The point should be to fix, before you pour into Foreign Aid, government/governance, so the money goes to the appropriate place/hands. More indeed, investment should go hand to hand with entrepreneurship and infrastructures.
Number of handsets is still increasing in Africa, but the difference (among many others) between blog analysis and mobile communications analysis is that these last ones they are so difficult to track. But it is an infrastructure that can be used for entrepreneurship, activism, or governance, etc.
Interactive Radio for Justice, for instance, allow users to send SMS questions to the radio, which can feature DRC deputy minister for defence, head of military operations for MONUC. This is a way to close the loop of media system.
mobilemonitors.org also represents another way of making elections more transparent, by calling to the radio and report abuse on voting places. And not just phone, but the pervasive of phone cameras is also a fact that is changing witnessing.
M-Pesa hire air (phone) time. But it is also being used for money transfer: I load the phone with money (say, air time) and a third party “downloads” the phone and gets the money back, with even a bank account intermediating.
Even activists upload speeches in the format of ringtones that can be downloaded and installed on your mobile phone.
Vodacom Congo is a compelling example on how strong is the demand for communications in Africa.
Success of incremental infrastructure in Africa
built on small (compared to huge projects) investments that quickly yield revenue
partially user financed and owned
replacement technology
Already incremental: mobile phones, internet. Possibly incremental: power grids, roads. Problems in the possibly incremental: inefficiency, coordination problems.
Answering a couple of Ralph Schroeder‘s questions, Ethan Zuckerman states that we see that there’s more voice traffic that text on mobile networks. Actually, low literacy is quite an issue for a lot of mobile users.
And concerning the role of the State, so far it seems that the mainstream is just to put some requirements on communication services, such as covering rural areas that otherwise (without State regulation) would remain uncovered. Surprisingly, telecoms end up by finding ways to actually make profit out of these requirements, by making up new business models that take into account those new clusters. But pricing regulation, etc. does not seem to be the most common answer.
Daithí Mac Síthigh expresses his concern that all the infrastructures are owned by the private sector, making it difficult to build upon them national strategies. Ethan Zuckerman’s concern is what happens with those infrastructures if they are owned by a government that you do not trust.
Incremental Infrastructure and the Democratization of Provision, by Mike Best
The question is not if we should give a poor a computer instead of e.g. food, but if there is a role for ICTs in providing the poor with food.
ICT4D – Africa – Innovation
Technological and engineering challenges
Supportive public policies and regulatory environment
Smart businesses, especially SMSs
Collaborative and socially aware interventions
Rigorous monitoring, evaluation, assessment
Post-conflict countries are being the ones with highest mobile phone use growth… but it might be because of replacement of fixed phones. So, is the indicator a good one?
A Knowledge-based Rwanda
Physical infrastructure
Human capacity
Peace, security and reconciliation
Good governance and supportive public policy
Grassroots opportunities
Spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship
Where fiber is not available (and not easy to build), wireless technologies come to the rescue: VSAT, GSM/GPRS, Wi-Max, Wi-Fi, UMTS, etc.
Readiness Assessment
Pervasiveness
Geographic Dispersion
Sectoral Absorption
Connectivity Infrastructure
Organizational Infrastructure
Sophistication of Use
Conclusions on the e-Readiness Assessment for Liberia
A strong independent regulator is critical to growth of the overall ICT sector
The lack of a fiber network in metropolitan Monrovia along with a national fiber backbone limits significantly domestic Internet capacity. A revitalized Liberian Telecommunications Corporation can serve naturally as a network service provider.
A connection to the submarine cable that travels from Portugal along the west coat of Africa (SAT3/WASC) can be realized perhaps with a link via neighboring Côte d’Ivoire
My reflections
We’ve seen many successes of mobile phone but… what are the limitations? is there a need to shift to the desktop anyway? or can we stick to mobile communications?
In this session I will first briefly show some of my works, namely our e-learning-project visual-literacy.org with the periodic table and the VIZ-HALL.
An ad (but also other forms of visual commmunication) which elicits a mental collaboration from the consumer is more likely to be an effective ad. As the consumer contributes in the process of making meaning, he becomes “part-author” and thereby he is moving from adversary to accomplice.
What Makes Visualization Effective?
VizHall, to rate a picture. As a peer-learning tool that it is, is that it requires involvement by the user to make full benefit of it.
Likeability
Entertaining
Relevant
Empathetic
Alienating
Confusing
Familiar
The power of the metaphore, based on intelligence. The problem is that you have to get them, to understand them, which is quite dangerous if you can loose your chance to send your message.
Where there’s a strong brand lovemark, it might be possible to subvert the discourse and first I have interest (lovemark) in your brand, you can catch my attention, persuade me and then push me towards action; normal procedure is to catch attention, get my interest and persuade me to come into action.
We’ll never thank Chintan Vaishnav enough for arranging our visit to the MIT Media Lab and OLPC Foundation, impressive places where to work (or study, of course: actually, a place to learn, either official role you get there with), really interdisciplinary.
We there were presented a couple of very interesting projects:
Scratch
Jay Silver kindly introduced us to the rudiments of Scratch and how to get started on this tool. Actually, I still wonder whether it is a game, a multimedia design and production tool, an educational technology, a collaborative web 2.0 networking social software or all of them.
I’m pretty sure that Jay Silver was right when he said that tools the like of Scratch actually fit on what Ivan Illich wanted to state on Deschooling Society.
The project joins best of both worlds in VoIP, mobile telephony and social software for community building. The idea is that while the Web is quite spread, in most developing countries the ICT revolution is clearly led by mobile phones. Thus, What’s Up presents the usual community site but empowered with VoIP and all kinds of mobile enhanced features, just like SMS posted text and vodcasts.
A year and a half ago I wrote Negroponte and the Web 2.0 or the Four Classes of the Digital Divide to state that Nicholas Negroponte’s effort to bridge the digital divide will be worthless if digital literacy and provision of content and services did not accompany the infrastructures revolution and diffusion. Having Samuel Klein as spokesman or PR representative makes a tacit statement on what the One Laptop per Child Project is about: it is not about delivering laptops to children, is about opening them the gates of content, which is the real issue.
As he himself explained, every activity has comunity around it, being the goal to build education networks, an example of it the installation of Moodle for some community projects, being the management and coordination of this free software LMS done by the same educational institutions that provide wireless connectivity to the laptops.
The commitment with content can be on the other hand exemplified with the Summer of Content 2007 initiative to provide content to be packeted with the XO laptop.
Samuel Klein strongly encouraged the audience and anyone interested to both contribute to the OLPC Project Wiki and subscribe to the OLPC Project Wiki mailing lists.
John introduces his speech as a trip through some reflections that arise from the fact that some people (i.e. born in the middle eighties and on) have always lived with the Internet and digital technologies. Those people live/interact on digital landscapes that do have some specific characteristics.
John Palfrey
Digital landscape
Digital identities, in two senses. One is be present on the Internet. Second, to be able to shape one’s identity at one’s will, as the Internet allow one to.
Multi-tasking: lots of windows open and things being done at the same time
Digital media: all your stuff is created in digital form (you might never ever print it) and it can be mixed, edited, changed… mashed up, and it will stand this way, digitally. And, indeed, is not only digital media, but digital platforms. And even if they are at a very early stage, there is already now a new layer above traditional http that is working as a new means of digital communication. This layer is shaped by devices like Second Life, Flickr, RSS or the Wikipedia.
From consumers to creators: Of course, this mashing up involves changes in cultures, intellectual property problems… new challenges arcane for digital immigrants, not to say analogue citizens.
New technologies/features: Google Docs, AJAX, tagging, hackability, wikis, social networks, RSS. RSS surely made Web 2.0 go from just a cool idea to a big change in the state of things.
Lightweight collaboration: multiple users on distributed workgroups where people collaborate as long and as intensively as they want to. In Yochai Benkler’s words, is a democratising innovation.
An international perspective: New contexts and new meanings. People like (and also expect) commenting others’ reflections. Tagging and geotaggin provide, again, new contexts for content. And those contexts are most of them relying on a new concept of trust, which enables strong networks… and business models.
Addressing perceived threats
Security and safety: cyberbulling
Privacy: everything on the Internet is public… anyone lost a job offer because of sensible photos on the net? unintended audience, replicability, persistence, searchability, unintentional contributions.
Tier 1: our own profile. You got control over what you post, and you can configure your own privacy settings.
Tier 2: your friend’s profile. Friends upload a photo of yours and you untag it, removing any liaison to you.
Tier 3: Blogs, Flickr, social networks. Friends upload a photo and you have to ask for them to remove it.
Tier 4: facial recognition systems. Friends upload a photo of you and tehc tags it for them with face recognition (Riya). How to undo this?
Intellectual property: people creating new things from old things is increasing (as it is increasingly easy) and the perspective is that intellectual property rights issues (i.e. lawsuits) are going to be a big issue in the nearest future (present!).
Information expectations:
credibility: “hidden influences”, grazing, misinformation… are common on wikis and blogs
information overload
Positive outlook
So, what’s the agenda from now on?
media literacy skills, expression/identity, empowering creators, information sharing, maintaining connections
Opportunities: creativity, media literacy, social production, semiotic democracy
Blogs and Wikis: knowledge creating, equity/democratic, participatory, empowering individuals, autonomy, cross-cultural and community building
Opportunities: Information creation, semiotic democracy, participatory, empowering individuals, access to information
An academic research team — joining people from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland — is hosting and working on the core of this wiki, which illustrates the beginning stages of a larger research project on Digital Natives.
“Digital Natives” are those people for whom the internet and related technologies are givens, whereas “Digital Immigrants” migrated to these technologies later in life (Prensky, 2001). Digital Immigrants know how life existed in the pre-networked society, whereas Digital Natives take networked communication as the foundation of their lives.
The focus of this research is on exploring the impacts of this generational demarcation. By learning as much as we can about Digital Natives, their way of life, and their way of thinking, we can address the issues their digital practices raise, and shape our legal, educational, and social institutions in a way that supports and protects natives, while harnessing the exciting possibilities their digital fluency presents.
Questions
Challenging question by Max Senges: is it possible to live with several identities at the same time? John thinks that no and, in the end, identities seem to converge on your real one, and your blog or whatever sooner or later reflects who you really are.
An interesting circle is being created: technologists create technology based on expected market users, but the users reshape this technology by using it, and again, technologists re-reshape the technology and so on. How can this be controlled, managed, etc.
César Córcoles: digital identity (on intensive live online) will become something normal, but now it is seen as (a) geekery (b) a bad thing to do (lost of time), so what should we, as academics, do? John answers that, actually, the problem is that academics are also digital immigrants, and thus they first have to learn. Open Access might be a good way to legitimate new means of distributing content and from an academic basis or point of view. (Academic) blogging is still not very popular, but how to foster it?
Ana Zúñiga: about information overload, the problem sometimes is that there is a strong lack of digital literacy, specially informational literacy, so you know where to go to in order to get high quality information.
Cristina Girona and John (and many others) engage in a debate about not using technolgy by itself, but for final purposes, such as educational purposes. But there is a need not only to think about technology in classrooms, but also to think about teaching itself.
Emma Kiselyova excellently points the fact that digital immigrants will disappear with time and digital natives will, sooner or later, rule the world. In the meanwhile, in the impasse, what should be done? How can educational institutions make the bridge, lead the rupture that digital technologies are causing.
I point, following Emma’s line, that all in all is a matter of e-awareness, of knowing what this digital paradigm means for everyone of us. On one side we’ve got digital immigrants (DIs; I here also include digital outsiders), that as mature people as they are, they have some degree of awareness of things (of what means living, how society works, what is moral and what is ethics, etc.) but have poor knowledge of “e-” things. On the other side, there’re digital natives (DNs), that fully master the “e-” part but they need education (remember: they’re still young and “inexpert”) and a place to go (i.e. the University) in order to get some awareness. But nobody is actually crossing the line to make ends meet: DIs do not approach digital landscapes and DNs, actually, pass over traditional knowledge that brings awareness (the example of intellectual property rights infringement is crystal clear).
Silvia Bravo argues that an approach is really happening, that the academy is blogging and writing on wikis. In my opinion, even if this was true (which I honestly believe it is not, at least not with a critical mass), the problem is that individuals are not the ones who transmit values, but institutions. And, at the institutional level, the state of things is definitely distressing.
This monograph is intended to help educational decision makers survey the technological landscape and its relevance to educational reform. This monograph is firmly rooted in a vision of education that begins with the learner and attempts to understand how technological tools can better contribute to educational goals. It looks at how technology can promote improvements in reach and delivery, content, learning outcomes, management of systems, teaching, and pertinence. In short, it is a contribution to global reflection on how to make learning throughout life a reality.
This new UNESCO/AED book, edited by Wadi Haddad and Alexandra Draxler and authored by a good collection of authors, presents some reflexions on how ICTs can help Education reach those that are unreachable by traditional educational means — thus, while not “for development” focused, it is indeed mainly targeted to people and institutions working for population under exclusion risks, specially those in developing countries.
My opinion is that the book is half complete. The articles chosen are really relevant, but there is a serious lack of strategical perspective. In other words, the actual situation being well described, there is no forecast on the current debates on instructional technologies and their immediate future. To note, two of the most prominent things absent in the book: free and/open source software for education (FLOSSE) and open educational resources (OER). The reason might be the date of the publication of the book: 2002. I know this is quite unhumble from my part, but I’d suggest taking a look at my master’s thesis e-Learning for Development: a model to complement the issues of OER and FLOSSE.
Open Educational Resources: legal aspects
Raquel Xalabarder, Department of Law and Political Science, UOC
In principle, intermediaries (i.e. OER repositories) are liable for infringement of intellectual property rights. Nevertheless, there are safe harbours (exceptions) where intermediaries are not liable, provided they pass the awareness of knowledge test. Mainly it deals with knowing you’re consciously infringing the law and your ability to quickly remove content when required to.
Big problem: there’s no consensus on which law should apply to what at the international level.
Three things that the law empowers the author (not the industry) to do: distribute, communicate to the public and transform. But there are exceptions to the author does not abuse his monopoly, and education is one of them. OER repositories, though intended to teaching — thus, fair use — do open those contents to anyone, be their purpose teaching or not, so we have a problem here of possible infringement.
Creative Commons is, in no way, a registry: you should (also) register your work in the Copyright registry to protect your rights, regardless of what you intend to do with them.
The advice for the OER community should not be just try and see how I apply the law but to lobby and see how this law can be changed, changed so educatinoal purposes are always an exception to copyright, to enhance consumer protection (vs. the industry’s). OER practitioners should aim to bring the debate to the international fora, not just to keep it in the scope of their own (immediate) needs. Rights should be about exploitation, not use.
Open Educational Resources and Virtual Universities
Susan D’Antoni, Head of UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning, IIEP Virtual Institute
Knowledge is not merchandise, knowledge divide is deeper than the digital divide [personal note: this is because we think of digital divide as ICT infrastructures divide, i.e. forgetting about informational literacy], OER has the potential to address national policy objectives on the Knowledge Society.
UNESCO (and, actually, the OER community taking part in the fora) should be in position to design a policy framework to enchance/foster/refer OER development and implantation.
Yochai Benkler, The wealth of networks: The importance of policy choices – and the social political choides behin them – in the move towards the information society.
Closing Session
Julià Minguillón, Vice-Director Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, UOC
The OLCOS project has drawn a roadmap and some tutorials on how to implant OER.
Recommendations
There’s a need for information, to spread the word of open access and OER
Top-down and bottom-up approaches
Remove producer-consumer barriers, in the sense that consumers can become producers, and producers become consumers
Stick to standards
Update 20061220: The presentations can now be downloaded here Update 20070517: The videos can now be downloaded here
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UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Third International Seminar. OER: Institutional Challenges (2006)
Technologies for Education: Potential, Parameters, and Prospects 
