ICTlogy

Andrea Burris
Creativity in the Information Economy: China Case Study

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

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