ICTlogy

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.

Round table: Innovative Uses of Mobile ICTs for Development

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

Mobile voice Wikipedia (MobiLed: you send an SMS to the mobile Wikipedia with the name of an article, and a voice reads you the whole article on your mobile phone.

Remote tutors that, through SMS, help kids in their Maths homework.

We have to de-skill the process of mobile application creation, thus why at Meraka they’re creating open source platforms for people to code mobile applications without much knowledge on developing applications.

Kentaro Toyama, Microsoft Research India (MSR India)

(disclaimer: he’s going to play the devil’s advocate)

The focus on putting development first, and then technology. If we speak about “M4D”, we’re putting technology first. Unless you have a strong interest in mobile phones (e.g. you’re working for Nokia) you should focus on what’s available, not just on a specific technology. Development is about human and institution capacity.

On the other hand, there’s also even more simple and broadly accepted technology than mobiles: television, community radio… so we should also focus in these if our arguments are cost, simplicity, broad usage and so.

There’s hype around M4D as there was hype about telecentres 15 years ago. It just does not make sense to fund projects that explicitly (ex ante) have to be run by mobile phones. And this happens. And this is hype.

Oleg Petrov, e-Development Thematic Group of World Bank

(in kindest answer to Toyama) The mobile phone is the new sibling, the new tool in the development toolbox. Enthusiasm vs. hype. It’s just enthusiasm, and other technologies, just like siblings, are “jealous” of the newcomer. But it’s a powerful tool indeed. We have not for forget about everything but mobile phones, but as a new tool, it deserves special exploration to determine its real potential and weaknesses.

The World Bank has plenty of projects that follow this excitement to test M4D: for health, for education, etc. We need a community of practice, ways to test this technology. Raise awareness and also move forward in the next direction of building toolkits, making it simple.

If you just look at the human side of development, you’re likely to miss (or not be up-to-date) state-of-the-art technological developments that might give you hints or ideas on how to solve human problems.

Jan Blom, Nokia Research Center – India

Anecdote: 6 months ago, a cab driver in Bangalore, using the mobile phone to SMS and as a GPS, but knowing nothing about what e-mail was. So: M4D is absolutely real.

There’s a dire lack of public information available (sometimes it does not even exist). M4D can focus on making this public information available, in providing location based services. There is much utility in taking local data, uploading to a central server, and publish it online (like Ushahidi does).

Stéphane Boyera, Device Independence Working Group of W3C

(also answering Toyama) It’s not that it’s a hype, it’s that technologists are approaching development in their daily lives, which is new and it’s great. Of course, when coming from the Development Cooperation field one must focus on humans, but the thing is that techies are approaching humans through tecnology, and the specific technology of their specific fields.

Q & A

Najat Rochdi: we have to know all the technologies available to be able to make the best decisions.

Stijn Vander Krogt: what is the role of governments in M4D? Isn’t it to analyse all that’s out there? Petrov: absolutely, this is one of the key roles of the World Bank, to provide advice on what can be used to solve any kind of problem. Thus why organizations have to know, and raise awareness, of the different applications of tools for human development.

Manuel Acevedo: What do we do when some laptops are really cheap and simple, and some mobile phones become increasingly complex and expensive? Thus, our task is to inform people of all the options available. Can we build multidisciplinary teams (as in research) at the government level? Can we build multi-institutional approaches in ICT4D?

Q: are we confusing needs for development? Are we artificially generating needs for gadgets? Aren’t we trying not to develop rural areas, but the broaden the target market of telcos?

In 2007, half the world population — 50.10% to be true — were subscribers of a mobile telephony service, representing 72.1% of the total telephony subscribers (fixed, mobile, satellite, etc.). The datum is even more shocking if we move into the African continent: there, still only one third of the population has (actually, is subscribed to) a cellular phone (28.44%), but it is important to stress the fact that this third stands for 89.6% of the total subscribers to telephone lines, the highest proportion of the five continents. Though it is but an average that goes way higher when looking into specific countries like Tanzania (98.1%), Mauritania (97%), the Congo (97.2%), Kenya (97,7%) or Cameroon 96%), just to put some examples.

These data absolutely support the creation, in 2008, of the Mobile Web for Social Development Interest Group (MW4D), fostered by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This interest group — a part of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative — has as a purpose to:

explore how to use the potential of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) on Mobile phones as a solution to bridge the Digital Divide and provide minimal services (health, education, governance, business,…) to rural communities and under-privileged populations of Developing Countries.

Some projects using mobile phones for development

• Kiwanja and their projects: FrontlineSMS, to help nonprofits to benefit from using SMS for advocacy and monitoring; nGOmoblie, a competition to encourage them to think about how text messaging could benefit them and their work; and Silverback, a game for mobile phones to raise awareness about gorilla conservation
• TradeNet, to access and manage market information (specially on agriculture markets) from the mobile phone;
• M-Pesa, to transfer money and make payments through text messaging;
• Ushahidi, a platform that crowdsources crisis information, allowing anyone to submit crisis information through text messaging using a mobile phone, email or web form.
• Kubatana.net and their experience monitoring the elections in Zimbabwe, now converted into a handbook on How to run a mobile advocacy campaign

These and other projects, stories, people and organizations using mobile phones for social impact can be found at MobileActive.

On the other hand, Stéphane Boyera and Ken Banks, co-chairs of the Mobile Web for Social Development Interest Group will be at the II International Meeting on ICT for Development Cooperation, where there is a whole track on mobile telephony for development.

More information

• Mobile Phones and the Digital Divide, article by Ken Banks in PC World
• The meek shall inherit the web, article at The Economist
• Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development, workshop about mobile phones for development taking place in Maputo, Mozambique, on April 1 and 2, 2009.
• Most mobiles…, Johathan Donner’s blog on mobiles for development.

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.

Visual Literacy in the Age of the Big Picture
Susan E. Metros, University of Southern California

What does it mean to be literate?

Just reading and writing? The say that one image is more worth than a thousand words stands even more than ever. But there are many and many literacies: depending on the context, on the emitter, etc. the message does change.

Even many disciplines heavily rely on visual literacy: Maths (symbols), Art, Psychology (perception), Economics (chars and graphs), Geography (Cartography), Medicine, Communication (Semiotics)… Disciplines that have created whole theories around these visual literacies.

Visual literacy:

• Decode and interpret visuals
• Encode and compose meaningful visuals: making pictures is getting as important as looking at and understand pictures
• Informed critic of visual information: understand what’s good or bad
• Able to judge accuracy, validity, and worth: know what’s real and what’s not

Judging validity is one of the challenges we’re facing and which is posing many problems as is getting more complex, sensible, a matter of debate along time.

The big difference between being visually stimulated and being visually literate [an interesting statement regarding the digital natives issue]. The visual information overload plays with our perceptions (and specially with those of the younger ones)… but what about understanding, assimilating them? Is there a cognitive process or just sheer exposure?

Failure to communicate is not inherent in the piece of information to be transmitted, but in the design of the communication device. So, where’s the balance between amateur and authentic? Is there a trade-off between “freedom of expression” and appropriate, authentic, sense-making visual communication?

And besides understanding the vocabulary of visual communication, fluency is also required: not only to be able to understand, create, create with sense, but create and communicate with ease.

Becoming visually literate

It depends on your learning style: a behavioural preference (visual), a matter of a better processing of things (auditory), a way of concentrating better (kinesthetic)… Statistically, 65% of the population is visual. Which means that not only visual communication is pervasive, but that it is preferred by the majority of the population as a learning style.

But visual literacy is also bound to the social and cultural context, sometimes making it local some visual signs, sometimes making other signs universal, and more immediate than words.

There is a lot of code to be learnt — plain different from other codes like written text — that needs serious addressing and specific training.

The role of the visual

• To document, e.g. The War Tapes, and document it in many ways, from different perspectives, to send different messages based on the “same” reality.
• To validate
• To communicate, in a very quick, straightforward, universal way
• To inform
• To engage, e.g. in gaming.
• To expose, to bring to light and spread information that, otherwise, would be difficult or impossible to transmit
• To politicize
• To provoke

Affecting change

How to make people more visually literate? How to fight the visual literacy divide?

“Come to us”: build spaces for this purpose. The problem being that people want their own spaces, their own tools. OSU Digital Union just does thus: create a space people feel as theirs.

Woven into the curriculum: try and make visual literacy an embedded part of a bigger whole (e.g. USC Institute for Multimedia Literacy). Research and teaching on how to do things an do it a must.

Systemic change: A Global Imperative. The Report of the 21st Century Literacy Summit: develop a strategic research agenda, raise awareness, make tools for creating and experiencing new media, empower teachers, work as a community.

Q & A

Mara Hancock: how do we face the white space, how do we leave room for the sight to rest? A: It’s really important to teach students about white space, how not to exhaust the available space and let one’s sight breathe, and avoid vision overload. There is indeed white space in many other literacies.

Q: Images can lies. Sometimes the image does not correspond to an object, but to what this object represents. This has to be taught too.

Brian Lamb: How to be rigorous, how to contextualize? A: It’s all about being literate, but not only the emitter, but also the receiver so they can enforce the appropriate use of visual communication.

Q: How to fight the visual illiteracy of students? A: Is there such a thing as visual illiteracy? To be able to read you have to be literate; to be able to listen to music or see images, even if understanding can be rough, you still have the ability to hear and see. Which means that addressing this (partial) illiteracy might not be that hard.

Teemu Leinonen: Can design-thinking help to improve visual (and all other) literacies? Should design-thinking be a part of the visual literacy programme? A: Design competences might help to enhance digital literacy, but are not inherent to visual literacy. About design-thinking, don’t believe there is such a thing as design-thinking, but going back to humans or humanities, and ask ourselves why are we doing some things, etc. E.g. Ethics should not be an attribute of design-thinking, but of being human in general.

Q: ICT literacy is very difficult to integrate in primary school. Can visual literacy can make its way in elementary and secondary education? How can it be integrated into the curriculum? Or will it stay on its own? How does it relate with digital and ICT literacy? A: Kids already are making use of their visual and digital skills… outside the school. It is “just” a matter to bring these competences — and experiences — inside the curriculum, bring them inside the classes and guess how to do it. But it is already happening.

Javier Nó: In art, image is imposed; in design, image should be negotiated. It is not a matter of literacy, but of meaning. Designers often forget that design is not art and that there is an audience to be reached, so image should be negotiated with the users, engaging them in the debate of image use. A: Art, and design, is important to learn it in context. And lateral thinking plays an important role in this context learning. Decoding and encoding go hand in hand, and we have to be able to do both.

Ismael Peña-López: Are digital natives wired different? Have we to realize this and adapt? Or are they just over-stimulate and just need to “calm them down” in a visual, digital way? A: Even if everyone is using the same tools, the thing is that students are using them in other ways and they do have different skills or capabilities. Cut them wings would be a step backwards. Sometimes they are more engaged than we think of and, more important, the boundary between formal and informal environments are blurring. We should take advantage of this.

twin towers falling
a mother with a child
capa and abatted partisan

Teamwork at the Open EdTech Summit. First part is a brainwriting exercise where a personal reflection time should produce a list of ideas. Then, a brainstorming exercise with the rest of the group where ideas are put in common. This group is about Personalization of the Learning Process. Other groups are Learning Content Development and Delivery, Future Technologies at the Service of Learning, Learning: Everyone, Everywhere and Anytime.

Team 1 – PLP (Personalization of the Learning Process). Contents of this area: individual methods of learning, personal learning speed. student personal learning experience, interaction between learning processes and technology.

Brainwriting

How far can we go with personalization in a credential-driven education system?

• As far as we push the learning process away from teaching, shifting responsibility to the student, the process can be as personalized as at the individual level.
• Goal setting and assessment has to be homogeneous in a higher degree (with slight changes according to personal needs), education has not.
• ICTs lower the transaction costs of individual/personal mentorship
• ICTs lower the costs of content diffusion (open educational resources in digital format)

How far can we go in automatically adapting the student’s personal learning experience, based on the system’s assessment of their knowledge/understanding?

• Syllabuses can be highly dynamic, though they require some human and technological effort
• Again, assessment should take place at the final stage, evaluating the “output” of the educational process. The process itself… should it be assessed (per se, not in terms of evaluating its performance to achieve educational goals)?

Will it be possible in the very next future that each student rules completely her/his learning process?

• The student should be able to rule their learning process
• More effort — and resources — should be put on the how and the what for, not the what
• The focus should be goal setting, designing “default” paths according to more common profiles, and guidance

How far technologies will help us in adapting the personal rhythm of learning to the academic demands of the universities?

• Should universities have academic demands at all? Shouldn’t universities be the ones to adapt their rhythms to personal learning demands?
• If focus is not put in the process but in goal setting, guidance and assessment — not in teaching — then technology could help to bind people together while keeping the ends quite loose.

Is it possible to offer university contents completely adapted to a specific (individual) learning process?

• It absolutely is: we don’t have to make scarce something abundant (e.g. tight syllabuses)
• The goal is not filtering, but capaciting people to filter

Brainstorming

Larry Johnson: how do you guide someone through their random process so that they become an e.g. “engineer”?

Jutta Treviranus: Personalization can be understood as personalization of access, not necessarily (or not only) personalization of the content. It’s critical to identify what constitutes an “engineer”.

David Wiley: a credential is shortcut for the employer to identify competences, a bundle of competences. Can be unbundle these competences? Course selection, sequencing, etc. can be hence adapted.

Llorenç Valverde: still a tight curriculum in Spain even after the Bolonia process. Is there room for a freedom of choice?

Lev Gonick: how to create space for subversion? how to bring the student autonomy? not big changes: where are the cracks of the system?

Jutta Treviranus: optimising learning, making it challenging to the student.

Vijay Kukmar: we can go very far in personalization. Microcredits, e-portfolios… are already existing tools that can be drivers of change. Not thinking about disciplines, but transferable skills and learning how to learn.

Jutta Treviranus: how you best learn? personalization is not about the system itself, but the engagement.

Ismael Peña-López: now what’s scarce is not knowledge (that’s why we had to produce and put together the scarce knowledge in classrooms and universities), but mentoning: no more focus on knowledge, but on mentoring.

Claudio Dondi: It’s easy to identify what the core competences are in a specific discipline/degree/etc. Thus, competences should be certified competences, more than learnings. Move the assessment from knowledge only to know-how.

Llorenç Valverde: how to certify competences without assessing content?

David Wiley: what happens with social interaction (amongst students) if personalization goes to the limit of individualization? Personalization should not let aside social activities. How to find the balance between helping in the decision-taking and taking the decision for the students.

Elena Barberà: personalization of what? goals? processes? technologies? We have to identify where are we learning, where are the connections between the person and knowledge, and adapt the use of the tools to this: learning needs evidence, documentation.

Francesc Santanach: personalization will be crucial in the future where heterogeneous students will meet in the same classroom. Globalization and digital technologies foster this heterogeneity. It is more important to recommend, not force anyone into any path.

Larry Johnson: there is a deep lack of definition about what is personalization, how to… There is not such a defined niche for personalization, and technology will not make it out of the blue.

Jutta Treviranus: personalization and technology not only from a pedagogical approach, but also in other aspects just like (physical) access.

Vijay Kumar: the difference between information and education; and between education and formal education (certification, etc.); and between education and learning. Should we focus in how learners customize their learning experience and forget about education?

Lev Gonick: how do institutions avoid the irrelevance of “bad” learning practices?

Llorenç Valverde: personalization has not to be contaminated by the commoditization that came with the industrial revolution. But we can avoid the pret-à-porter one-size-fits-all of education and go into personalized tailoring.

Lev Gonick: we have to set up theories that create new frameworks that e.g. allow the human genome project to emerge.Without that theory, educational institutions will be marginalized from their own system.

David Wiley: theory has to be backed up with real data.

Jutta Treviranus: and we need a framework to gather all theories.

Claudio Dondi: there is a problem when trying to put under the same system training (professional training) and education. The higher education system is not actually coherent with the rest of the socio-economic system. Thus, something should be done at the system level: the problem might not (only) be at the praxis level, but at a more systemic one.

Vijay Kumar: what is the atomic unit of personalization: is adaptation or is it individualization? The currency between the academic system and the socioeconomic system is the degree. Is the problem this currency? the different interests at either side of the currency exchange?

Larry Johnson: the very most importance of competences as the real currency, not certification.

David Wiley: competences permit tying the content, to experience, to certification…

Lev Gonick: we created a personalization at the technological level, but not at the educational process level.

Claudio Dondi: Difference of personalization between how and what.

Larry Johnson: there has to be a mentor-like connection in personalization. The system is educational, not technological.

David Wiley: personalization of the mediation, personalization of the feedback you give, personalization of the hint, etc.

Lev Gonick: how to use the technology to personalize to achieve higher success, to prepare the student for success?

Vijay Kumar: metacognition, where I know how to access problems and where to look for help or solutions. Seeking information, validating information, etc.

David Wiley: prior knowledge is a basic, stable difference between students.

Ismael Peña-López: not only identifying how to access problems, not only assessing one’s assets or prior knowledge, but be able to identify and assess your own context, culture, environment… your localization. These three issues — the cognitive process, prior knowledge and context — might be three main drivers of personalization.

Claudio Dondi: the difference between prior knowledge and the capacity of learning.

Vijay Kukmar: how to shift from content-centered processes towards learning-to-learn processes?

Elena Barberà: we are looking forward more autonomous learners, to enable them to take responsible and adequate decisions at the correct time. Autonomous thinking might be one of the big answers to the whole debate.

David Wiley: personalization as Amazon. Amazon only asks you to buy books, no conscientious or rational or meditated choice required: just buy. And the system can tell the tastes and needs and suggestions.

Jutta Treviranus: what are the limits of personalization? don’t we have to let the system open? We cannot allow ourselves to reinforce individual biases.

Person is all alone, big distance to cover, all learning is contextual, take the route to the future… by walking, the first step is down, it’s lonely on the mountain top, breathing is learning, room for serendipity.