ICTlogy

Keynote speech: Khalid Rabayah
ICT as an enabling tool to ease tension, relief hardship, and resolve conflict: application within the Palestinian case

Despite the decreasing GNP and GNP per capita, the instability of the region, etc. the literacy rate in Palestine is 92% and the computer literacy is 51.2%. The explanation seems to be that precisely education seems to be the way out of the situation the region is immersed. So, the background seems appealing for ICTs for Development… but some failing projects seem to bring evidence on the contrary. The question being: can ICT work without a leading body?

NGOs provided most services before the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority. The difference being since the establishment of the PNA is that, even if it is now the PNA who supplies most of these services, it does not have financial stability, while NGOs do — depending on foreign policies. So, how to build one’s own IT policy?

The brain drain (more Palestinian IT experts in the Gulf than in Palestine) has done nothing but worsen things.

Two E-Government projects… we don’t even have a Government on our own!. Palestine Educational Initiative (PEI)… was fully halted when the PNA composition changed.

The ICT centers of Excellencies, built besides main universities, has or is being a successful project. The idea is to have the business community to interact through the centers with the academic community.

Lessons learnt

• Despite of ups and downs and minor government role, progress has continued (ICT indicators continue rising)
• Government failed to lead the sector
• NGOs played a major role increasing capacity, raise awareness
• Private sector lobbies to open market, defends the sector interest
• Importance of people centered development
• Politically motivated initiatives strongly affected the ICT environment
• ICT in some scenarios provided the only solutions
• The demand driven are the most successful

Jonatan Stanczak
Teaching information, communication and technology to empower children in a low intensity conflict area: a case study from Jenin refugee camp, West Bank, Occupied Palestenian Territories

How performing arts can be combined with ICT to empower children and how to assess/evaluate this?

One important problem to overcome is the researcher’s background and the biased language of “development” issues.

On the other hand, when uncertainty and security are such big issues, working with ITs is not really easy.

So, the goal is to occupy oneself by creativity, engagement, how to enable… and what’s the role of ICTs in this? It’s a very important tool, such as sports or theater, but it surely has a more special role.

Salma Abbasi
Role of Telecentres in Gender Empowerment: do they really work for women?

Despite everyone saying that telecentres are “so good”, why do they sometimes/often fail to achieve social goals?

• “North knows best”
• No consideration to community needs
• Exclusion of marginalized
• Irrelevant information
• Lack of localized content
• Illiteracy
• Inaccessibility by community
• Insecure locations
• Donor funding
• Expensive services

requirements to ensure women’s access to ICTs

• Overcome Technophobia
• Fight Discrimination
• Conduct active outreach
• Ensure financial accessibility
• Ensure physical accessibility
• Relevant content

More Info

• Salma Abbasi: Practical ways to deploy and sustain ICT to enable development and gender empowerment. Preliminary field observations of ICTs.
• Green, L. (2003), Gender-based Issues and Trends in ICT Applications in Education in Asia and the Pacific (PDF)

Marcus Duveskog
Tekkie Kids – A learning laboratory for future engineers

Goal: create an interest in kids for science engineering and technology; and provide researchers with a live lab for distance education

What are the key elements that make a tech club successful in developing positive attitudes towards Science Engineering and Technology?
What is needed to support massification of technology clubs among South African primary schools?

Research method: Action Research

Fun factor is important, and so is competition, but there’s a trade-off between engaging and “creating losers”. Planning is hard, being that some kids are “spoon-fed” one of the possible reasons.

As per massification issues, hub schools and teacher training might be good answers.

How should we asess and evaluate the TekkiKids project?

My reflections

• Markus brings out as a main working tool Lego Mindstorms, but states that though it is a very good learning tool, is is quite expensive and out of reach for most schools’ economies. It is important to notice that the same people that developed Mindstorms also developed Scratch, which is based — more or less — on the same concept of making programming easy and very effective. And being Scratch a web 2.0 project, it’s cost is just the one of the access to the network — which might be, of course, also quite an issue.

Muhammad Atif Ishaq
Usability in e-learning

The usability of a learning system is quite tricky as it involves fuzzy concepts and multiple dimensions and factors.

Indeed, developing countries have added factors that make usability even more complex to define, such as:

• Low DOI
• Basic level operating skills
• Digital Divide
• Heterogenous cultures and languages

Evelyn Kigozi Kahiigi
Exploring the e-learning state of art

Evelyn begins by describing an overview about the fundamentals of e-Learning

Main challenges of e-Learning

• Lack of technical skills
• lack of time management skills
• Credibility of e-learning
• Integration of emerging tech
• Digital Divide
• lack of policies and strategies
• Increasing dropout rate

To explain the why of failures (and successes in e-learning for development), Hypothesis: Applying social presence factors of communication, interactivity and feedback can create successful e-learning experiences

My reflections

• Connectivism, as a new approach beyond Behaviourism, Cognitivism and Constructivism, and really related with the hypothesis of the project, as Connectivism is really about feedback, interaction, co-participation, etc. Same with e-Learning/Education 2.0
• Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age
• Connectivism.ca
• Downes, S. (2006). Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge

Annika Andersson
The (jigsaw-) puzzle of e-learning: case study Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

Thesis theme: Inhibiting and facilitating factors for e-learning in developing countries

• which are the nhibiting and facilitating factors for e-learning in developing countries
• which of these factors are of specific importance to developing countries
• Contribution: a conceptual framework on factors that contributes to enrollment and completion of e-learning courses in developing countries: student, teacher, course, technology, support, institution, society.

But, besides the difference in degree of factors, is there a difference in concept between developed and developing countries? Maybe not…

Nevertheless, in academic literature, when analyzing this factors the focus in developed countries is in the individual (the student) while when analyzing developing countries the focus is usually in culture. Isn’t this a prejudice?

Arguing for a holistic approach but still focusing on a few factors.
Categorizing and looking for differences between “developed” and “developing” countries… Extremely unhappy with this terminology.

More Info

• Annika Andersson: What is so special about e-learning in developing countries?

In the following articles I’ll be writing about the Second Annual ICT4D Postgraduate Symposium organized by IPID, the International Network for Post Graduate Students in the area of ICT4D, and supported by SPIDER (The Swedish Program for ICT in Developing Regions). Sincerest thanks to all those that have made possible this second edition, especially Gudrun Wikander, Annika Andersson and Marcus Duveskog

Keynote speech: Tim Unwin
ICT4D: a dialectic exploration

We might do quite well in practice, but… what about an ICT4D theory?

• Dialectics: seeking a synthesis, a/the resolution of the thesis and antithesis
• From a European intellectual apparatus (from Socrates through Hegel to Marx) to… an alternative African and Asian modes of thought? Might the solution to some problems be elusive unless you changed the way you look at the problem?
• What are the conditions under which ICTs may indeed be of value for “development”? And, in this train of though, what would be the role of technologies?

What is development? The dominant hegemonic model:

• Focused on the MDGs

Absolute poverty to be eliminate by economic growth
Providing the appropriate liberal democratic governance structures are in place

An alternative model?

• Focused on relative poverty
• Placing emphasis on social culture
• enabling people to fulfill their own voices — empowerment?

Thesis vs. Antithesis

• Exogenous or endogenous?
• Top down supply driven or bottom up demand led?
• Software and Knowledges: proprietary or open source
• Partnerships or project delivery?

Technology as exogenous: a thesis

• Much of literature addresses ICTs as exogenous: the Knowledge Society
• An “externally” introduced “innovation” that can bring significant benefits
• ICTs delivering “development” solutions in health, education, rural development…
• ICTs as technologies developed primarily in the major global economies, and made available to deliver on development (defined as MDGs growth…)

Exogenous Technologies: an antithesis

• ICTs are endogenous to “developed” capitalist economies
• Central to speeding circulation of capital, reducing labor costs, increasing market
• Need to focus on endogenous I&C technologies in other parts of the world

A top-down supply-led thesis: new ICTs developed in dominant economies and rolled out to developing world. Arrogance of economic and political power. Solutions that should “always” work, as norms; companies wanting to expand markets; countless self-proclaimed “successful” initiatives.

We should begin with needs, design needs based solutions.

Knowledge as private profit: proprietary thesis.

• Knowledge and education enable benefits
• People should therefore be willing to pay
• People should profit from their endeavours: intellectual property rights and copyright
• What is worth has a price
• Focus on the individual

Knowledge as global common good: an antithesis.

• Focus on the community
• Knowledge for the betterment of human society; must be shared
• Communal development

Thesis: Partnerships as the solution

• Complexity of problems requires new skills
• Engage all relevant stakeholders
• Reduce duplication and wheel reinvention
• Gain from synergies
• Combining demand and supply approaches

Where’s the balance?

Comments/Debate

Khalid Rabayah makes an interesting comment I fully share: the focus in ICT4D strategies is usually in Technologies (in Infrastructures) and neither in Information nor in Communication. There’s an urgent need to shift to content — local content — and design Information Strategies. While agreeing, Tim Unwin’s counterargument is based on the benefits of globalization: sharing what’s out there, not reinventing the wheel, being able to communicate across the World, etc.

Student research seminar: Ismael Peña-López

The goal of this research is to add reflection and knowledge to the belief that there is an important lack of tools to measure the development of the Information Society, specially addressed to policy makers aiming to foster digital development. We believe there is still an unexplored point of view in measuring the Information Society which goes from inside-out instead of outside-in. In other words, the main indices and/or reports focus either in technology penetration or in the general snapshot of the Information Society “as is”. There is, notwithstanding, a third approach that would deal with working only with digital-related indicators and indices, thus including some aspects not taken into account by the technology penetration approach (i.e. informational literacy), and putting aside some “real economy” or “analogue society” indicators not strictly related to the digital paradigm. Relationships between subindices would also provide interesting insight for policy makers on which to ground the design of their initiatives.

Michael Best comments that it’ll be interesting to test too the impact of the indices that measure the information society on policy makers and the policies they make up to foster the information society. I guess that maybe the way to do this would be to compare the series of an e-readiness indicator and the series of regulations issued during the same period of time in a country.

More info

• Working bibliography
• Slides for the Presentation

Student research seminar: Benjamin Addom

This is a proposal for a theory-driven Evaluation Research using Fourth Generation Evaluation Framework (FGE). The history of agricultural development reveals that agricultural technologies over the years have been bought, borrowed, or stolen and therefore should not necessarily be domestic. The model of diffusion of innovation especially has been applied in the transfer of these technologies to developing countries. TEEAL and AGORA are two initiatives that are transferring scientific knowledge from the North to the South. The proposed research tries to explore or assess or evaluate the merit of the initiative to the primary users (researchers, students and policy makers) and its worth to the secondary users (farmers) in Ghana. The concept of global and local knowledge, theory of absorptive capacity of “community”, community ties theory, and the technique of social network analysis are being proposed.

Main aspects

• Inefficient mechanisms for informatino/knowledge “transfer” (exchange)
• Inadequate investment in research internally
• Use of outdated technologies

Arnold and Bell (2001) argue that the exponential growth of ICTs has transformed the ability to take advantage of knowledge developed in other places of for other purposes.
WSIS Action Plan, Line C-7, item 21 on e-Agriculture.
Faculty and researchers only had access to print copies of serials that were years, if not decades, out of date (Wallace & Jan Olsen, 1980).
Research background: Cornell University TEEAL Project.
Research background: FAO AGORA Project

The study will evaluate

• Link between TEEL/AGORA and researchers/students
• Link between researchers/students and the farmers
• What content do Researchers/Students “transfer”
• How does the social structure of the communities facilitate or retard use of the knowledge?
• With what effects?

Theoretical Framework

• Concept for knowledge sharing – GDN or WB, Szulanski (2003)
• Absorptive Capacity of Communities – Cohen and Levinthal 1990 Xahra and George (2002)
• Theory of Community Ties – Warren (1978)
• Social Network Theory – Perkins et al. (2002)

My reflections

• I guess I’d add some experiences from the Open Access world, specially when dealing about the diffusion of knowledge in open environments and how to measure it

More info

• FGE:
• TEEAL
• AGORA