ICTlogy

Going back to e-volunteers tasks, I sometimes think that we tend to believe that e-volunteers are some kind of second-best volunteers: if you can’t get a “real” one, get yourself a virtual one: this is completely wrong.

Here at the Campus for Peace we’re planning to set up three virtual courses about Macromedia multimedia design applications: Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks. These courses will be given for free to the NGO working with us.

This will be done the following way:

• An e-volunteer, with a pedagogical profile, will coordinate the whole thing, including course programme, e-teachers, and content
• Three more e-volunteers, experts in the applications to be taught and with some expertise and/or training in e-learning, will teach each one of the courses
• Content and learning materials will be supplied for free by the University
• e-Learning platform and management will also be supplied for free by the University
• It is possible that we add two or three people as tutors or sort of technical backoffice supporting e-students in their way through the virtual campus, not a complex tool but neither that simple

The courses will be, a priori, followed by 60 to 100 people all around Spain and/or Latin America… at zero cost (in fact, near zero cost: personnel costs are paid by the University cooperation for development programme and e-volunteers will “pay” their own costs ;)

Thus: still think e-volunteers are a second best? Imagine how would you do this and where in Earth will you raise the required funding from.

[via info-commons.org]

“Volunteers from all over the world are helping organizations that serve communities in developing countries — but without leaving their own communities. These online volunteers translate documents, write articles, research data, build web sites, mentor young people, design logos, and engage in many other projects to benefit organizations serving people in the developing world.”

And I would add all the issues related to e-Learning

• Pedagogical design
• Pedagogical coordination
• Content authorship
• Tutorship
• Teaching
• Academic management
• Etc.

and everything related to technical backofficing.

All in all, e-volunteering will always, in my opinion, be related to knowledge management and knowledge-related tasks.

In fact this is just to bring some colour to this dull blog of mine, part II ;)
(I thought some snapshots would be welcome in this full-of-text page)

These

are some of the e-volunteers working at cooperation for development projects here at the Campus for Peace. We had a dinner with the Rector of the University last January.

There are

• pedagogues
• ICT experts
• ICT teachers
• training for e-trainers teachers
• virtual communities dinamizers
• etc

I’m also there: go find me! :)

This is the report on the Seminar: “Social Exclusion and information technologies. Challenges and opportunities”.

My presentation was entitled “Acci

Today I added NetAid to my links selection. I surely might have it done before.

Instead of pointing to their home page, I pointed directly the online volunteering page.

The main reason of this post is not making news of this simple update, but focus attention on how they explain what online volunteering is about and what does this mean to non-profits. I usually try and think of the pros and cons of e-volunteers: well, it’s nice to see there’s someone else on it :)

Sorry for digressing. Here come my highlighted pages of their site:

• Why Online Volunteering?
• Hosting Online Volunteers
• Are You Ready to Host Online Volunteers?

Take a look at John Daly‘s article Volunteers, Information and Communication Technologies, and Development on Development Gateway. It’s right.

One useful thing and a remark.

The useful thing is, in fact, two useful sites appearing there and recently included in my links list:

• Association for Progressive Communications, with a good capacity building selection of on-line materials
• Itrain Online, with good resources on Internet knowledge.

The remark is: ICT volunteering or e-volunteering?
Ok, I know it’s not the same. But I think e-volunteering should be taken in more consideration, as it is ICT volunteering but not in the contents point of view but in the instruments, as Literature deals with the things I say and the way I write them.

In fact, experience shows more and more than e-volunteers do teach other content and ICT by learning/teaching by doing, which is a plus. I agree with specific capacity building in the field of ICT, but let’s not forget that ICT training per se is not the issue.