ICTlogy

I’ve always had on my About Me section my e-mail address so I could be contacted. And I had it there as an image to avoid spam. This was ugly and not accessible.

I’ve just fixed it adding a new Contact section where there’s a form that sends me an e-mail. Better looking and much more accessible.

And pretty easy to get it done by using the code I found here.

This is a (quick) answer to a question Howard Rosenberg made in a comment last Friday.

His questions were:

• If one would like to offer on-line training to developing
  countries, how would one go about getting involved in such an endeavor?
• Thru NGOs?
• Which ones?

My immediate answer is: errr, umm… oooops.

The approach of the Cooperation for Development programme at the Open University of Catalonia is quite different or, if you prefer, similar to what it is pointed in question #2.

Put it simple:

• As a University we think our expertise is not cooperation for development, but education and training (and research and knowledge spreading, but this is another part of the story)
• As a virtual (and only virtual) University, we believe our main added value is how to deal with online learning
• We thus empower NGOs for free on how to deal with online learning: instructional design for e-learning projects, online teaching, etc.
• What NGOs? Don’t know. Mainly, they get to as and ask for cooperation.
• Of course big NGOs have more resources (human over all) and a wider vision concerning investement, training, capacity building, etc. so they are our main target, explicitly or implicitly

Don’t know if I answered the question… but I guess it was a difficult one ;)

Somewhat related to the Human Development Report research tools, the World Bank has launched his World Development Indicators for 2005.

Data can also be queried for countries and indicators.

[via John Daly]

The Education for Rural People Tool Kit Web page was launched today by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

The tool kit is a valuable resource for all those whose daily work consists in training the rural poor in the fields of food and nutrition, local knowledge systems, agrobiodiversity, food quality and safety, rural finance, marketing, forestry, fisheries, communication and other related issues.

Well, last time I reviewed a site I got hard criticism on the comments I made. But the question is that there are some comments to be made, not as easy criticism, but with the aim to help to improve these sites that are of the greatest value!! So, there go my comments. Please read them as made not with the aim to destroy but to build.

The Took Kit does not seem to be a database but static html. This has, at least, three inconvenients:

• Searching is much more difficult if not impossible. Try with “bookkeeping”, that has a category on its own, and cry over the results. Filtering by categories is simply not available.
• Updating becomes a hell of a work. Adding a new resource means changing, at least, two pages. Changing an existing one, even more difficult.
• Categorization becomes static, non hierarchical, etc.

Some months ago, Yan Simmard asked in one comment whether Google was not a better learning objects “repository” than some other so called LORs. Well, if repositories are just like this Tool Kit, Google surely is still a better one, which is a sad, sad thing.

Thus, what in principle was a very good news – new educational resources for the rural community – then becomes a quite disappointing one :(

Links:

• Education for Rural People Tool Kit
• FAO’s piece of news presenting the ERP Tool Kit

[read at noticias.com]