ICTlogy

The article at Goiaba Knowledge Bridge mainly deals with language matters when working internationally. Not that it is very original, but yet it arises some aspects you’d easily overlook.

Just three contributions (one is repeated ;)

• To the problem of communication: well, this is not new and we’d surely must communicate in some lingua franca, i.e. English, Spanish, etc. I know the problem is still there. Then: literacy in this language is a must, not for development, but for living (if I’m allowed to exagerate a bit ;)
• To the problem of translating and so: online volunteers is quite an option
• To the problem of social/tacit knowledge spread all over the world: online volunteers again, stuck to the community and with their knowledge at a click’s reach. If correctly designed, the online volunteers community will not have language matters
• To the problem of local content: well, the internet and, especially, intranets, wikis and blogs just ease this creation of local content. Digital literacy is, then, also a must. And technologies focused to content (and not technologies for technology) are the tool.

In an article entitled ¿Es aplicable el modelo de producción del software libre a contenidos educativos? (Is the free software model of production applicable to free educational content?), Sergio Monge Benito compares how free software is developed and tries to see if the educational community could reproduce its model to produce free educational content.

The text is very interesting. After a first short introduction to F/OSS he says that software and content are quite similar. They both are packeted knowledge and so they can be shared, modified, easily transferred, etc. Another point is their modularity. In both cases, software or content can be cut into little pieces (the shortest bunch of lines of code or the tiniest learning object) so its difficult not to be able to adapt a part of the whole to one’s own purposes.

The problem, of course, is not the similarities but differences. These differences are grouped in the following lines:

The community

There is a community of free software but there is not a community of free content teachers, at any level but, specially, at the secondary school level – of course he speaks of an articulated, legitimized, running, actual community, collaborative network the way we understand the hacker community.

Technological tools

This community of teachers or content producers does not master the technological tools to be used in a collaborative ICT enhanced environment.

Even if they did, they surely do not master either everything concerning the production of materials to be used in virtual environments or, at least, to be filed in virtual repositories. The author does not speak of anything concrete but I guess he’s right thinking that not everyone knows about HTML, DHTML, Flash, Breezer, RSS, PDF, PowerPoint, etc. – I know it sounds weird but try and run a poll in your nearest environment.

Standards

Simple. While the F/OSS community is standard guided, content community is not. Yes, there’s some attempts with IMS, Scorm, etc. but this is only a part of the problem – the technologycal one – and it is far from being solved.

Concerning to content itself – and this is my opinion – this community of teachers has a lot to learn from people usually working in wikis (is it the same community? maybe)

University Volunteers

Mmm, dark point here. The author says most of the biggest leaps in F/OSS came from the University, from university volunteers (“the F/OSS community benefits from availability of time and energy from university students all over the world”). Well, this might be true, but I think is a little bit biased.

The author concludes that teachers are usually overwhelmed by their everyday work and thus the University – university volunteers – should collude with them in their effort to create these learning objects and asks the public administration and the private sector for help.

Critical mass

A minimum number of people is required to kick off a F/OSS project. Then, others join it and the project goes on.

This is difficult to happen in the educational world as there is an “individualist tradition” in the teaching community.

The reference:

Sergio Monge Benito: ¿Es aplicable el modelo de producción del software libre a contenidos educativos? (110 Kb, in Spanish)

Well, not a very optimistic point of view, though I share it 90%.
At least, we seem to know our weak points :)

[via Sierto]

Just a list of pros I sometimes am asked for and always have to think back.
You can also find some cons here: Reasons not to set up an intranet

• Manage your communications amongst NGO members in a rational way
• Keep in touch with people in your own headquarters, people in other organization’s offices and people in overseas destinations… within the same working framework
• Manage knowledge: keep the organization information, content, data, services and applications, and people who know how under the same environment
• Upload/download working documents and access them from wherever you are: headquarters, work, home, etc.
• Privacy: some information just don’t need being published in the Internet at everybody’s reach… but should be at a browser’s reach for members
• Help people feel they belong to the organization… even if they’re the last volunteer who signed in
• Build places where people can talk collectively in an informal way… and in a formal one too
• Know who’s who in the organization just one click away… and e-mail them or invite them to chat in the intranet’s instant messaging application
• Set up online volunteering programs… in a well-organized way
• Set up e-learning programs (some intranets can work as virtual learning environments too)

OpensourceCMS is a

site […] created to give you the opportunity to “try out” some of the best open source and free php/mysql based software systems in the world. You can log in as the administrator to any site [t]here, thus allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs.

Each system is deleted and reinstalled every two hours. This allows you to be the administrator of any system here without fear of messing anything up.

These systems include Portals, Blogs, e-Commerce, Groupware, Forums, e-Learning and others. In the e-Learning section there’s an installation for Moodle, Claroline and Segue.

I think the most important added value of the site, other than gathering a lot of sowftare existing around, is having it installed and giving you a try in what we’d call a “production environtment” or a “test environment” or a “demo environment”… call it whatever you want (you can call it Al ;)

Great idea.

[thank you César]

I think of the potential online volunteer as the eternal excluded from cooperation for development, as a kind of “market” yet to be discovered.

When I say “eternal excluded” I dont’ mean he or she never took part in any project or organization in the field of cooperation for development, he surely did. What I mean is that he surely had to abandon because of other (most important) social commitments.

Lets take three main factors: age, time and space.

Age factor

There’re four main age groups in volunteering:

0 to 16: too young to have a real engagement with anything. Can be a volunteer, but yet too immature to carry the weight of real responsibilities

16 to 25: quite an adult. Can carry on with volunteering responsibilities and, most important: (usually) has plenty of time to “waste” with others, as he is normally an student or apprentice and has not a lot of other responsibilities

25-65: married or with formal engagement; sons or family duties; work, work and more work. Not a lot of time to spend with others, specially time to “give away”. Would volunteer, but how and when? What a pity: he’s got training and he’s got experience. He’s got knowledge but a difficult way to share it with others. The potential online volunteer?

65-over: he’s got plenty of time and a lot of experience. He’s surely the new cluster of (“real”) volunteering and, why not, virtual volunteering. But he’d maybe prefer personal contact. Besides, it’s possible his experience is a little bit out of date if he did not keep a long life learning/training in his expertise field.

It seems to me that groups 2 and 4 make up the normal “real” volunteers while the third group is the natural virtual volunteer.

Time factor

Having familiar responsibilities shortens our disposal of time.
Having professional responsibilities shortens our disposal of time.
Our preferred NGO is open when at work.
When home, no time to volunteer because it’s time to be with his or her children, couple, do some housework, etc.
And when he or she, at last, can spare some time to volunteer, where to? Whom with?

Space factor

Same happens with the question “where to volunteer” in the preceding example.

But there are other reasons besides family and work not to be able to go where you can volunteer: crossing the ocean or the continent is, besides a matter of time, a matter of money. And sometimes it is even a matter of infrastructures: no road, no trip.

Adding up:

• The online volunteer is a knowledge centred volunteer
• The online volunteer is a volunteer with independence of time
• The online volunteer is a volunteer with independence of space

[This is part of what I said at the First International Congress about E-Learning and social inclusion. I’ll try and gather all up and put it in the form of an article. In the meanwhile, I’ll publish it as a normal post by little pieces :P ]

Talking this morning with Dr. Álvaro Morales, Administrative Director of the Fundación Norte-Sur, we were dealing with the concept of technology transfer. I think that, in general, but even more important in terms of cooperation for development, there’s no use talking about technology transfer but knowledge transfer. And the whole thing is about my eternal speech of content and services driven infrastructures and not infrastructures as a good for themselves.

When providing an intranet or an online learning environment, as we do, the point is not whether we give some platform or some web applications for free but:

• the knowledge enclosed within
• the training or knowledge transfer to appropriate the tools and optimize their use on your own

Thus, this is the reason why, when giving an intranet away, we previously have assessment sessions on what the intranet would mean to the inner organization of the NGO, the hierarchy architecture changes, the information and communication skills and requirements, the pros and cons of web interaction, etc, etc, etc.

And this is also the reason why, when planning online courses (with or without online volunteers), we usually plan previous training for e-trainers sessions so we can “brainwash” traditional teachers and show them what e-learning is all about.

Dr. Morales and I agreed that bridging the digital divide starts much before any technology transfer is even planned, and that it should begin with a serious knowledge transfer on what you are, what you need and, in the end, how could ICT based content and services help you out.