ICTlogy

Notes from 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.

How do we go forward in the field of ICT4D R+D+i?

Florencio Ceballos, telecentre.org

• ICT4D are a clear niche that can grow outside the circuit of development issues
• Capacity building happens locally, and this means building confidence, trust.
• Institutional independence has to be promoted to enable real capacity building.
• Focus on networking: promoting open networks for capacity exchange

It’s not as much as how you design agendas, but how you make them evolve, how to shift the paradigm. And this shift of paradigm is towards openness.

Caroline Figueres, International Institute for Communication and Development

There is a need for a research to ground some “evidences”, and showcase successes in the field of ICT4D under the rigour of scientific analysis.

People in the South should be put in the agenda of ICT4D research, as most of the output is targetted to developing countries.

Co-creation (e.g. in the sense of Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics) is a very powerful concept. Capacity building can be enabled this way by means of knowledge workers co-creating together.

Kentaro Toyama, Microsoft Research India (MSR India)

How to do formal research in ICT4D? Several steps:

1. Immersion. Ethnography
2. Design, involving people, where technology is just one component and a cost-effective one
3. Evaluation, including finding statistical significance on the impact of a specific project or action

It’s a good idea to break the link between funding and the research agenda. The researcher should be able to pursue their own interests and not be tied (or upset) to the need for funding.

Experience in research might be as important as (or even more) than experience in development. Accuracy of the scientific process is crucial.

Andrés Martínez, EHAS Foundation.

Evidence has to be demonstrated to convince policy-makers and funding institutions that some actions are to be taken and deserve being supported (politically or economically).

• Research is needed in the impact of ICTs in welfare, health, education
• But also, research is needed on how to provide appropriate and cost-effective infrastructures, as most communities just do not have access to either hardware or connectivity
• Sometimes the context is unknown. Thus, research should focus not only on the impact of a specific project, but on what the context (sociocultural, health, education, economic) is.
• Research on services.
• How to measure empowerment and mainstreaming of technologies in specific communities and sectors (e.g. the Health sector)

The only way to promote research in the field of Development and ICT4D is to foster publication of research results in indexed publications. Despite the interest of the topic, if the work is “well done”, then it can be published. It is highly relevant to find the problem you want to deal with your research, more important than finding “the” solution.

And diffussion is absolutely worth doing it. On the one hand, results of the projects and the research undertaken. On the other hand, not only information about the results, but knowledge transfer through assistance, direct training, formal education, especially to achieve multiplier effects.

Merryl Ford, Emerging Innovations Group of the Meraka Institute of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

There’s sometimes resilience to empowerment. Capacity building is not only about specific (digital) skills, but also about changing mindsets.

• Slogan on disabilities in SouthAfrica: Nothing about us, without us. We need to make sure that we don’t do things “for” people but “with” people. Africa should take ownership of its development agenda.
• Interventions should be simple
• The cellphone is the PC of Africa
• Sustainability, replication, massification. A pilot needs to be scaled at any stage.

Q & A

Q: research on impact… is a real need or an imposed “need” of the inner structure of development cooperation, projects, agencies and so? Ceballos: The need to measure impact is real. Many policies are put into practice based on intuition, on vision. So we do need to evaluate these policies to support or reject such intuitions. Martínez: short-run projects are difficult to analyze accurately, as there’s no time to do it properly. A solution would be that everyone involved in the projects collected data and helped to analyze it.

Q: How do we cope about the cost of maintenance of cellphones in rural areas? A: There are alternatives (e.g. via radio) that do not charge per call… but the maintenance of the whole network does have a cost. Certainly, it’s not a matter of absolute costs, but a matter of cost-benefit analysis, seeing whether the project is worth running it and find out how to support the overall costs.

Q: How do we put social research together with tecnology research in development related research? A: The problems that research has to face have to be far ahead enough. And they require plenty of time. In this sense, everyone involved in ICT4D should be in a same conversation, to gather all sensibilities and be able to look far in the horizon.

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 ICT for Human Development
John Dryden, Ex-Deputy Director Science, Technology and Industry. OECD

Main learnings from the OECD in the field of ICT4D:

OECD’s findings on the benefits of ICTs do not carry over easily to developiong countries.

• Global initiatives in “ICT4D” have been long on discussion and short on action
• ICT mainstreaming is indispensible to achieveing MDGs
• ICT mainstreaming is implicit rather than explicit in the push for “aid effectiveness”
• The conjuncture is very poor so current prospects do not appear good but there are a few developments that create opportunities both for development co-operation and for ICTs to enhance its quality and effectiveness

ICT in Development Cooperation institutions vs. ICT4D

ICTs in development cooperation

• ICT aids management and delivery of development assistance
• ICT “mainstreamed” as part of development assistance: ICTs integrated on what institutions “deliver”

ICT4D

• All of the above, plus ICT productgion and use to achieve economic growth, development and social welfare.

The Seoul Declaration, 2008

• Facilitate the convergence of digital networks, devices and services
• Foster creativity in development, use and application of the Internet
• Strengthen confidence and security
• Ensure the Internet Economy is truly global

For developing countries, this means

• more access to Internet and related ICTs
• competition
• use by all communities: local content and language, inclusion
• energy efficiency

Against the Solow Paradox: there is now evidence on the economic impacts of ICTs:

• macro-economic evidence on the role of ICT investment in capital deepening
• sectoral analysis showing the contribution of (a) ICT-producing sectors and (b) ICT-using sectors to productivity growth
• detailed firm-level analysis demonstrating the wide-ranging impacts of ICTs in productivity

Problems to implant ICTs in developing countries:

• Barriers of entry and different people needs
• The relationship between ICT investments and economic growth in OECD countries is complex and uncertain,highly dependent on complementary factors, many of which less apparent in developing countries: power supply, maintenance, skills and literacy, the degree to which society is networked, the extent to which its economy is reliant on services, etc.

The Genoa Plan of Action

• development of national e-strategies
• improve connectivity, increase access, lower costs
• enhance human capacity development, knowledge creation and sharing
• Foster enterprise, jobs and entrepreneurship

Mainstreaming ICTs

UN ICT Task Force Mainstreaming ICTs for the achievement of the MDGs: ICTs as an “enabler” of development, not a production sector

ICTs should be able to enable donnor coordination: need analysis, non-duplication of efforts and projects, etc.

Debate

Caroline Figueres: is effectiveness only top-down? aren’t we seeing bottom-up effectiveness? A: Yes, of course.

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.

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

Curriki
Linda Roberts, Curriki

The way we make progress, is doing things: the power of taking risks, and not being satisfied with small successes.

A change of paradigm: the Participation Age. This is why global connectivity, global access, the global network come so important.

The Mission: eliminate the Education Divide. Content is abundant, but it’s embedded into expensive devices (i.e. textbooks). How to make it available?

The Internet is a great World equalizer and the Open Source community has proven to be the hallmark of the “Participation Age”.

We’re shifting from a linear knowledge space (the classroom, the library) towards a random knowledge space (the Internet). Clayton M. ChristensenDisrupting Class: how to benefit from the innovation that this disruption represents.

Open Education

How open is open? can you build courses and curricula collaboratively? Can you trust the community?

If the materials are as open as open education (should be), then even an improvement in the economic model of delivering education also can come to existence, shifting 1/3 of the budget from learning materials towards teaching and teachers and guidance, which is what is scarce: time.

Strategy

Build a portal, a community of educators, a repository of open educational resources, and a global community.

Find, contribute, connect, and at a global level, with materials and whole courses in several languages.

Personalization is also made possible by creating personal collections of resources.

Q & A

Paul West: Is Curriki going to be around in, say, 3 years? Is anybody going to use it? A: Hope yes, because the world is going to be global in essence.

Susan Metros: How to take the content out of these collections, rebuild it and make it available worldwide? Could it be a business strategy that made the project sustainable? A: The problem (or positive thing) is that the people that create the materials they do it for their own reasons and a business plan is not in their equations. So, how to get support from the community without bothering them in things they’re not interested in? Providing evidence should suffice to raise funds, but maybe alternate models had to be approached. The matter is that, even in the open community, a business plan (not for profit, but a business plan anyway) has to be kept in mind.

Tim Unwin: what about the commoditization of Education, where you have to pay as an investment in yourself? How does this philosophy cope with the open paradigm? A: We should be able to make come the pieces together, and every time we do something we should be able to both generate value and show we do. It’s not enough to know you’re making an impact, but it has to be grounded on evidence. And the community can play an important role in this, as diffusers, as prescriptors. And, indeed, evidence needs to be collected and analysed: research should back all decisions, developments, etc.

Mara Hancock: How do people discover things like Curriki? How to promote not findability but discoverybility? A: To intentionally bring in relevant and active people that already are players in their own field. Also, know the language the community is already using, and know what the community is looking for.

Susan Metros: How can things made been easy? I want everything one click away.

Tim Unwin: I don’t want anything, I want what’s best. Amazon’s suggestion system is just this.

Ismael Peña-López: Leveraging the power of an existing community should boost findability, ease of use, discoverybility, filtering…

Julià Minguillón: the community can also help to build a reputation system that can nurture a (future) semantic web.

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

Wikiversity
Teemu Leinonen, Media Lab – University of Art and Design Helsinki

Any true understanding is dialogic in nature (Bakhtin).

UNESCO’s Young Digital Creators: UNESCO Young Digital Creators (YDC) Educator’s Kit.

Evolution of learning technologies

Is it learning with technology or learning from technology?

The best way to predict the future is to invent it, Alan Kay, 1971.

An evolution of instructional technology:

• The media center as a separate artifact, segregated from the gallery, meeting room and seminar room.
• The web becomes more and more the desktop, the meeting and collaborating place.
• Pervasiveness of mobile phones brings on the possibility of mobile learning, that has to cohabit with e-learning as we knew it.
• Affordability of multimedia devices that can record, create or edit sound, audio, etc. enrich e-learning experiences with rich media created by the user. This leads us to projects as the mobile audio encyclopaedia.
• Then to augmented reality with mobile phones like Shedlight.

Wikiversity

Course: Composing free and open online educational resources: a course planned (and paid by) Finnish students, but followed by +60 more people around the world. And now it can be (and it actually is) replicated elsewhere, at any time.

The syllabus, the assignments… everything took place on the Wikiversity page of the course.

Wiki platforms allow the collaborative creation of very simple — though effective — learning objects.

Three metaphors of learning

• Knowledge acquisition: you read a book, you learn. But access to courseware is not an issue when it is abundant. Learning is an individual cognitive process. Memorizing.
• Participation: learning is a socio-cultural process. Acting.
• Knowledge creation: learning is a socio-cultural process with an intention to produce artefacts. Cultivating.

In Wikipedia all three metaphors take place. But where’s the place for educators? What and how are they doing?

Grundtvig’s Folkenhøjskole: the university is more than four walls, it is a social dialogue. Freire: non-institutional education. Ollman: the University as an institution that is educating and nurturing acting people, but that has built a chasm between it and the society. Hakkarainen: Progressive Inquiry [reminds me of Participatory Action Research].

Q & A

Paul West: how to maintain, validate wikis? Does it leave room for the teacher? How digitally literate do they have to be? A: Le Mill makes it easier for the teacher to create content.

Q: is it really possible to have cultural diversity in wikis/wikipedias? A: Actually, the different structures themselves of the several wikipedias do demonstrate that even at the core, cultural differences shape the container itself, not only the content.

Tim Unwin: Are artefacts content? are we focussing too much on artefacts rather than content? A: Of course the artefact is but a tool. But the process of creating, even creating the artefact, does provide too some valuable knowledge, as it forces reflecting about the process itself.

Susan Metros: How can teachers assess the materials that students are creating, specially in collaborative ways? A: It is important to keep groups really small so that tracking can be easily done.

Julià Minguillón: the pervasiveness of English as lingua franca, won’t crowd out other smaller languages? Should this small languages speakers be encouraged to create content? A: ICTs enable small languages to survive, but translating content in other languages is not the strategy: it has to be genuine created content.

Sugata Mitra: what is learning? when students “play” with computers, is that learning? A: It might be learning, but after the n repetition, is just repetition. Besides, learning and education might not be the same thing,

Ismael Peña-López: If the whole process is available, and everyone can join, how can we assess the learning of the student? how can we help them find whether they learned or not? A: Some of them might not be interested in a “formal” assessment, but just find the process was interesting. We could be talking about evaluation and feedback instead of assessment. Tim Unwin: peer assessment is a very effective — and even efficient — assessment method.

Linda Roberts: What’s next? A: Free Open Content should gain power. And a community will gather around the creation, sharing and use of these materials, enhanced by collaborative tools to engage one with each other.

Brian Lamb: How to evaluate collaborative work? A: The evaluation should also be like a dynamic dialogue. Of course, it requires time (and money).

Enric Senabre: How to create a local Wikiversity? A: Content has to be created, prove that “people will come”, and then the Foundation will create the local Wikiversity site.

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

Opening
Mariana Patru, UNESCO

The importance of Education in all stages of development.

The increasing changes that the Information Society and Globalization are bringing impact all aspects of life. Life long learning is one of the paradigmatic effects of the recent changes the World’s been in.

Beyond digital literacy, and digital exclusion because of lack of physical access, there’s a huge knowledge divide that needs to be fought: access to useful, culturally relevant knowledge.

ICT4D as a tool to fight the digital divide
Tim Unwin, Royal Holloway University of London and World Economic Forum’s Partnerships for Education programme with UNESCO.

Fight the digital divide or build on individual strengths? Begin with information and communication needs, being the fundamental part “for Development”.

Partnerships

ICT4D partnerships have been very successful: they have been fostered per se, but also the private sector has had a leading role in ICT4D, in contrast with a lack of understanding among donor agencies. On the other hand, partnerships have worked well because ICT4D is still a complex an unknown area where collaboration is strongly needed.

But partnerships have also failed: partnerships with no clear goals or even meaning; focus on public-private partnerships, forgetting other kinds of organization; emphasis on the supply side; insufficient attention paid to partnership processes.

Sustainability is not something that can be thought of once the project is started — or near its “completion” — but should be included in the plan from the sheer beginning. Same with scale, trying to avoid pilot-project fever that think short run and narrow scope.

e-Learning for development?

The pros are many and quite well known. What are the cons?

• Costs of ICT are high, and infrastructures scarce.
• Tutorial support is required and more important than just content — though important too and needs to be localized indeed.
• The focus should not be put in ICT training, or “office” software, but in Education. Education vs. training.

Main reasons of failure in ICT-led education projects in Africa

• Understand context of delivery
• Appreciate African interests
• Overcome infrastructure issues
• Provide relevant content
• Top down
• Suypply driven
• Photo-opportunity “development”

Constructivism and 21st century skills

Learners involved, democratic environment, student centred learning, etc.

Critiques to constructivism:

• learning might be behaviourally active, but is not necessarily cognitively active.
• may not be delivered in teaching practices. Teaching practice mayh not deliver the theoretical realities
• Ignores the reality of the African classroom
• Emphasis on replicating “truths”
• Modular thinking
• Going for the easy option, e.g. go to the Wikipedia
• Tendency towards plagiarism
• Inability to think critically
• Lowest common denominator attitude
• Pandering to student “demand”

Most of ICT in education focusses on content and collaborative networking, but not in problem solving or critical thinking.

What kind of education for what kind of development?

Private sector and education. Engaged in setting a global agenda, and with strong interest in the knowledge economy.

Hegemonic model — economic growth and liberal democracy — need for focus on relative poverty — inequalities, access.

Emphasis on training for a knowledge economy while forgetting about critical ability and reflection.

Education is not a driver for economic growth. Key skills to be human, fighting the digital tyranny that constrains us rather than liberate us. Some ICTs (e.g. e-mail) do not let time enough to think creatively and take action.

Take control of technologies — and take control of those who control the technologies — to take control of our learning process. Re-define the role of the teacher and re-assert shared and communal educational agendas, while assuring equitable access.

Questions or opportunities for the future

• Post-constructivism and the role of the teacher?
• Processes of learning communities?
• Enabling innovative problem solving and critical thinking?
• How to provide appropriate infrastructure?
• The tyranny of digital environments?

Q & A

Linda Roberts: is there any good practice in ICT4D and Education? A: Sadly enough, there are very few of them, e.g. some of them mobile-phone centred that enable the student to access some content without displacing the teacher.

Eduardo Toulouse: is it the clue teachers and the quality of teachers? what happens when infrastructure is a barrier for even the teachers? A: Yes, the clue is teacher quality. And to achieve this teachers have to be able to live on their own work. And, in some environments, thinking that they are going to engage in the production of materials and share them (at the connectivity cost) for nothing is ludicrous.

[…] from University of South Africa: is there any option left but believe in ICTs, despite all the drawbacks, “buts”, failures and so? A: Top-down approaches do not work, so this “hope” in ICTs has to be indeed grassroots founded.

Ismael Peña-López: what if we do not have teachers? can ICTs help to bring them on our community? can open educational resources help attract teachers? can OER help to create teachers out of the blue? A: OER can leverage already existing social structures to create learning communities. Peer learning, by leveraging peers and turning them into teachers can be a thrilling option. Communal education is the one to be put under the spotlight, and even a local facilitator can even be a bridge between a remote teacher and the community if the tools and the human network are well thread one with the other.

Q: What’s after post-constructivism? What about critical pedagogy? A: Isn’t this a Western approach as well? Even if Paolo Freire is brazilian, his ideas are well rooted in the West.

Paul West: ICTs can help the teacher to lighten his burden by making him more efficient, e.g. when correcting and marking exams. A: Agree. The debate is in whether doing old things in a new way vs. or new things the old way.

Sugata Mitra: is there a possibility for real change? for a shift of paradigm? A: We have to find the gaps and expand them.

Ismael Peña-López: is there a room for co-operation that avoids cultural imperialism, fosters endogenous development, relies on content while not forgetting the teacher, etc.? A: The critique is not in collaboration or in technology, but on pre-established mindsets, one-size-fits-all or magic solutions, etc. Of course collaboration can take place, but to define a solution, not just implement the solution.

Linda Roberts: how to engage the youngest? A: Mass media might be a first approach to get to them easily.

Teemu Leinonen: what’s the role of languages related to education, ICTs and development? A: There are several initiatives where ICTs are being used to support languages that are dying out. On the other hand, localization is not (just) translation into the local language.