, the one that exists “offline”

After the grassroots stage, now the Compartim Programme has been institutionalized — in a perfect shift from a push to pull strategy — and communities of practice are but a part of the institution’s strategic plan and training plan.

e-Justice: opening the Administration to the citizen

But, does the community of the Justice system ends with the public servants? Should it include the citizens?

Hence, the Compartim Programme goes open and is inviting the whole community and citizenry to debate about knowledge management in the framework of the Catalan Justice system in their III Jornada del programa Compartim [III Compartim Open Conference]. As in the case of the crafting community, what is important is the real community, made up of real people with real life goals. The Internet is enhancing the debate by:

• Keeping the Gestió del Coneixement - Programa Compartim del Departament de Justícia blog as the nodal meeting point
• Using a digg-like social blog to discuss, ex ante, possible topics for the conference and their relevance

The goal of the Conference is to reflect about the community itself with two workshops:

1. Ideas to improve communities of practice.
2. Using Internet tools for knowledge management.

The conference will take place on 4th December 2008, which means that the online preparation of the event will take place during the preceding 10 weeks of the meeting.

It is my opinion that this is a perfect public-private partnership to improve the Justice system specifically and e-Government and e-Administration in general. The difference being that the private counterpart is not, as usual, a firm, but each and every citizen acting in their own interest.

More information about the programme and the event (in Spanish or Catalan)

• Redes horizontales, CoPs en nuestro entorno: Compartim
• Compartim. Gestió del coneixement

Recommended citation for bibliographical purposes:

A couple of months ago we already announced the course Network Society: Social changes, organizations and citizens.

Finally, we have been able to set up the definitive programme for the course and all the details concerning its organization. The making of both the programme and the sponsorships has been quite an issue, but we believe that we, at last, succeeded in creating a valuable proposal for all those interested in the analysis of the changes that our society faces and the role of technology and culture in the whole set.

There are circa 200 people attending the course and we hope it will become an opportunity to create (and shift towards the Net) an open and critical conversation about the so-called “network society”. Registration closes on Monday October 6th.

The sessions will take place at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), c/ Montalegre 5. We’ve uploaded a wiki (multilingual) where the attendees can introduce themselves, share information and coordinate things like accommodation (the organization has not any agreement with any hotel) transportation or possible parallel activities that anyone might be willing to promote.

The programme is, hence, as follows:

NETWORK SOCIETY:
SOCIAL CHANGES, ORGANIZATIONS AND CITIZENS

Day 1 - Wednesday 15 October

Introduction
09h00 - 09h30 : Opening
09h30 - 10h30 : Juan Freire - Presentation of the course

State of development of the Network Society
Chairs: Ismael Peña-López
11h00 - 12h30 : Irene Mia

Organizations in the Network Society
Chairs: Genís Roca
12h30 - 14h00 : Enrique Dans
16h00 - 17h00 : Santiago Ortiz

Citizenship in the Network Society (I)
Chairs: Marc López
17h30 - 19h00 : Carol Darr

Day 2 - Thursday 16 October

09h00 - 09h30 : Juan Freire - Presentation of the day

Citizenship in the Network Society (II)
Chairs: Marc López
09h30 - 11h00 : Tom Steinberg

Communication in the Network Society
Chairs: Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí
11h30 - 13h30 : Diálogo Josu Jon Imaz y Miquel Iceta
16h00 - 17h30 : Andrew Rasiej
17h30 - 19h00 : Gumersindo Lafuente

Day 3 - Viernes 17 October

Innovation in the Network Society
Chairs: Ismael Peña-López
09h00 - 10h30 : Carlos Domingo
10h30 - 12h00 : Ethan Zuckerman

Closing
Chairs: Juan Freire
12h30 - 14h30 : Round Table
14h30 - 15h00 : Closing

Some more info about the course:

• Website of the course, with more information about the speakers, fees, registration, etc.
• Facebook Event
• There will be translation to and from Spanish and English

Recommended citation for bibliographical purposes:

Notes from the IPID ICT4D PG symposium 2008, Mekrijärvi Research Station, Joensuu University, Finland. 8 and 9 September, 2008.

Nelson Godfried Agyemang, University of Pretoria: A Sustainability Framework for Advanced ICT Education in a Developing country

Nelson Godfried Agyemang

How to make sustainable Postgraduate in ICT education programmes in developing countries.

Action research methodology.

Kurt Lewin’s iterative process: diagnose, action planning, action taking, evaluating, specifying learning.

Important point: not to take research for consultancy.

Different sustainability stages: outcomes, processes, context, etc.

In the digitizing sustainability, not everything can be digitized.

Tersia Gowases, University of Joensuu: Impacts of Higher Education Institutions of an Information Society

Background: Edulink fosters ICT development in Africa. Its objective is to foster capacity building and regional integration in higher education in ACP States and Regions, and to promote higher education as a means of reducing poverty.

In this framework, see what’s the role of the combination of Higher Education and Computer Science (e.g. degrees in computer science).

Perspectives: technological, economical, occupational, spatial, cultural.

Joseph M Longino, Lappeenranta University of Technology: Evaluation of Implementation of BSc IT curriculum at Tumaini University

The “C” in ICTs, as a difference with IT.

Background of ICT in Tanzania: post independence situation, development of ICT in Higher Education Institutions, public sector and SMEs reforms to include ICTs. ICTs have been really useful for SMEs to access remote information.

International standard curricula bodies for Computer Science: IFIP, UNESCO.

Curricula models and development: IEEE & ACM (1991 & 2001), UNESCO (1999).

Create a curriculum for a Bsc IT, following the six principles as input: contextualization, international recognition, project based, practical orientation, research based, interdisciplinary orientation.

Challenges: to move ICTs from entertainment to promoting change, by meeting social expectations in an efficient use.

Haider Abbas, Asad Raza, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden: Security Evaluation of ESAM Software

How to do security evaluation using Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM)? How to promote time/cost-effective security evaluation of Software Architectures in developing countries?

Security is considered a cost overhead in developing countries and so is often left unattended.

A new framework based on ESAM Software to make it easier.

Carolina Islas, University of Joensuu: Playing and Sharing knowledge through the use of portable devices, formally known as Mobile Phones

How is gaming and sharing knowledge relevant for ICT4D? Knowledge sharing for development.

Development according to Van Wagner: the growth of humans throughout the lifespan.

SECI model: socialization, externalization, combination, internalization. This is what happens in the sequence of gaming from a scenario towards a goal.

If we can shift content and education to the mobile zone arena — being mobile phones the most evenly distributed ICTs — then we can make some broad impact in knowledge shared based development. Mobile pervasive gaming is a vehicle to support learning.

Third Annual ICT4D Postgraduate Symposium related posts

Recommended citation for bibliographical purposes:

I have been invited by the Spanish Center of Judicial Documentation (Centro de Documentacion Judicial, CENDOJ) to impart a conference at the III Encuentro de Información y Documentación Judicial de la Red IberIUS [III Meeting about Judicial Information and Documentation of the IberIUS Network].

The idea was to give an overview of what the Network Society is and what are the concepts besides collective creation. Here come my slides (in Spanish):

Full reference and PDF downloadable here.

Recommended citation for bibliographical purposes:

e-STAS is a Symposium about the Technologies for the Social Action, with an international and multi-stakeholder nature, where all the agents implicated in the development and implementation of the ICT (NGO’s, Local authorities, Universities, Companies and Media) are appointed in an aim to promote, foster and adapt the use of the ICT for the social action.

Here come my notes for session IV. (notes at random, grouped by speaker, but not necessarily in chronological order)

Left to right: Francisco Ortiz Chaparro, Belén Perales, Javier Estévez (moderator), Javier de la Nava Trinidad, José Manuel García Prieto

Belén Perales, IBM

Why corporate volunteering? Employees demand it and their satisfaction, engagement, etc. does increase with nonprofit or development projects engagement. And this does benefit the firms beyond profit.

Francisco Ortiz Chaparro, AHCIET

Public-private partnerships are an important key for the development of the Information Society.

Big firms are kidnapped by their highest directors, that apply for themselves retribution policies that generate huge inequalities within the firm. This is a barrier for both the credibility of the firm as socially committed and the engagement of the rest (the basis) of the employees. Shareholders should enforce their rights to achieve more transparency and accountability of the behavior of such boards of directors, for both economic management and social responsibility reasons.

There is a good amount of nonprofits and projects that are created ad hoc as (public) grant raisers. Nonprofits should change their minds and think on project designs that could include firms and even benefit them, so through a mutual benefit, partnerships between the civil society and enterprises could arise. And, at the same time, the project will gain sustainability.

Javier de la Nava Trinidad, BBVA

The five groups of stakeholders: shareholders, providers, customers, employees, the society at large. And it is not only the customers that a firm has to keep content, but the whole panoply of stakeholders.

There is an increasing need for employers to have their employees engaged and identified with the firm, to be satisfied in their workplaces.

José Manuel García Prieto, SUN Microsystems

It’s true that telecoms benefit from more ICT use, hence why fostering its use in their corporate strategy.

There is not a single model of cooperation between nonprofits and firms, but normally the model is that firms give away the know how, their knowledge, their human capital, etc.

e-Stas 2008, Symposium on Technologies for Social Action

Recommended citation for bibliographical purposes: