ICTlogy

Notes from the the II Encuentro Internacional TIC para la Cooperación al Desarrollo (Development Cooperation 2.0: II International Meeting on ICT for Development Cooperation) held in Gijón, Spain, on February 10-12th, 2009. More notes on this event: cooperacion2.0_2009. More notes on this series of events: cooperacion2.0.

Innovating in the Use of ICT for Human Development: the Key in the Transition to a New Phase in ICT4D
Najat Rochdi, Deputy Director in charge of Policy, Communication and Operation at the UNDP Liaison Office in Geneva

The goal: achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Can we do it the proper way?

What’s the connection between ICTs and poverty alleviation? What does it really mean ICT4D?

And it’s not about the poorest ones only: the crisis that began in 2008 — and it’s absolutely blasting in 2009 — is also about how ICTs can contribute to alleviate its effects. Access should be able to enable people to progress. But access is unevenly distributed.

The private sector has lead innovations in the ICT field. The development sector should also be reached by such innovation processes: new ideas and new applications of old ideas. We need to leverage knowledge. We have to shape the changes, not be shaped by the changes.

A new digital aid is coming, based on the citizen, on the individual, empowered by the web 2.0 and the upcoming web 3.0.

Web 2.0, added to text messaging, is opening a new landscape of participation and democracy. The web 2.0 and mobile technologies do not only increase development by empowerment, but also create new markets that make it sustainable.

Sharing is the key to ICT4D success: share methodologies and instruments, best practices, research, data, etc.

But there’s urgency in pursuing these goals and putting hands to work in ICT4D related issues. And commitment is needed too. The resources, the human capital, the technology… everything is out there, but we need to bring it to the ones that need it, and we need to do it with a broad political support.

Take hold of the future or the future will take hold of you.

Debate

Q: how do we know we’re really addressing the real needs? A: It’s a collective responsibility. We have to abandon the idea that development agencies and organizations know everything, and that there’s so much to learn from local communities, that we have to engage them in the making of the projects.

Caroline Figueres: Participation and communication is already happening on the field. The problem is that is not being known elsewhere. We have to make it sure everything is well known.

Q: What happens when there’s no infrastructure? A: Mobile technologies seem to be helping in the infrastructures issue. On the other hand, it’s important to catalyse the demand, so that the private sector sees there’s a niche, a need to be covered that can report benefits. A holistic, multi-stakeholder approach is what has to be solved beforehand.

Q: Why is there not an international political commitment to apply the same energies to poverty alleviation than to the financial crisis? A:

Manuel Acevedo: Next step? A: We need scalable initiatives. To do so, from the beginning a quantitative approach has to be made so that sustainability can be (sort of) calculated and know that there is a potentially high probability of success. We do not use to document projects, to see whether we can share outcomes and learnings, specially methodologies. We have to end up with experimentation, and go to the field scientifically prepared. We have to innovate (i.e. apply tested things), do not experiment.

Anriette Esterhuysen: (re: Caroline Figueres) it’s not already happening. There is no continuity, hence there is no scalability. On the other hand, there’s lack of capacity and ability to communicate knowledge. And, in this time of crisis, what will happen to ICT4D projects and institutions? A: ICT4D is not marketing issue you can cut down to reduce costs. Is a matter of international survival, so commitment will (hopefully) stand. The private sector is playing a most important role in developing countries and is there to stay, it’s boosting and changing a mindset change.

In 2007, half the world population — 50.10% to be true — were subscribers of a mobile telephony service, representing 72.1% of the total telephony subscribers (fixed, mobile, satellite, etc.). The datum is even more shocking if we move into the African continent: there, still only one third of the population has (actually, is subscribed to) a cellular phone (28.44%), but it is important to stress the fact that this third stands for 89.6% of the total subscribers to telephone lines, the highest proportion of the five continents. Though it is but an average that goes way higher when looking into specific countries like Tanzania (98.1%), Mauritania (97%), the Congo (97.2%), Kenya (97,7%) or Cameroon 96%), just to put some examples.

These data absolutely support the creation, in 2008, of the Mobile Web for Social Development Interest Group (MW4D), fostered by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This interest group — a part of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative — has as a purpose to:

explore how to use the potential of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) on Mobile phones as a solution to bridge the Digital Divide and provide minimal services (health, education, governance, business,…) to rural communities and under-privileged populations of Developing Countries.

Some projects using mobile phones for development

• Kiwanja and their projects: FrontlineSMS, to help nonprofits to benefit from using SMS for advocacy and monitoring; nGOmoblie, a competition to encourage them to think about how text messaging could benefit them and their work; and Silverback, a game for mobile phones to raise awareness about gorilla conservation
• TradeNet, to access and manage market information (specially on agriculture markets) from the mobile phone;
• M-Pesa, to transfer money and make payments through text messaging;
• Ushahidi, a platform that crowdsources crisis information, allowing anyone to submit crisis information through text messaging using a mobile phone, email or web form.
• Kubatana.net and their experience monitoring the elections in Zimbabwe, now converted into a handbook on How to run a mobile advocacy campaign

These and other projects, stories, people and organizations using mobile phones for social impact can be found at MobileActive.

On the other hand, Stéphane Boyera and Ken Banks, co-chairs of the Mobile Web for Social Development Interest Group will be at the II International Meeting on ICT for Development Cooperation, where there is a whole track on mobile telephony for development.

More information

• Mobile Phones and the Digital Divide, article by Ken Banks in PC World
• The meek shall inherit the web, article at The Economist
• Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development, workshop about mobile phones for development taking place in Maputo, Mozambique, on April 1 and 2, 2009.
• Most mobiles…, Johathan Donner’s blog on mobiles for development.

From 10th to 12th February 2008, the Development Cooperation 2.0: II International Meeting on ICT for Development Cooperation will take place in Gijón, Spain.

Last year’s edition featured a interesting collection of international speakers from the Development Cooperation and the Information Society world that rarely come together. This year’s pool of speakers lists an equally impressive range of personalities from which to learn — and debate with: Stéphane Boyera, Ken Banks, Ana Moreno, Vikas Nath, John Dryden, Eduardo Sánchez, Alexander Widmer, Carolina Figueres, Merryl Ford and Najat Rochdi.

The central topic of the conference will be Innovation in ICT for Human Development, with threethree associated thematic axis, namely:

• ICT and Quality in Development Cooperation
• ICT and Mobility for Development
• Development Cooperation Networks

Being interested in ICT4D and Development Cooperation, this is one of the two events taking place in Spain that you dont want to miss — the other one being e-STAS: Symposium de las Tecnologías para la Acción Social (more information to come).

More info

• Official Website
• Call for open participation
• The tag of the event will be cooperacion2.0

Notes from the UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar. Fighting the Digital Divide through Education.

Reflections & Conclusions

The real fact of the digital divide

• Multiple factors
• Many different (digital) divides, in relationship to context: culture, geography, education, wealth
• Where to start? Many and different approaches

Importance of the “digital” issue

• The “digital” embedded in the socioeconomic divide
• The “digital” embedded in the education divide
• What’s the relationship between digital and analogue variables

ICT4D

• Awareness raising
• Build from previous experience (e.g. best practices)
• Open processes, open outputs, open participation
• If added value, will to pay (i.e. impact and sustainability)
• Evaluation, assessment

Community

• Communities of practice
• Leveraging communities by focusing on their needs
• Self-organization
• Partnerships
• Networks
• Distributed agoras to debate

ICTs and Education

• Technology not to replace the teacher
• Need to train teachers in ICT usage
• Who’s the expert? The role of youngsters
• Relevance of open content (i.e. OER)
• The networked, multidisciplinary and multicultural teacher & faculty
• Gain from system disruptions to review teaching & assessment

Digital literacies

• Multiple literacies: textual, visual… and language
• Evolving and pervasive nature of digital literacies
• Digital skills as part of the curriculum, embedded in the whole educational process
• ICTs as a language, not just technology
• Training the trainers, educating the educators

What’s next? (VI Seminar 2009)

• Best strategies of knowledge diffusion
• Semantic web in Education
• Teacher training in the Information Society
• Awareness raising in policy-makers and decision-takers
• Education for citizenship, values and attitudes
• Back to open education
• Social learning, peer learning, emergent learning

Acknowledgements

I would personally like to thank the speakers — for their collaboration —, the audience — for their engagement and participation — and, most especially, to Carlos Albaladejo for being a perfect partner in this trip.

Notes from the UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar. Fighting the Digital Divide through Education.

Begoña Gros, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

65% have computers at home, but half of them have access to the Internet. 70% of companies have access to the Internet, but the use of the Internet drops to 50%. Access of citizens to e-Administration is about 45%. 90% of schools and 100% of universities are connected to the Internet, however teachers are not using it for teaching.

Digital natives? = Digital Fluents?
Tíscar Lara, Universidad Carlos III

Being fluent and being stimulated has nothing to do. From the technological paradigm to the communicative and social paradigm.

Digital skills

• information access
• information use
• fluen in different languages and media
• critical thingkin
• knowledge share and publication
• collaborative work
• social values and citizen awareness

Product, write, construct, encode vs. analyze, decode. For the first time both sides of the equation are available to everyone.

More than using technology, it’s better to learn how to take be in a participative culture.

When designing curricula, we should forget about hardware and software, but being centered in problems:

• building and managing a digital identity
• privacy
• intellectual property
• what does it mean being a consumer in the Information Society
• how to understand marketing and advertising

Above all, values have to permeate the whole process of acquiring and using digital skills:

• Fake culture can be very creative and thrilling and liberating, but, on the other hand, we have to tell truth from lies.
• We are constantly exposing our privacy — and our familiars’ and friends’ — and we have to be aware of the pros and cons of such exposure
• Have to learn to distinguish information and advertisements
• Amateur vs. professional

Digital literacy, what for? A digital literacy tied to values and citizenship:

• Have voice for awareness
• Engage in civic participation
• Reduce any divide
• Build a better world

Interactional Space
Javier Nó, Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca

The space determines the educational behaviour. Physical space and technological environment determine interactions. People are part of the environment.

An specific interactional space is the definition of the environment where communication takes place. A learning space is an interactional space that has to be designed. Which are the features of the environment taht produce effective interactions?

Dimensions that have changed that enable universal access

• Physical access
• Digital skills
• Affordance: usability
• Affordance: language
• Affordance: visual literacy
• Affordance: accessibility

Affordance takes access to another level, beyond “just” access.

Digital skills are not enough: the Internet is a specific culture with rules, meanings, organization and a visual language created and negotiated by a very small group of users… the users that have the power to negotiate.

To be able to be part of the Net, one has to understand this culture beyond just practical skills. And to negotiate the culture of the Net, one has to be engaged and implied. So, the question is how to design a space to promote implication, so that, through implication, comprehensive and shared meanings are created.

There is a trade-off between the certainty that is needed for structured knowledge, vs. the uncertainty that an innovative environment brings with it. How to deal with this? How to match innovation with structured knowledge and education?

The crossroads, the interactional space: affordance, negotiation, certainty.

Pedro Aguilera, Fundación Esplai

Mission of Fundación Esplai: to educate during leisure time.

Projects to overcome the digital divide: Red Conecta and Conecta Joven.

The digital divide is but a reflection of social exclusion. We have to avoid the “ostrich strategy”: “technology is not my business”. But also, the technological hype: “we have to wire everything”. In between both models, strategy, step by step processes.

Four main drivers: to reduce the digital divide, to improve employability, to take advange of the potential proximity of the organizations, to eliminate mental and physical barriers.

The usual question is not “how can I use technology”, but “why do I need technology”.

Three main lines of action:

• Training: functional digital skills
• Community strengthening: learn a common “language”
• Access to labour market

Main targets: women over 45, immigrants, unemployed, elderly people, youth at risk of social exclusion, poverty pockets, people from disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

Telecenters are part of the local NGO, to embed it inside an existing local community. Besides saving money by saving resources, the participation inside the community makes the e-inclusion projects way more powerful and socially sustainable.

On the other hand, telecenters work within a network to share resources, methodologies, etc.

The central key of the e-inclusion methodology is the person, the telecenter motivators: people can’t trust a machine, people trust persons. These motivators have at their own reach many resources to support their work: handbook of the “perfect motivator”, a network of motivators and online cooperation tools, tool-kits, etc.

The key issue is understanding e-Inclusion as a social project. As such, partnerships have to be build with local NGOs, Enterprises and the Public Administration being part of them.

Q & A

Mariana Petru: we have to be able to speak both of digital skills and digital competences. Besides, the cultural fact and self-awareness is also a very interesting one. We have to include in training the learning to learn part, and the learning from one’s own life part. Tíscar Lara: Learning to learn is so transversal that it has to be embedded in all disciplines and across the whole educational process. Javier Nó: if we are able to innovate the learning process itself, then all this things will come together.

Francisco Lupiáñez: is there a need to speak about the digital divide if everybody agrees that technology is not the key? Pedro Aguilera: the digital divide is, of course, but a part of a whole. But is a good indicator and a good way where to start. The e-inclusion is a crack in the exclusion wall that you can leverage to achieve broader goals. Tíscar Lara: it is true that we are seduced by ICTs, but ICTs are so comprehensive that approaching them you’re actually approaching a really broad range of “divides”. Javier Nó: ICTs have a versatility you do not find in the “analogue” world.

Linda Roberts: Should people have to learn how to use ICTs at all? What happens with multiculturality? Javier Nó: Of course, best of options would be that people learnt but that what they learnt was a technology designed for and by them, in a dialogue, in an agreement. Pedro Aguilera: ICTs enable multicultural preservation and even enhancement, way higher traditional means of communication.

Notes from the UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar. Fighting the Digital Divide through Education.

Hole in the Wall
Sugata Mitra, Newcastle University

Strong correlation between school performance and geographical distance from Delhi, the capital: the longer the distance, the lower the performance. Teachers from rural areas, indeed, do want to move to Delhi or closer to the capital, to an urban centre. Remoteness reduces the quality of education.

But remoteness not necessarily has to be geographic: there is some sort of “quality remoteness”, where some teachers want to get closer to “good” schools, and feel remote by staying in a low quality school. Remoteness, thus, has many shapes and depends on the cultural, economic, social, geographical, etc. contexts.

Alternative primary education is needed where there are no schools, or schools are not good enough, or where there are no teachers, or where teachers are not good enough.

Educational technology should be designed for and reach the underprivileged first. Indeed, educational technology is perceived to be over-hyped and under-performing in schools that have good students and teachers. And educational technology should be designed by educators, not corporations, politicians, lobbies, mass media…

Values are acquired: doctrine and dogma are imposed.

Self organizing system

Self organizing systems structure themselves without any intervention from outside the system (e.g. John Conway’s Game of Life). Is it possible to set some kind of self-organizing system whose output is an educational system? The Kalkaji experiment: a computer fixed on a wall, and, without instructions, children learnt how to browse (by essay an error) and did browse and teach each other how to.

The Madantusi experiment: will English stop them from using the computer? with enough time, the kids learnt how to play games with the computer and asked for more power and better pointing devices… and saw English not as a barrier but as a challenge: “if I learn English, I’ll be able to use the computer better”. Assertiveness, not negative statements.

Evolution of the experiments

But, are these projects replicable? sustainable? adaptable to different contexts? Can really emerge educational systems from such experiences?

The pattern was: discover the use of the computer, discover browsing… and, systematically, discover Google and see the whole experience shifting towards a higher level.

Next step: install a software to learn English, based on voice recognition. No instructions provided. Again, with few time children were using all the features of the system.

But more than computer literacy, other things were happening.

SOLE: Self Organised Learning Environments

Groups of children interacting with groups of computers. No timetables, no instructions. They are able to find solutions to problems given. Questions being: is this learning? How far can this go (e.g. learn Quantum Mechanics)?

What about the teacher? Is the teacher just presence? Is the teacher guidance? Experiment: put the teacher in a screen (videoconference) with webcams communicating in both directions (teacher-classroom). It’s interactive, and somehow present.

Some conclusions: Education for development

Development is about reducing inequalities. And engagement, and effort, is worth it if the reward (reducing the personal distance with the rest) is big. If there is no reward (inequalities are relatively small), effort does not pay off, and thus engaging in learning is a tough thing to do. How to fight this lack of commitment, or vision, toward one’s own education?

Some conclusions

• Groups of children can learn to use computers, irrespective of who or where they are.
• Children share a computer and get literate in 3 months: learn by doing, but also learn by watching.
• $0.03 per child and day
• Computers improve maths and English (even biotechnology)
• Improve school attendance
• Anwer school leaving examination questions
• Reduce petty crime
• Generate local goodwill
• Change social values
• Children in unsupervised groups can self organise to do all these things, and teach themselves English (speaking and pronunciation too) or improve algebra

Can they change their own aspirations? Can they achieve their own schooling?

Q & A

Paul West: Can such a method be mainstreamed in any way? A: It can be done. Examples and evidence are more convincing than good words.

Q: Can it be applied with adults? A: Adult ego is a strong inhibitor and it might probably not work.

Emma Kiselyova: Can we use second hand hardware to replicate this kind of experiences at a broad scale? A: Children are enraged if they do not get the appropriate (cutting edge) technology. So, the answer is: let’s keep the old computers for us, as we are less power demanding, and send the new ones, as the kids do need more powerful features.

Q: Would this work with retarded or autistic children? A: Autistic children are brilliant, but lack the social skills, a clue of success of these experiences. And brilliant as they are, they might end up going on their own.

Ismael Peña-López: if kids are now so exposed to abundance of information, and learn to collaborate and learn together with other students, are they going to become different adults? A: Definitely. Some youngsters are already collaborating in most intensive ways and even challenging their workspaces and ways their jobs are managed or structured. Surely the nature itself of Education has to change because the reality has dramatically changed. Because full generations are chaning.

Francisco Lupiáñez: Besides remoteness, GDP per capita, or health conditions, do they affect too? Beyond a threshold (i.e. 200miles from the urban center), all these variables are homogeneous in rural India, while remoteness still suffers a gradient in relationship to performance.

Larry Nelson: What’s next after getting the skills? What’s the teacher role? A: After skills, games come. Then, Google opened a large gate of knowledge, really useful for homework. And it was on an imitation basis: the one that takes advantage of using Google to do schoolwork, is imitated by the others not to lag behind. Teachers end up encouraging this kind of behaviour: forbidding gaming is breaking the whole emerging learning process. And there are astonishing stories about kids leaving schools, having smashing success at high school, and attributing it to the computer experience.

Q: Are there any filters in the Internet access? A: Not even there are no filters at all, but even the default set links by the users were overridden from start. And public exposure avoids vandalism, criminal or socially unaccepted browsing. And as the computer is so needed by the students, they will not risk losing access to it.