ICTlogy

Josie Fraser posts about Regional Suport Centre Wales’s e-Toolbox where you can find information pertaining to a variety of software which can be used to develop learning situations.

Josie “complains” whether reviews or examples will be added to the tools posted in the database – now there’re neither reviews nor examples. I completely agree. So far, the only thing you can find is some specifications, being amongst them the product URL.

Nevertheless, the idea is quite good.

I wonder if it is going to grow in such a way that it becomes useless because of infoxication or it will remain “under control”. This is kind of a self-criticism because I’m running an ICT4D Wiki – for personal uses, so far – and I was wondering whether I should open it to anyone to read it and/or open it to anyone to edit it.

On one hand, the more people the more content, and this is good.
But if I/we am/are going to make a copy of portals such as The Development Gateway or The Digital Divide Network, what’s the meaning of it all?

Keep thinking about it…

Really impressive analysis of Free, Libre and Open Source Software in Education (FLOSSE) by Teemu Arina.

I really really really liked the comparison amongst free software and free culture. Is a thing I’m really interested in and pretend to write something adding a third dimension – online volunteering (“free human resources”) – to promote free e-learning for development programmes.

• The post where all the information is presented: Results of future of FLOSSE
• The presentation in PDF format: Future of FLOSSE (3.595 Kb)
• The presentation in slides: Future of FLOSSE

[read chez James and “kept it new” in my bloglines since a couple of months ago – shame on me]

Again through my subscription to one of the lists of The Development Gateway (BTW, that usually means John Daly :)

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has publised the ICT Development Indices for year 2004. First of all, I’m glad they called the report that way, The Digital Divide: ICT Development Indices 2004, instead of something such as “ICT Implantation Indices” or something even colder, as numbers usually are.

The report begins with a comparison amongst year 1995 and year 2002 indices.
It then deals with telephone lines, mobile suscribers, internet hosts, PCs and internet users. Lorenz curves for these items are really impressive – not their drawing, but the message within!

The report goes on with some best practices about the introduction of ICTs and then points exclusively on Africa.

Highly recommendable.

The Digital Divide: ICT Development Indices 2004 (422 Kb)
The Digital Divide: ICT Development Indices 2004 (1,398 Kb)

My subscription to one of the lists of The Development Gateway leads me to… plenty of things!

The University of California, within the framework of his Global Information Internship Program, has scheduled a course called IT Design & Application for Social Change

One of the readings for the course is a Mark Warschauer article called Reconceptualizing the Digital Divide

The second reading concerning this subject is another article by Mark Warschauer: Demystifying the Digital Divide

Both readings are simple but very nice to read (simple meaning that it is quite easy to understand for everyone – not that they are too simple and they give that different approach far away from the typical infrasctructure-only approach :)

BTW, I started the Wikipedia entry about Mark Warschauer: anyone can contribute? Now it is just a stub article.

Reconceptualizing the Digital Divide (174 Kb)
Demystifying the Digital Divide (171 Kb)

I’m back from the I Jornadas sobre participación social y nuevas tecnologías: Cibervoluntariado y Ciberactivismo [I Seminar on social participation and new technologies: cyvervolunteering and cyberactivism] that was held in the University of Almería.

And the people I found there – organization and speakers – were just G.R.E.A.T.

Teresa González de la Fe (Universidad de la Laguna) talked about the Informational Society and citizenship. I guess I did not agree with her almost in anything. I mean, we share the same approach, but I guess I’m far more optimistic in the benefits of the Internet for development, cooperation, citizenship, etc. than she is.

Anyway, the main conclusion I got from her is that I have to reinforce my academic background to support some of my beliefs, opinions, etc. ;)

Cite of her speech (sorry for the translation): “those who focus on their personal affairs, set aside the public ones; and forgetting public affairs brings tyranny” Alexis de Tocqueville

Paloma Ortega (Fundación Chandra) spoke about their sites and I paid special attention to their best practices section about volunteering management and their project on corporate volunteering. All in all, not really related to online volunteering… but interesting enough.

Ignacio García Cáceres (Almería 2005) showed us their project of online training for their volunteers. A good practice… but I cannot understand why they did it using WebCT, as it did not seem to be a very big project the one of online training (it was good, but not that big given the costs of WebCT…)

Yolanda Rueda and Jorge Beltrán (Cibervoluntarios) presented their experience with ICT Volunteers (we debated whether the term “cybervolunteer” means “online volunteer” or “ICT volunteer” – I prefer the former)

Afterwards, during the dinner, we talked about communication skills, the Johari Window and Tom Peters and his theories on business management and marketing. Once again, I should reinforce my academic general knowledge of things everything ;)

Viola Krebs (ICVolunteers) closed the seminar talking about the role of ICT volunteers and volunteers in general in society and, in particular, how the subject is dealt with within the framework of the WSIS.

She presented the CyberVolunteers program that “recruits, trains and coordinates volunteers with information and communication technology skills for development” and the Conference Reports program that “is a cross-sector partnership that directly involves volunteers in carrying results around the world [and to] to create, review and post summaries of sessions, articles and interviews”.

She pointed something about e-Volunteering in the Library section in the World Wide Volunteer site, but it does not seem to be working :(

Instead, there’s a good bunch of links in the e-Volunteering links section.

Another link: CIVICUS, “an international alliance dedicated to strengthening citizen action and civil society throughout the world”.

Umpf, quite a chaotic explanation of the seminar. Forgive me: it’s monday morning…

A thing I did not like about my 3 column template was that sidebars had text much too little. Increasing its size meant have (even) less text area for posts. Bad. Actually, I indeed wanted more text area for posts.

At last, I’ve migrated to a 2 column template. Links will soon appear under a new way: Bloglines Blogroll.

So far I have it linked on my sidebar. The original idea was to have it completely visible by using the include PHP function getting the info from http://www.bloglines.com/blogroll?html=1&id=ictlogist, but it does not seem to be working (page does not download). Any hints??? :P