Intend to identify the barriers to e-Health implementation in sub-saharan Africa and see how can these barriers be overcome.

• Political barriers
• Economic barriers
• Socio-cultural factors
• Technical barriers

Solutions to Political barriers

• Leadership
• Leadership
• Leadership

Solutions to Economic barriers

• Infrastructure development
• Poverty alleviation
• Assistance from donor organizations

Solutions to Socio-Cultural barriers

• Education
• Digital divide
• Use of ICTs in public institutions

My Comments

• During the debate, issues arise about citizenship awareness (on e-Health) and overriding (corrupt) governments, which reminds me of some good hints Francisco Lupiáñez about ICTs and e-Health in some cases not empowering but disempowering people, e.g. the distrust on online information about Health in general thus strengthening the link/dependence physicist-patient. Thus, overriding governments with the required awareness might by a tricky issue.

Marije Geldof
ICT for low-literate youth in Ethiopia: the usability challenge

The instruments of literacy create a demand for literacy (Lewis)

Explore current role & future opportunities of ICTs in the live of low-literate (limited reading and writing skills) youth (1o to 20 y.o.) in Africa

Methodological challenges

• Sampling
• Phrasing questions
• Visual representations
• Answering behaviour
• Translation
• Research setting

Preliminary results

• Divide urban and rural
• Gender differences
• Main ICT use: communication long distance; information about country
• Mobile phone popular
• Technology for the educated only
• English necessary for using ICT
• Reading and writing for education, letters, obtaining knowledge, job perspectives
• Impact video
• Imitating
• Low sustainability

Andrea begins her session with an introduction to Economics fundamentals: relative advantage, surplus, etc. The question being: in the Information Society, how does surplus, the production function, etc. have changed respect to agricultural and industrial economies?

Technological change shifts the production function (see reference to Max H. Boisot at the end), but also makes that the level of chaos, that evolved from an “ordered” regime, through a complex regime, to a chaotic regime, drops back to an ordered regime again. The difference being that, normally, analyzes focuses on changes on end products and not on changes on processes.

Creativity is about going beyond the established frontiers of the actual technology/possibilities, about pushing the limits.

Mikko Vesisenaho
Developing contextual higher level introductory ICT education in Tanzania

Local vs. global approach to education moving further and further away from one another. Need for more contextualization. Efficiency, effectiveness, impact and sustainability situated in relation to dimensions of contextual relevance and standardized performance.

Research questions

• What kind of framework is feasible for understanding ICT transfer in developing country like Tanzania?
• How was contextualization taken into account into the Contextualized Programming?
• What were the meaningful contextual outcomes of the Contextualized Programming?

David Hollow
Assessing Education and ICTs

Highest importance of evaluating projects: if we do not carry on any impact assessment, are we making any difference at all?

What to focus in an assessment?

• indicators
• baselines
• relationships

Educational levels

• Bloom: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation
• Anderson: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, creating

And we usually evaluate at the first level, at the knowledge/remembering levels, instead of evaluating e.g. creating

My comments

• David talks about what and how we can assess but I wonder whether the where the assessment takes place is also relevant: (only) in the classroom? also assessing the students output i.e. the portfolio? under a “digital natives” train of though, also their digital identities and creation (e.g. uploads to MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, and so.)?

More info

• Max H. Boisot (1998) Knowledge Assets. Securing Competitive Advantage in the Information Economy
• The Monitoring and Evaluation of ICT for Education Initiatives in Africa

Look@World project in Estonia

• Public Internet Access Points
• Equipment
• Training

How to collect best practices? Universal kwnoledge, transferable core vs. specific country knowledge/context. How can we extract the universal, transferable part of the best practice?

• How to collect and “conserve” the best practices?
• How to extract the country specific aspect?
• How to manage the knowledge Institutionalisation?
• Methodologies, approaches?

Uduak Okon
ICTs and Sustainable Communities Development. The case of the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria

How ICTs may contribute to the sustainable development of communities in the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria.

Incorporate Ethnography into the Participatory (Action) Research framework

Engage in a dialog between the researcher and the target population of the research, sharing findings, reshape theoretical models, test them back again with the target group, etc.

My commntents

• Stress/focus in the “communicational sphere” and not in the whole “devolpment” sphere. Uduak agrees and states that, in fact, she is already focusing in the social part, letting aside the economy, etc.
• What is “sustainable”?
• Match categories of findings with corresponding categories of “ICT solutions”
• Bring inside the methodology Web 2.0 applications as perfect companions to build community (i.e. social software) and their quite low power demanding needs

Gudrun Wicander
SIF — the Sustainability ICT Framework — and beyond

3 dimensions: resource, space, time
5 capital: human, social , physical, financial, material

Include institutional and political capital into the 5 capital model, to focus on Public Financial Management. Then use the extended SIF as an analytical tool applied to Tanzania in the administration of primary education andor tracing funds to rural schools.

Research questions

• Attitudes among teachers
• Attitudes among administrators
• Mappnig of mobile…
• Mapping of information flows

More info

• UNESCO Open Training Platform
• Sundén, Susanne ; Wicander, Gudrun (2007). Information and Communication Technology Applied for Developing Countries in a Rural Context: Towards a Framework for Analysing Factors Influencing Sustainable Use

The goal of this research is to add reflection and knowledge to the belief that there is an important lack of tools to measure the development of the Information Society, specially addressed to policy makers aiming to foster digital development. We believe there is still an unexplored point of view in measuring the Information Society which goes from inside-out instead of outside-in. In other words, the main indices and/or reports focus either in technology penetration or in the general snapshot of the Information Society “as is”. There is, notwithstanding, a third approach that would deal with working only with digital-related indicators and indices, thus including some aspects not taken into account by the technology penetration approach (i.e. informational literacy), and putting aside some “real economy” or “analogue society” indicators not strictly related to the digital paradigm. Relationships between subindices would also provide interesting insight for policy makers on which to ground the design of their initiatives.

Presentation as a mental map:

Unpeeling the layers of the digital divide
[click to enlarge]

Working bibliography

Some comments/suggestions I got:

• The importance of context when designing indices and how this context might challenge the accuracy, objectivity, suitability of these indices
• The importance, beyond infrastructures, of international services broadcasters such as BBC or Voice America
• Analyzing what the (real) goal, purpose of the indices is. How and, over all, why are they built the way they are
• The importance of not only looking at what worked (e.g. projects and policies to foster the information society), but also what has failed, what and how many are the failed projects
• The opportunity to develop different indexes according to the different countries, contexts, etc.
• context, context, context

Florence Nameere Kivunike
Measuring the Information Society: An Explorative Study of Existing Tools

Why assess the Information society

• Current status
• Comparison
• Tracking progress
• Policy, decision-making
• Research-related
• Value-judgment

What is assessed

• Social
• Economic
• Institutional

Temporal concept

• Readiness
• Intensity
• Impact

Limitations

• Focusing mainly on infrastrucutre
• Relationships among features
• Limited consideration of context in terms of the enabling factors e.g. social or cultural setup and flexibility
• Oversimplified methods characterized by subjective approaches

Challenges of IS Assessment

• Dynamic and complex nature of the IS
• Data constraints especially in development countries
• Challenge of measuring transformation

More info

• Menou, M. & Taylor, R. (2006) A “Grand Challenge”: Measuring Information Societies. 22, The Information Society p 261-267

EdTechΔ research group, focusing on educational technology creation, under these premises:

• Making a difference in action
• Triangulation in research
• Multiple perspective in development
• Bidirectional partnerships

How come does our education system train professionals who can design an architecture to meet the needs written in a specification, for making existing processes more efficient, but not experts who can creatively, critically and supportingly talk with their customers and identify their real needs?

New project in the ICT undergraduate program at Tumaini University, Iringa, Tanzania, to make the students re-link their new skills and knowledge to the needs of that society where they have come from

Principles of the ICT program

• Contextualization, local problems as starting points for projects
• Practical and interdisciplinary orientation
• International recognition
• Continuous research for the program’s formative development

Which color is ICT professional’s collar when mining a problem? Is it blue? Should it be white?

ICT program in the light of ICT4D dialectics

• exogenous vs. endogenous? ethnocomputing.org to culturally discover meaningful entry points to ICT, in the spectrum between practical needs and theoretical models of computaion
• top-down or bottom up? gaining ownership to emerging vs. guaranteeing access to given
• open source or proprietary software? garage mentality
• partnership or delivery? I4D, VISCoS, Knowledge Management journal, Vol 3, No 1: monographic about Stewarding technologies for collaboration, community building and knowledge sharing in development

Despite the decreasing GNP and GNP per capita, the instability of the region, etc. the literacy rate in Palestine is 92% and the computer literacy is 51.2%. The explanation seems to be that precisely education seems to be the way out of the situation the region is immersed. So, the background seems appealing for ICTs for Development… but some failing projects seem to bring evidence on the contrary. The question being: can ICT work without a leading body?

NGOs provided most services before the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority. The difference being since the establishment of the PNA is that, even if it is now the PNA who supplies most of these services, it does not have financial stability, while NGOs do — depending on foreign policies. So, how to build one’s own IT policy?

The brain drain (more Palestinian IT experts in the Gulf than in Palestine) has done nothing but worsen things.

Two E-Government projects… we don’t even have a Government on our own!. Palestine Educational Initiative (PEI)… was fully halted when the PNA composition changed.

The ICT centers of Excellencies, built besides main universities, has or is being a successful project. The idea is to have the business community to interact through the centers with the academic community.

Lessons learnt

• Despite of ups and downs and minor government role, progress has continued (ICT indicators continue rising)
• Government failed to lead the sector
• NGOs played a major role increasing capacity, raise awareness
• Private sector lobbies to open market, defends the sector interest
• Importance of people centered development
• Politically motivated initiatives strongly affected the ICT environment
• ICT in some scenarios provided the only solutions
• The demand driven are the most successful

Jonatan Stanczak
Teaching information, communication and technology to empower children in a low intensity conflict area: a case study from Jenin refugee camp, West Bank, Occupied Palestenian Territories

How performing arts can be combined with ICT to empower children and how to assess/evaluate this?

One important problem to overcome is the researcher’s background and the biased language of “development” issues.

On the other hand, when uncertainty and security are such big issues, working with ITs is not really easy.

So, the goal is to occupy oneself by creativity, engagement, how to enable… and what’s the role of ICTs in this? It’s a very important tool, such as sports or theater, but it surely has a more special role.

Salma Abbasi
Role of Telecentres in Gender Empowerment: do they really work for women?

Despite everyone saying that telecentres are “so good”, why do they sometimes/often fail to achieve social goals?

• “North knows best”
• No consideration to community needs
• Exclusion of marginalized
• Irrelevant information
• Lack of localized content
• Illiteracy
• Inaccessibility by community
• Insecure locations
• Donor funding
• Expensive services

requirements to ensure women’s access to ICTs

• Overcome Technophobia
• Fight Discrimination
• Conduct active outreach
• Ensure financial accessibility
• Ensure physical accessibility
• Relevant content

More Info

• Salma Abbasi: Practical ways to deploy and sustain ICT to enable development and gender empowerment. Preliminary field observations of ICTs.
• Green, L. (2003), Gender-based Issues and Trends in ICT Applications in Education in Asia and the Pacific (PDF)

Marcus Duveskog
Tekkie Kids – A learning laboratory for future engineers

Goal: create an interest in kids for science engineering and technology; and provide researchers with a live lab for distance education

What are the key elements that make a tech club successful in developing positive attitudes towards Science Engineering and Technology?
What is needed to support massification of technology clubs among South African primary schools?

Research method: Action Research

Fun factor is important, and so is competition, but there’s a trade-off between engaging and “creating losers”. Planning is hard, being that some kids are “spoon-fed” one of the possible reasons.

As per massification issues, hub schools and teacher training might be good answers.

How should we asess and evaluate the TekkiKids project?

My reflections

• Markus brings out as a main working tool Lego Mindstorms, but states that though it is a very good learning tool, is is quite expensive and out of reach for most schools’ economies. It is important to notice that the same people that developed Mindstorms also developed Scratch, which is based — more or less — on the same concept of making programming easy and very effective. And being Scratch a web 2.0 project, it’s cost is just the one of the access to the network — which might be, of course, also quite an issue.

Muhammad Atif Ishaq
Usability in e-learning

The usability of a learning system is quite tricky as it involves fuzzy concepts and multiple dimensions and factors.

Indeed, developing countries have added factors that make usability even more complex to define, such as:

• Low DOI
• Basic level operating skills
• Digital Divide
• Heterogenous cultures and languages

Evelyn begins by describing an overview about the fundamentals of e-Learning

Main challenges of e-Learning

• Lack of technical skills
• lack of time management skills
• Credibility of e-learning
• Integration of emerging tech
• Digital Divide
• lack of policies and strategies
• Increasing dropout rate

To explain the why of failures (and successes in e-learning for development), Hypothesis: Applying social presence factors of communication, interactivity and feedback can create successful e-learning experiences

My reflections

• Connectivism, as a new approach beyond Behaviourism, Cognitivism and Constructivism, and really related with the hypothesis of the project, as Connectivism is really about feedback, interaction, co-participation, etc. Same with e-Learning/Education 2.0
• Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age
• Connectivism.ca
• Downes, S. (2006). Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge

Annika Andersson
The (jigsaw-) puzzle of e-learning: case study Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

Thesis theme: Inhibiting and facilitating factors for e-learning in developing countries

• which are the nhibiting and facilitating factors for e-learning in developing countries
• which of these factors are of specific importance to developing countries
• Contribution: a conceptual framework on factors that contributes to enrollment and completion of e-learning courses in developing countries: student, teacher, course, technology, support, institution, society.

But, besides the difference in degree of factors, is there a difference in concept between developed and developing countries? Maybe not…

Nevertheless, in academic literature, when analyzing this factors the focus in developed countries is in the individual (the student) while when analyzing developing countries the focus is usually in culture. Isn’t this a prejudice?

Arguing for a holistic approach but still focusing on a few factors.
Categorizing and looking for differences between “developed” and “developing” countries… Extremely unhappy with this terminology.

More Info

• Annika Andersson: What is so special about e-learning in developing countries?

Keynote speech: Tim Unwin
ICT4D: a dialectic exploration

We might do quite well in practice, but… what about an ICT4D theory?

• Dialectics: seeking a synthesis, a/the resolution of the thesis and antithesis
• From a European intellectual apparatus (from Socrates through Hegel to Marx) to… an alternative African and Asian modes of thought? Might the solution to some problems be elusive unless you changed the way you look at the problem?
• What are the conditions under which ICTs may indeed be of value for “development”? And, in this train of though, what would be the role of technologies?

What is development? The dominant hegemonic model:

• Focused on the MDGs

Absolute poverty to be eliminate by economic growth
Providing the appropriate liberal democratic governance structures are in place

An alternative model?

• Focused on relative poverty
• Placing emphasis on social culture
• enabling people to fulfill their own voices — empowerment?

Thesis vs. Antithesis

• Exogenous or endogenous?
• Top down supply driven or bottom up demand led?
• Software and Knowledges: proprietary or open source
• Partnerships or project delivery?

Technology as exogenous: a thesis

• Much of literature addresses ICTs as exogenous: the Knowledge Society
• An “externally” introduced “innovation” that can bring significant benefits
• ICTs delivering “development” solutions in health, education, rural development…
• ICTs as technologies developed primarily in the major global economies, and made available to deliver on development (defined as MDGs growth…)

Exogenous Technologies: an antithesis

• ICTs are endogenous to “developed” capitalist economies
• Central to speeding circulation of capital, reducing labor costs, increasing market
• Need to focus on endogenous I&C technologies in other parts of the world

A top-down supply-led thesis: new ICTs developed in dominant economies and rolled out to developing world. Arrogance of economic and political power. Solutions that should “always” work, as norms; companies wanting to expand markets; countless self-proclaimed “successful” initiatives.

We should begin with needs, design needs based solutions.

Knowledge as private profit: proprietary thesis.

• Knowledge and education enable benefits
• People should therefore be willing to pay
• People should profit from their endeavours: intellectual property rights and copyright
• What is worth has a price
• Focus on the individual

Knowledge as global common good: an antithesis.

• Focus on the community
• Knowledge for the betterment of human society; must be shared
• Communal development

Thesis: Partnerships as the solution

• Complexity of problems requires new skills
• Engage all relevant stakeholders
• Reduce duplication and wheel reinvention
• Gain from synergies
• Combining demand and supply approaches

Where’s the balance?

Comments/Debate

Khalid Rabayah makes an interesting comment I fully share: the focus in ICT4D strategies is usually in Technologies (in Infrastructures) and neither in Information nor in Communication. There’s an urgent need to shift to content — local content — and design Information Strategies. While agreeing, Tim Unwin’s counterargument is based on the benefits of globalization: sharing what’s out there, not reinventing the wheel, being able to communicate across the World, etc.