ICTlogy

I am at the Open EdTech Summit where very interesting people from the world of Education and instructional technology have gathered to share best practices, as the basis for discussions to help identify future education and technology needs and trends for next-generation educational and learning environments.

Opening Up Education
Vijay Kumar, MIT

A departure point of the session is Toru Iiyoshi & Vijay Kumar’s book Opening Up Education (2008), which gathers experiences on open education around the World (and can be freely downloaded at the book’s site).

Some issues: what does open education mean for the future of institutions? how can it be made financially sustainable? how can it work as an agency for change in both formal and informal education? how can niche learning communities take advantage of open educational resources?

Three axes: Open Technology, Open Content, Open Knowledge.

Recommendations:

• Investigate the transformative potential and ecological transitions: does open education helps in finding solutions to the structural or traditional problems of education? can quality be scaled to reach wide national needs? what’s the role and design of blended learning? how can we throw down the boundaries of education?
• Change Education’s culture and policy: fight inertial frames (e.g. “scarcity of knowledge/content”), enabling structures, how can open education help to improve access to and quality of education? are we ready for that much openness? what arrangements have to be made in institutions and educators to benefit from openness?

Susan D’Antoni, UNESCO IIEP

Not only universities: but education as a whole, universal primary education, gender equity.

The Horizon Report 2008 states some crucial aspects: the needed change of scope and leadership in research topics related to education (and open education); the importance of mobile devices for mobile learning; the emphasis on collaborative learning that demands new forms of interaction and assessment; new literacies that education has to bring into curricula.

Experience shows that communities of interest are useful for:

• awareness raising and identifiying who the leaders to be informed are
• spreading knowledge and capacity bulding
• guarantee quality and serve as a reputation device for both content and people

Paul G. West, Commonwealth of Learning

The “openness” process has to be smooth and progressive, and same applies to the process of “blendification” or “e-learningification” of Education, specially in those communities where the digital divide is more than a tag (physical access, broadband, affordability…).

In this sense, it is important to see that the sharing will not be one-way sharing (from developed to developing countries) but a two-way sharing. And this requires a change of mindset in developed countries institutions and people.

We need to think on whole-world terms, and beyond the interests of closed groups. And, on the other hand, on the different perspectives and approaches of the many and many kinds of people and communities around the World. And this takes us back again to the digital divide issue.

Linda G. Roberts, Curriki

There’s always been innovators, innovators that are necessary to break with the way things have normally been done and try and find new ways of doing them… or of doing new things the old way. Normally, doing different is the most difficult way.

Clayton M. Christensen Disrupting Class: work from outside the system, break it. Linda G. Roberts: we should work both from inside and outside the system.

After breaking barriers, after bringing innovations into the spotlight, sustainability is the issue. Innovation requires new strategies. If (methodologically successful) innovations are not here to stay, because they are not sustainable at all, should we engage in the effort of making them up?

Sustainability is also about political or strategical sustainability. Thus, the correct questions have to be put — and given an answer — so that the whole thing makes sense for each and everyone.

Of course, sustainability is not only about taking into account costs, or investment, but also in how this investment is going to cut down final costs of alternatives to the innovation (i.e. the traditional way), in this case, open educational resources.

Llorenç Valverde, Open University of Catalonia

We shouldn’t talk about teaching, but about learning — and this is specially important in open or distance education institutions.

If content is open, the container should be open too.

And, as a matter of fact, if content has any value, it does not make any sense to close it to “protect or investment”, because, sooner or later, someone will open it for us.

Next 23 and 24 October 2008, Net.es 5, accesibilidad y nuevas tecnologías en la sociedad. El papel de la Sociedad Civil [Accessiblity and new techonologies in the society. The role of the Civil Society] will deal about human rights, digital citizenry, accessibility and disabilities, usability, e-inclusion and digital literacy.

I will be sharing a round table with Rafael Casado Ortiz and David Cierco about accessibility, inclusion and digital literacy.

I will take a real from the real life to explain why and how digital literacy can enable or enhance inclusion — just inclusion, not digital inclusion —. The example, which I already used in my seminar at the Executive Master in e-Governance and made up with Mercè Guillén-Solà, is taking the crafting community as a paradigm of a network that existed off-line and used the Internet — and Web 2.0 applications specifically — to enable and enhance better and stronger links. Digital literacy comes, then, as help to leverage the existing network (and to avoid the danger of dropping out of it), but not as a substitute or a goal in itself.

Presentation

More information

• Net.es 5 official site
• Peña-López, I. & Guillén Solà, M. (2008). Accesibilidad e Inclusión Digital:el papel de la Alfabetización Digital. Conference imparted in Madrid, October 24th, 2008 at the Net.es 5, Ministerio de Educación, Política Social y Deporte. Madrid: ICTlogy.

I’m proud — really proud — to present this year’s edition of the UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning International Seminar, Fighting the digital divide through education, in which I am part of the academic committee (i.e. I’ll be attending the Seminar).

UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar is going to held in Barcelona between the 12th and 14th of November, 2008, and is aimed to debate the different possible solutions to the digital divide problem, cataloguing and analyzing success stories where ICT have played an important role in the development of education, in spite of technological and social barriers.

The Seminar is primarily addressed to:
* Top management at universities: presidents, vice presidents, general managers and executive officers.
* Those responsible for the application of e-Learning in higher education institutions, in which these tools play an important role: officers in charge of the introduction and use of new technology, e-Learning directors, faculty deans, research centre directors, etc.

The programme looks really interesting for those interested in the intersection of Education, ICTs and the Digital Divide. Confirmed speakers are: Tim Unwin, Teemu Leinonen, Ivan Krsti?, Linda G. Roberts, Sugata Mitra and Bakary Diallo and Begoña Gros.

More information

• 5th International Seminar official website
• UOC UNESCO Chair weblog

These are the materials I used on a seminar belonging to the Executive Master in e-Governance organized by the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and partnered by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

ICTs, development and government: from e-Readiness to e-Awareness

Presentation

Recommended Readings

Assignment

Take your home country as the basis.

Describe the strengths and weaknesses of this country in the following five fields:

• Infrastructures
• ICT Sector
• Digital Literacy
• Content and Services
• Legal Framework

and relate them to what you think is critical to establish a full range of operational e-Government initiatives (basic, intermediate and advanced levels).

Evaluation criteria:

• Identification of main/critical aspects
• Depth of analysis, conclusions backed with data/evidence…
• Use (and citation) of appropriate and complementary references
• Quality of exposition, structure, clarity of language…

Where to start from:

• Country At a Glance tables – The World Bank
• ICT At a Glance tables – The World Bank
• Global Information Technology Report 2007-2008 – WEF/INSEAD
• ICT EYE – International Telecommunication Union

More information

• Citation
• Download the presentation (, 1.6 MB)

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Notes from the course Network Society: Social Changes, Organizations and Citizens, Barcelona, 15-17 October, 2008.

How do social change organizations innovate?
Ethan Zuckerman, Harvard Berkman Center

Social organizations do not innovate, do it badly, or just do it slowly. Quite usually, the assumption is to be unrealistic about the power of technology to enable social change.

Facing a blank canvas gives you the idea that everything is possible. But good art is about constraint. And if you don’t know your constraints, figure them out.

• Innovation comes from constraint

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail saying does not apply to innovation: innovation is about hacking the hammer and making it better.

Von Hippel (see “more info” below): Lead user theory: users innovate all over the time.

Learning from extreme uses, hostile environments. Africa is a good place to test technology, as the environment is roughest. What works in Africa, works everywhere (AfriGadget, about African innovation).

Some examples of innovation from constraints: the Zeer Pot, the Solar Stove. The problem sometimes is not innovation in processes, but innovation in culture. Then innovation has to be reinvented, hence the solar stove becomes the Jiko:

• Don’t fight culture
• Embrace market mechanisms
• Innovate on existing platforms

Innovation is using the ordinary in extraordinary ways: the Malawi Windmill. Innovation is about hacking existing technology. And the technology that now is spread on Africa is mobile phones: technological innovation in Africa will necessarily be related with hacking mobile phones. Mobile phones have already changed the way sub-Saharan Africans see and do things: TradeNet, to get agricultural information; M-Pesa, to transfer money and make payments; Ushahidi, crowdsourcing crisis information; reporting the 2008 Zimbabwe presidential election to report electoral rigging.

Incremental infrastructure: e.g. a mobile phone antenna that also is a vertical axis power windmill.

• Problems are not always obvious from afar
• What you have matters more that what you lack
• Infrastructure can beget infrastructure

Ethan Zuckerman’s ICT4D Innovation test

1. Does the innovation comes from constraint?
2. Does it fight culture?
3. Does it embrace market mechanisms?
4. Does it innovate on existing platforms?
5. Does it come from close observation of the target environment?
6. Does it focus more on what you have more that what you lack?
7. Is it based on a “infrastructure begets infrastructure” basis?

Example 1: the OLPC project fails on 1, 3, 5, 6 and maybe 7, only passing on 2 and 4.

Example 2: Kiva passes on 1-4, fails on 5, and not sure whether it passes or fails on 6-7

Example 3: Gobal Voices passes on 1, 4 and 7; fails on 5-6; not sure about 2-3.

Social innovation never comes from a blank canvas. Comes from understanding the needs of all parties. Caveat: sometimes constraints leverage innovation, but are also a limitation for an innovation to go beyond itself.

Q&A

Ricard Ruiz de Querol: How to adapt the innovation based on constraints scheme to e.g. the digital divide in Spain? A: We should be aware whether there is a real digital divide or just a geeky will (unselfish, indeed) for everyone to be a digital native, when those people maybe already got what they needed. So, pushing people towards forced uses might be dysfunctional.

Carlos Domingo: But do we always have to bend to culture and stick to the past? A: It depends whether you’re talking short run or long run. In the long run, you want to figure out how to make culture smoothly evolve; in the short run, fighting culture just will enact an opposition reaction.

Personal reflections

Innovation as a darwinist evolution: no mutations, but adaptive non-disruptive changes based on what best performs on a specific environment.

More info

Von Hippel, E. (2005). Democratizing Innovation. Cambridge: MIT Press

Notes from the course Network Society: Social Changes, Organizations and Citizens, Barcelona, 15-17 October, 2008.

State of development of the Networked Society
Irene Mia, World Economic Forum

The Global Competitiveness Report and The Global Information Technology Report

The Global Competitiveness Report

A network of experts that reports the state of the economy in most countries of the World (covering circa 98% of the World’s GDP). The network works also on tourism, technology, private investment, etc.

The main goal is seeing why, given different countries with very different frameworks and socioeconomic backgrounds, why some of them behave similarly. It seems that there is a high correlation between competitiveness and e-readiness: ICTs are a general purpose technology that impacts all levels, thus why its relationship with competitiveness.

The Global Information Technology Report and the Networked Readiness Index

To see how countries can benefit from ICTs, how ready are they to enter the Information Society. To do so:

• A proper environment: business environment, government environment, individual environment
• A joint action between all the social actors to work together and share a common vision towards the Information Society
• Readiness, to make usage possible.

A composed index of three subindices:

• Environment: Market, Political/Regulatory, Infrastructure
• Readiness: Individual, Business, Government
• Usage: Individual, Business, Government

Data come from two different kind of sources: hard data, coming from national statistics; soft data, coming from experts that note down their perceptions. There is criticism on this last kind of data, dubbed as subjective; but perceptions, in the Economy, do play an important role, so despite the bias that might arise, it is also a way to gather all subjectiveness from a country’s reality.

Denmark — and other Scandinavian countries — are normally on top of the rankings. They are countries that are very innovative, competitive and wide open to international trade and a way of understanding the World as a global arena. On the other hand, some small Asia-Pacific countries have transformed their economies from having poor natural resources to be able to export hi-tech products and services. Last, some Arabic countries are also quickly scaling up the rankings, the reason being the diversification of their economies beyond oil.

Evidence shows that when there is an acknowledged strategy and philosophy to foster the Information Society (especially between businesses and governments), results are much better at achieving higher e-development goals.

The role of Governments in e-Readiness

The level of government readiness and usage is crucial, as it is a vector that dynamizes the introduction of new technology, the supply of services, the activation of the demand for those digital services, etc.

The case of Estonia

The shift from a planned (soviet) economy towards an open market one.

A huge effort was made to make government more efficient and to provide an appropriate environment so that the digital economy could develop: high usage, computers and Internet at home and at school, high level of e-government, etc.

• Leadership from the top
• Holistic national ICT Policy
• An inclusive information society
• Public-private partnerships

The case of Israel

Strong bet on software and exporting software — coming from a traditional economy based on exports of citrus.

How to create the appropriate environment? The government acted as an “ICT powerhouse”: investment in infrastructures, in R&D, in capacity and skills, in enterprise-university partnerships, firm incubators and venture capital, etc. Even this government “intervention”, it was always seen as “market friendly” and contributing to its dynamization without crowding it out.

The case of Taiwan

Incredible economic development based on hi-tech exports, with a highest share of ICT products worldwide.

Again, the strong role of the government and its vision and leadership. An emphasis on education, high quality training; innovation and investment, fostered through incubation programmes and parks.

Other countries that had high positive changes in their Networked Readiness Raking were China, Guatemala, India, Jamaica, Lithuania, Romania, the Russian Federation, Ukraine or Vietnam. Reasons for success being similar to the ones afore mentioned, including many important changes in education too. On the other hand, Africa or the Western Hemisphere showed poor change, normally due not (only) to lack of infrastructures, but to more fundamental reasons like being able to make change happen, the educational and socioeconomic framework, etc.

Q&A

Q: What does it take to shift one point upwards in the index/rankings? A: We don’t know, because the problem is that each country’s reality is too complex to draw a single model.

Q: In the case of Spain, how will it impact the law of access to the e-Administration or the electronic ID? How ambitious is the year 2010 deadline? A: It surely would, but it will not be in the short run. On the other hand, rankings are comparative, so it not only depends on your own performance but on your neighbours’. Of course, accomplishing deadlines also depend on the complexity of specific countries, so it is difficult to tell.

Q: Why e-readiness and usage measured apart? How it is that usage can be higher than readiness? A: Usage is more about e-government (public services, content, etc.), e-readiness more about strategy and policies.

Q: Are there rankings amongst countries with similar populations? Where’s France? Are there any countries going backwards? A: There are no rankings amongst similar populations, but it does make sense as implementation quite often depends on the total population (both positively and negatively).

Q: Is there any repository of best practices? A: The World Economic Forum publishes their case studies — based on successful practices —, as do some other organizations, but normally not as repositories but within reports, etc.

Q: Andalousia (southern Spain) has implemented telecenters and put computers+Internet in the classroom… but it looks like teachers are not ready to (efficiently) use them in teaching. Have other countries (e.g. Denmark) found the way to (efficiently) promote the use of ICTs in education? A: More than ICT policies, it is about education policies. Finland, for instance, invested highly in teachers and their skills (but also in wages). [see also “more info” below]

Q: Why is the civil society scared of the government having an important intervention? A: Public intervention is a need, and it should be better explained why, but there also is a need to protect the individuals in front of some violations of rights like privacy, security, freedom of expression, etc.

Q: What’s the role of web 2.0 apps in e-Readiness? A: It is especially about the role of the citizenry, the relationship of individuals with organizations, etc. And it will have a positive impact on usage, availability of information, etc.

Q: Intellectual property rights… are a barrier or a protection? A: It surely is a double-edged instrument, and there are reasons to and against having IP rights, and there is no clear positioning about them. What it is clear, is that governments should have a criterion about it and act according to it, coherently and consistently.

Demand or supply policies, push or pull strategies? A: In the case of developed countries (e.g. Spain) that already have some amount of infrastructures and skills, most probably the bet should be on demand-based policies and pull strategies to put the user actively in the equation.

More info