ICTlogy

Notes from the IPID ICT4D PG symposium 2008, Mekrijärvi Research Station, Joensuu University, Finland. 8 and 9 September, 2008.

Keynote speech
Tim Unwin: ICT4D – where next?

Tim Unwin

Thoughts on a framework for reflecting on ICT4D

The importance of the D in ICT4D. Predominance of development as “economic growth” and “poverty elimination”. Development definitions should be put in context.

What’s empowerment? Empowerment cannot be exogenous. Habermas’s critical theory as a guide: theory of knowledge constitutive interests. The role of the researcher as the psychoanalyst of the society, to make people (e.g. leaders) think and reflect.

Three main drivers of (new) research:

• From individual focused approaches to communal focused ones
• Avoid technologically driven research interests, and try to think about the most appropriate technology for each context… and this includes going back before the “new” technologies (e.g. electrical power)
• Integrated approach

Towards a critical ICT4D

A focus on needs, avoiding supply led and top down ICT4D projects. Supply and demand need be fitted and put together. And then rely on local institutions, already working, with large tradition, to leverage their legitimacy.

Sustainability has to be put into the equation from the start, not when failure occurs. The goal to be pursued is to find some sustainable project that matches both the interest of the rich (the investors, the international companies) and the poor.

Hence, some good research on needs should be done before engaging in research about the solutions.

Enhance sustainability by taking accessibility into account.

Reflections on research practices

The challenge of multidisciplinary approaches meeting in ICT4D.

Is an empowering agenda compatible with doing (traditional) research / publishing in peer reviewed papers / following “academic” rules?

I’ve been working lately analyzing 47 models that describe — explicitly or implicitly — the Information Society. Some of them speak of access as the existence of infrastructures; other cannot conceive any effective access without capacity (i.e. digital skills); some others do have quite a broad understanding of what access is and include many nondigital/analogue variables to explain their model.

On one hand, all models (or almost) have their reasons: depending on what are your objectives, you are measuring a different thing and/or think of different conceptions of the Information Society — and the digital divide.

On the other hand, the problem is that this is just like speaking in different tongues, a Babel Tower, where quite often people, institutions, projects, indicators and indices, etc. do tell different and incomparable things.

Almost two years ago I draw what I then considered a framework that could gather up all kind of approaches:

I’ve now drawn the following one:

Towards a comprehensive model of the Digital Economy
(click to enlarge)

Economist Jeffrey Sachs signed on August 21 2008 an article at — The digital war on poverty — in which, summing up, he explains that [t]Thanks to market forces, even the world’s poorest people are beginning to benefit from the flow of digital information. Not that I do not agree, in general, with what is explained in his article, but there are some clarifications I’d like to make.

Over all, the tone of the article is optimistic. I am also optimistic about the ends, but not on the actual estate of the situation nowadays. Besides, I’m becoming more sceptic about leapfrogging, which is one of the strong points made by Sachs. Don’t get me wrong: I do believe ICTs are a revolution and will provide renewed energies for those who will be capable of benefiting from them, but I think that ICTs will be catalysts and multipliers (perhaps in several orders of magnitude), but not substitutes.

I’ll try and comment some original statements made in the article one by one, and then gather up some conclusions.

The digital divide is beginning to close

Were this a question, the answer would simply be no. Put short, the inequality in the quantity of existing infrastructures is certainly narrowing. But when we look about quality, the digital divide is actually widening. I’ll be discussing this later, but here come some other articles of mine where I already debated about this issue (in chronological order):

• World Telecommunication/ICT Development Report 2006: digital divide narrowing?
• The Millennium Development Goals Report 2006: ICT and Digital Divide target
• The 2007 e-readiness rankings: comments and critiques

Extreme poverty is almost synonymous with extreme isolation […] [b]ut mobile phones […] will therefore prove to be the most transformative technology

I agree. Mobile technologies (cellphones, wireless, etc.) have a strong power and I also think that they will (they actually are) transforming the society at several levels. But from this sentence we understand — I’m sorry if it is me that got the author wrong — that poverty comes from isolation and, hence, as mobile devices will make isolation disappear, so will poverty.

I agree with Sachs that poverty usually means isolation — I’d say “exclusion” — but this is a consequence of other factors, a symptom, but not (or not always) a cause. So:

• Communication fosters development, but isolation not necessarily leads to (dire) poverty.
• Poverty has many factors, and many of them come from unequal distribution of wealth, unbalanced trade relationships, personal exploitation, etc. And they do happen in spheres of actual communication and not isolation (especially exploitation, by construction).

Mobile phone technology […] costs so little per unit of data transmission

Underdeveloped countries quite often are accompanied by lack of civil rights and concentration of power, which includes, usually, lack of competition in the telecommunications market. This means that prices are not that cheap. In absolute terms. In relative terms, with huge amounts of people living under the threshold of poverty, the prices are anything but cheap (a direct consequence of monopolistic regimes). Of course I agree that they provide cheaper means to exchange knowledge than other technologies, but I’m afraid that, even so, costs are not “so little”.

On the other hand, not only communication services have to be cheap, but also devices. Data transmission requires some devices (e.g. 3G cellphones) that are simply out of reach to 99% of the world population. Of course, I’m talking about rich data, and not SMSs or (in some cases) WAP — remember what we said about quality.

Despite this criticism, there are excellent experiences like Brosdi, Tradenet or (also mentioned by Sachs), M-Pesa, that picture an optimistic future. The final results will depend on how these experiences impact on developing countries and, more important, how fast developed countries are in running their own path… with better technology.

In the following paragraphs, Sachs explains some good examples on how ICTs have changed jobs and employment, business and commercial relationships, Education or the Health system. I agree these are good examples. I agree, too, that convergence is a very good thing, so that same content and services are made available regardless of the place or tool you’re using to access them. In general, I somewhat share his ideal that the end of poverty could be reached would we put all the potential we already have by pointing to that goal.

But the devil is in the details.

In a research I’m just carrying on, I’m finding that (almost) all good performance in indicators from the Digital Economy depends on exogenous factors, on analogue or “real economy” ones: the gross domestic product, education, inequality, freedom, etc. This puts at stake some optimisms about leapfrogging. The idea that the Information Society, Knowledge Based Societies or the Digital Economy can run in parallel from the Industrial Society does not seem backed up by evidence. So, not two parallel lines of development, but a circle is the figure that fits best. A virtuous circle or a vicious one, depending on what sense are you making it spin.

For all the benefits that Sachs speaks of to come, other (deeper) changes must take place too. And it is true, we can provoke and speed up some of these changes by means of ICTs. But to have a rabbit coming out of the hat, someone had to feed it first.

Three years ago I set up ICT4D Courses, a repository where I would be uploading learning materials related to training courses in the field of ICT4D.

After that time, the repository has not grown at all — it was somehow part of my MPhil’s dissertation.

On the other hand, I had recently created ICTlogy Learning Materials Series, a place where to upload the learning materials that I had created.

Now, it does not make sense to be having two different places for the same thing: open educational resources, so I merged them into one. The URLs have not changed, just the respository, that now holds everything concerning open educational resources:

You’ll see it missing from the top menu, but you can always access it at the Bibliography, and then go to Types of Works and Learning Materials.

The PhD on the Information and Knowledge Society Programme recently opened the call for candidates — including 10 full time fellowships —, offering 33 student places in the following fields:

• Computer Science and Networking Technologies
• Community and Social Action
• Law and ICT
• eGovernance
• eLearning
• Information Systems
• New Economy
• Technology and health
• Technology and Education System
• Research Programmes

As said, UOC‘s research institute, the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, offers 10 grants for full-time PhDs that are carried out physically in its headquarters in Castelldefels’s Mediterranean Technology Park (20 minutes from Barcelona). It carries a stipend and access to travel funds.

Please visit the PhD programme‘s website, for detailed information about the places on offer and the fellowships.

Conference by Stephen Downes at the First International Conference Free Knowledge, Free Technology – Education for a free information society in Barcelona (Spain), 17 July 2008, on the production and sharing of free educational and training materials about Free Software.

Stephen Downes, Institute for Information Technology‘s Internet Logic Research Group
The Future of Education

The Public in Public Education

Stephen Downes
(Photo: César Córcoles)

Public education, education for everyone, is an important concept not for the “education” part, but for the “public” part, as its impact goes far beyond the acquisition of knowledge, but the shaping of the whole society.

Stephen Downes presents gRSShopper. Besides the most evident uses of the tool as a resource harvester, the main purpose being connecting the different resources amongst them, to link one to each other different pieces of content scattered around the Internet. This is a personal learning environment, more than a social software intended to build community; an personal environment but headed to openly being a part of the network of people and content.

Freedom

Freedom as a state of being: putting the stress on the personal capability and will to do something, more than e.g. on the formal or legal permission to.

Freedom is an attitude, a perspective of self-determination, of self-government, to be what you want to be. Education means realizing the degree of freedom you’re in and finding out the way to get more of that freedom. But being educated does not suffice, as practical constrains (fear, etc.) also apply.

Freedom is also about being able to reach one’s own potential.

Freedom as access: access to knowledge and learning, where these are public goods, created in a nonprofit way that expects no revenue from their creation and distribution.

The Future of Education

The concept of the “class” is an administrative one, not related with pedagogy, not related with a course. But the question is that, for several (socialization) reasons, the idea of the “class” sticks. But could the network substitute the group? Communication is central to our being, so our connections do shape ourselves and our actions.

So there’s pressures towards using our natural connections to engage in collective learning, more than to move into an artificially built classroom that, even if it might have been an efficient tool in the past, it only seems now to be perpetuating relationships of power between teachers and learners.

Competences

Competences are a dynamic concept, based on growth. And they require a constantly changing path that can be filled with different (ad hoc) educational recourses.

Nevertheless, there is learning hardly identifiable with competences.

So, competences should be one more way to identify learning opportunities, and the selection of learning resources just an add-on to a whole system of learning activities (traditional and new ones).

The selection of learning options should depend on our background and framework (former learning, actual legislation, etc.) and should be driven also by context, by actual needs.

Delivery systems

We have, hence, to build topic delivery systems, systems that deliver learning resources.

Delivery systems today are, basically, content delivery systems. The Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is here to replace learning management/delivery systems. The PLE is more a concept than an application:

• Is based on the idea of personal access to resources from multiple sources
• Is based on a personal web presence
• Focuses on creation and communication rather than on content completion

Education should be no more as managing a system, but delivering in a network; no more something self-contained, closed, but something interacting with a larger environment. Thus, educational institutions have to reshape themselves to become entities that interact with the larger environment.

Connectivism and Freedom

Our ideas of concepts are created through “wholes” of information sets — the basis of Connectivism. So educational institutions have to make resources available to both contribute and be able to build these “wholes”. The resources have to be able to learn from the environment and the student, and communicate with their framework and environment. Among other things, this will make personalization more efficient.

Education should be a flat network, where both students and teachers are nodes communication one to each other. And the communications among these nodes should be free: if these communications are mediated (or just made possible) by digital resources, these resources need to be free to enable communication… and hence education.

Al Gore, The assault on reason: we’ve gone from a society that used to think by itself to a society that is being though for itself (e.g. media think for the society). We have to go back to the society that used to think for itself. And content needs to be free to be able to reach this state of freedom of communication and thought.

The market — and their firms — are putting barriers to these freedoms. And, indeed, non-commercial licenses (cc-sa, copyleft) allow bad practices against the free flow of content, as they do not prevent perverse uses of open resources.

The role of public education institutions should be, in the end, to promote this free flow of resources. To guarantee access to the public good that is digital content and media as the language of interaction today.

Update:
Audio of the conference (, 9.5 MB)