ICTlogy

When this blog started, my intentions (as stated in About ICTlogy v1.0) were rather simple and were no more than sharing knowledge and experience in a very concrete area of ICT4D under a focus of content and services, mainly e-learning, online volunteering and knowledge management.

Then came the ICT4D Wiki and even after came the ICT4D learning objects repository, two other ways of sharing more knowledge that I gathered here and there – only the blog brought new knowledge to the whole thing.

Somewhere in time I decided to upload the articles – most of them untranslated – and communications – actually just a list, any of them yet uploaded – I made. Good or bad, that was new knowledge and thus I hoped to correct the unbalance I face towards human kind in general, and the blogosphere in particular ;)

This new phase I’m just starting will be reflected also here. I’m in the process of reorganizing the site as sort of a “personal portal” – is it an e-portfolio? a personal knowledge environment? who cares. Some changes are already visible in the header of this page you’re reading. Some I hope will be not that noticeable but deeper in content and concept.

To do this, under the general concept/domain of ICTlogy I’ve set up the following contents:

• ICT4D Blog, with news, links and reflections about ICT4D in general and, specially, about e-learning, e-volunteering or online volunteering, intranets and networking, knowledge management, the digital divide(s)…
• ICT4D Wiki, with all “static” data I gather around: people, institutions, resources…
• ICT4D Bibliography, a good bunch of bibliographic citations on ICT4D or closely related issues
• ICT4D learning objects repository, with courseware in the field of nonprofits and development
• This is all followed by an about section where all this is repeated.

On the personal side, an about me section

introduces the articles and communications sections, a contact form and a disclaimer that says that (usually) everything found here is under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Creative Commons License.BTW, since yesterday this blog is powered by WordPress 2.0 and things seem to be working cute. Kudos to the WP team! :)

For those few reading these lines besides me, I do hate make you lose your time with stuff not strictly related to this blog’s purpose – and your purpose in reading it.

BUT

I wonder if some news lately might not be of “public” interest, even if they’re just to contextualize this and everything. Excuse me too for the catchy title of this entry – read on to see where does it come from.

Since December 1st I left my responsibility leading the Cooperation for Development Programme at the Open University of Catalonia. This is something we had been cooking since… almost February 2005 together with one vice-president and the CEO of the University. The reason of it all was that the Cooperation for Development Programme was leading some projects that should be lead within the framework of an academic strategy, say, from a Faculty. These projects where the direction of two masters in development, three (and a half) knowledge transfer international projects, research and innovation (almost)projects, etc.

After some internal benchmarking we found that the Faculty of Law and Political Science was deeply interested in launching an area of knowledge centered in Public Policies for Development (including ICT4D). The who’s and how’s were debated since April 2005 until October 2005, when the University decided I would become professor at the Faculty of Law and Political Science leading this new “area”, which would include the academic projects that were formerly run by the University’s Cooperation for Development Programme. Just because of bureaucracies it all was officialized last December 1st.

This means that this blog will, presumably, turn into something more academic and be shifting from e-learning and online volunteering to issues more centered in policies and the digital divide. Previous subjects will not be – of course! – forgotten, but my (somehow) new professional interests seem to be joining my late personal interests and thus scope would be a little bit wider and a little bit deeper at the same time. I guess in the following posts that’ll get some clearer.

BTW, (at least) two other ICT4D people are trying to face new challenges this new year. Jayne Cravens and Andy Carvin are leaving their actual projects and are available – the former I know, the second I guess – to share their valuable knowledge. Have good luck in your quests!

For those who do visit this blog besides reading it by RSS subscription, you’d have seen there have been some changes in the horizontal navigation bar.

The main goal behind these changes is feeding ICTlogy with more content… even if it’s most by myself };)

Articles section has been spanned in, sofar, three sections:

• Articles itself, containing all the articles I’ve published, linking to (coming soon) abstracts and full text
• Communications, same as Articles but with presentations and speeches. You know, you sometimes say some things not deserving the effort of an article but cool enough to be shared :)
• ICT4D Wiki, a wiki I started as a personal notebook but… hell, why not sharing it.

Concerning the wiki, well, it is a complete mess, so don’t be cruel. I’ve been doubting about whether opening it to anyone or keeping it just for myself. At last, I opened it, but kept it locked so I’m the only one editing it. If you really think you can contribute, let me know. Notwithstanding, I’d really hate to “compete” with some really cool portals over there: that would be useless and far from reality.

WiICTlogy, the ICT4D Wiki should not be a place to put content or links, but reflection – you’ll see it is not this way now, but…

FAQ: Why not starting an ICT4D category in the Wikipedia?
ANSWER: Because I want to put there all the nonsenses I’d feel like to

(um, I feel this is getting less and less serious – time for holidays, I guess)

A thing I did not like about my 3 column template was that sidebars had text much too little. Increasing its size meant have (even) less text area for posts. Bad. Actually, I indeed wanted more text area for posts.

At last, I’ve migrated to a 2 column template. Links will soon appear under a new way: Bloglines Blogroll.

So far I have it linked on my sidebar. The original idea was to have it completely visible by using the include PHP function getting the info from http://www.bloglines.com/blogroll?html=1&id=ictlogist, but it does not seem to be working (page does not download). Any hints??? :P

I’ve always had on my About Me section my e-mail address so I could be contacted. And I had it there as an image to avoid spam. This was ugly and not accessible.

I’ve just fixed it adding a new Contact section where there’s a form that sends me an e-mail. Better looking and much more accessible.

And pretty easy to get it done by using the code I found here.

Today I added Subscribe to Comments plugin. I’m quite sure quite nobody’s subscribed to the comments rss 2.0 feed, but sometimes would like to know of the follow up messages of a comment made on one of my posts.

This is just what this plugin does.

I’ve also customized my own Error 404 page. Some weeks ago I converted all my static pages (abouts, articles, disclaimer) into WordPress Pages, which was a good idea, but had the evident problem concerning old bookmarks and broken links. Redirecting old pages to new ones did not look fair to me. Thus, I deleted them and, instead, customized the 404 so people can easily find again where they where going.