ICTlogy

Last Friday 23rd I had the luck to attend the third day (out of three) of the IV Encuentro de e-Inclusión: e-inclusión para la construcción de la ciudadanía, a national meeting of telecentre instructors about e-Inclusion that focused on participation and the Web 2.0, and was organized by the Fundación Esplai.

I had committed to impart the opening speech about the general concepts that the Web 2.0 metaphor usually talks about. You can see my simple presentation here:

And also download it both in Spanish (the original) and translated to English:

• ¿Qué dicen que es la Web Social? (688 Kb)
• What do they say the Social Web is? (686 Kb)

But, as it is usual in this kind of events, the best was yet to come. The audience — around one hundred telecentre educators — was richest, with a deep knowledge of their work, target, resources and possibilities, mainly due to their highest level of compromise that kept them informed and enthusiastic about e-inclusion, digital literacy and so.

About the different input that I had — during and after my speech — I might stress the following concerns about the role of digital literacy in this three subjects:

• Privacy: What happens with my data spread in all those Web 2.0 apps? Should we teach the user what the implications are of using these platforms
• Reputation: how do I filter content? Will the semantic web really work? What’s the role of virtual communities? is the wisdom of crowds reliable?
• Online Participation: e-Participation is participation? What’s an online volunteer? through e-Participation, can I suggest or also decide? (As an answer to these last questions, I dare suggest reading my paper Online Volunteers: Knowledge Managers in Nonprofits

After my speech, the group split in three workshops, two of which I could parcially attend.

e-Knowledge

Lead by Jordi Barreda and David Gateu they defined e-Knowledge as the knowledge built with Web 2.0 technologies and the Web 2.0 as technology that allows interaction: simple, but pretty clear and effective.

They projected Michael Wesch The Machine is Us/ing Us and Lee Lefever at Commoncraft’s Wikis in Plain English and Social Bookmarking in Plain English, explained the importance of XML and the importance of culture in the use of tools: tools ain’t good or bad, is our use that shapes them.

I lacked the rest of the workshop, but I guess it’s worth citing here some of Jordi Barreda’s comments on his own blog:

The three main ingredients for a social web to work are:
– Personal interest
– A common space
– A management system
[…]everything heading towards a common goal.

e-Participation

The second workshop — lead by Marta García Moreta — was equally interesting.

They collectively gave a definition for e-Participation:

The commitment, at different levels, between people and/or institutions that contribute, cooperate, collaborate in the development of a collective objective, whose goal implies social transformation. [by means of Web 2.0]
[…]
The telematic channel should improve and complement the actual mechanisms of participation, including the generation of new ones only possible by means of the Net, and all of them should be taken into account when designing a new integral model of citizen participation. This should, by no means, exclude the existing ways of participation.

And presented some examples of the different types of e-Participation tools, following Alberto Ortiz de Zárate’s typology:

• online synchronous chat
• open forum, not moderated
• online moderated dialogue, with a defined subject
• online survey with a defined subject
• comments function
• political simulation
• online (open) petition/suggestion
• online votation
• online scoring
• direct dialogue through e-mail
• offline channels
• collective editing
• community building
• campaing platform
• signing of petitions

Some of the examples:

• Photodemonstration for women rights, a demonstration that took place on Flickr
• Cuadernos Ciudadanos, a virtual space for the citizens where any citizen can set up a blog, photo repository, etc. Promoted by the city council, free to use by the citizen
• pódcast Cádiz, same as Cuadernos but no need to write: just talk to make any suggestions to your city council
• Madrid Participa, similar to the previous two
• Vivienda Digna, a wiki-based platform to ask for better housing

The Evaluation of e-Inclusion Projects

Last event of the morning — just before conclusions, etc. — was the presentation of the report of the The External Evaluation Model of Red Conecta and Conecta Joven by Rosa Baez, Cristina Pulidoa and Laura López from the research group CREA, University of Barcelona.

They used Critical Communication Methodology to evaluate projects and introduced how Habermas, Chomsky or Beck were authors that tried to unify theories of social action.

Some results of their survey that evaluated the impact of telecentres and the design of their (educational) model:

• Shift from just access to motivation + access + competences / capacity building (based on Paolo Freire)
• Incorporation of learning/apprenticeship in daily life
• Impact on daily life: work, business
• Impact on the community: the telecentre becomes a referral for the community
• Sustainability: economical and social… and of the model itself
• The need to establish an evaluation system, including an interactivity/feedback system with the community
• The evaluation of the network of telecentres has also shown that there’s a sense of network, mainly based on personal affinities or coordination needs (e.g. geographically) but there’s room for further collaboration, specially using the virtual platform to exchange knowledge

Today I imparted a seminar belonging to the Executive Master in e-Governance organized by the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and partnered by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

General information

• Details of the presentation (including slides to download)
• Slides on Slideshare
• Recommended Bibliography

I just want to thank the attendants to the course for being such an interesting audience and for making me think because of their witty questions.

Syllabus

Information and Communication Technologies for Development: ICT4D

• Food or computers?
• Efficacy, efficiency
• Leapfrogging Development
• Second Bests
• Endogenous development

The concept of access and the measurement of the Knowledge Society

• The Telecommunications Model: limitations
• The Broadcasting Model: limitations
• Access vs. Ownership: different solutions
• Access vs. use

Digital Divide: a holistic approach

• A five tier model
• Old and new divides

• Hardware
• Software
• The broadband divide
• Informational Literacy
• Content and Intellectual Property
• e-Awareness and the leadership divide

e-Readiness and Web 2.0 for e-Governance in Developing Countries

• e-Participation and e-Democracy
• Censorship circumvention and freedom of speech
• Transparency and accountability
• Law enforcement
• Open Access and access to knowledge

Slides

Recommended Bibliography

Notes on the seminar at UOC’s Law and Political Science School Reconsidering the analysis of the uses of ICTs by political parties: an application to the Catalan case, presented by Albert Batlle, Rosa Borge, Ana Sofía Cardenal and Albert Padró-Solanet, after their homonimous communication at the 4th ECPR General Conference in Pisa.

Is there a crisis on political participation?

From 1950 to our days, participation in elections has notably decreased in most developed countries.

Same applies when we look both at the membership/voters ratio and the absolute membership volume.

Electoral volatility — voters changing the party they vote — also increases.

Why those changes?

Positive approach: changes in cleavages that explained vote intention and no longer can so clearly explain vote intention.

Normative approach: crisis of the institutions themselves, citizenship disaffection.

What’s the role of ICTs in this landscape? Regenerate institutions? Empower voters/members? Raise political parties’ accountability? Enhance participation?

Working hypotheses

• Leveling the playing field: ICTs provide an comparative advantage to small parties, but after comes normalization: the bigger the party, the more resources can allocate
• Depending on the typology of the political party, they tend to interact more or less, communicate with their voters.

It seems that the normalization hypotheses is the most concurrent, political parties do not use ICTs to increase communication, and it geographically happens quite homogeneously.

Theoretical approach

Political parties are led/influenced/build by an ideology, an organization and an electoral market (the really exogenous variable). This leads the party to implement a communication strategy that will determine the party’s ICT uses.

Then, test how different indicators (see also paper below) affect the dependent variable: ICT use on political parties.

• Ideology: left parties associated with better participation scores?
• Party organization: mass parties related to resource generation and provision of information?
• Party organization: catch-all parties more related to campaining?
• Electoral market: more preasure to win votes leads to campaining?
• Electoral market: the more the resources and the expectations to obtain them, the more sophisticated the development of websites?

Findings

Normalization hypotheses seems confirmed: bigger/richer parties have better/richer websites… but smaller ones, do also well in their websites, to obtain support, funding… Thus, seems clear that the electoral market is a very important issue in the strategy of ICT use in political parties.

Nevertheless, it seems that ICTs in general — and, specifically, websites — are not a strategic priority of Catalan political parties.

Mass parties seem to be better connected, have better network than catch-all parties.

My questions/comments

Any research on how parties react to the quantity/quality of the communication — Fourth Estate — arena?

Political parties might not find any incentive to enter the conversation, taking into account the classical literature about how political parties behave. BUT, if there really is a Fifth Estate emerging thanks to web 2.0 technologies, wouldn’t it be a “menace” to the traditional way political parties communicate with voters and members? Wouldn’t it be an incentive — i.e. respond to the fifth power — to engage in more communication, participation?

Maybe we should not take political parties as “political parties” but as communication media: information deliverers and opinion generators. And analyze website strategies not as political strategies but communication strategies: look not at the origin — the political parties, their strategies — but at the destiny — the communication arena.

More info

• Batlle, A., Borge, R., Cardenal, A. S. & Padró-Solanet, A. (2007). Reconsidering the analysis of the uses of ICTs by political parties: an application to the Catalan case. Communication presented at the 4th ECPR General Conference. Pisa: ECPR. Retrieved

There’s an ongoing dialogue at the World Dialogue on Regulation for Network Economies about the Regulatory Frameworks for Improving Access. Amy Mahan kindly asked me to contribute — there are so far very interesting contributions to the debate —, so here comes my opinion.

From infrastructures to content regulation

Marc Raboy defined access (1998) in two ways:

In the broadcasting model, emphasis is placed on the active receiver, on free choice, and access refers to the entire range of products on offer. In the telecommunications model, emphasis is on the sender, on the capacity to get one’s messages out, and access refers to the means of communication.

In my opinion, when talking about accessing the Information Society — and measuring the development of the Information Society — in the last years the stress has been put in the Telecommunications Model: what are the infrastructures and how can they evolve to provide access. The regulation framework has, thus, followed the same path, by focusing on the telecommunications market, technical issues and so.

While necessary, the user is nevertheless usually forgotten in this point of view: digital content and services are just seldom taken into account and only sometimes are the target of specific initiatives to promote them, most of them coming from the public sector: e-Administration, e-Government, e-Health…

Notwithstanding, at least three facts have started to shift the focus from infrastructures towards content and services:

• The increasing maturity of the Information Society, the major deployment — at least in developed countries, but also in most developing ones — of the required infrastructures, and the accompanying legal measures to settle the situation have shown the imbalance between both sides of the scales: the container is regulated, but the content is not.
• The Web 2.0 has, indeed, strengthen the importance of the user and its creation and communications. And this has often happened to the detriment of infrastructures, as most Web 2.0 applications act as substitutes for desktop software and hardware (not connectivity).
• Once the intensity of use of the Internet as reached a certain level, the consequences of this use have come under the spotlight, being human rights (freedom of speech, intimacy, security, etc.) on of the most important ones.

Hence, and keeping in mind that infrastructure regulation is a must, it is time when content and services — i.e. uses — require more attention from policy makers and decision-takers:

• Internet governance
• Net neutrality
• Freedom of speech and censorship
• Digital identity, data protection, right to privacy
• Intellectual property rights in the digital age
• Content and services liability (carrier and/or supplier)
• Jurisdiction of taxes on e-services
• Definition and jurisdiction of cybercrime

Of course, this is not a closed, definitive list. Any suggestions?

Elisabetta Cigognini asks me whether I could draw a list of 10 adjectives — concepts, capacities, competences — that qualify the skills of an expert knower 2.0 or learner 2.0.

Difficult, because I get consciously or unconsciously “intoxicated” by John Palfrey’s list of characteristics of a digital native. I believe that a digital native and a knower/learner 2.0 are overlapping concepts (especially if you take digital native as a “syndrome”, as I do, and not as a generational fingerprint, which makes poor sense in a digitally divided world) but are not exactly the same thing.

You can browse Elisabetta Cigognini’s publications and speeches pages for a good bunch of readings about what a knower/learner 2.0 stands for. Regarding myself, and summing up, what I have in mind is an adult learner, or an expert knower, that, by definition, has left a long track behind that backs his vast knowledge in one — or more — fields, and is intensively using the Internet — specially Web 2.0 apps — to both increase and enhance the reach of his knowledge. Just to put things clear again about digital natives, I believe that:

Digital native = expert knower 2.0 – experience – maturity – general knowledge (+ deep knowledge in one new field of knowledge)

Or, mutatis mutandis:

Expert Knower 2.0 = Digital Native + experience + maturity + general knowledge (- deep knowledge in one new field of knowledge)

Notice the parentheses: as I said, I understand the digital native concept as a syndrome. Thus, some non-generational natives do behave like (almost) perfect digital natives, hence the fact that “deep knowledge in one new field of knowledge” can or cannot be a difference. Experience, maturity and general knowledge are provided only by lifetime spent, which, by definition, is shorter in (generational) digital natives. To me, the expert knower/learner is very close to the definition of the digital settler by John Palfrey / Urs Gasser / David Weinberger.

Going back to the list, I tried and group its points under three categories. Not that I like doing it, but it makes an easier reading and comprehension than just a 10 bullets list. They are not sorted in any way, thus last item is “last but not least” and so:

Technical skills

• English: necessary to access relevant information. English natives will nod proudly and non-natives will deny in anger. Even if things are changing, the fact that English is the lingua franca these days for both science and business, and the fact that the Internet and the Web where born and developed in English-speaking environments has created a deep lag in the amount of information that is available in English or in other languages… combined.
• Digerati: Informational literate: knows where and how to search, how to evaluate relevant information, etc.; Media literate: can manage any type/support of information: text, hypertext, photo, sound, video…; and Technological literate: has advanced technical skills such as general knowledge of HTML, javascript or PHP, knows how a computer, server or the Internet work, how to set up a web site and a domain, etc.
• Multitasker: can do more than one thing at the same time, specially combining job-training-leisure tasks to create a difficult balance. Can also play havoc on the knower/learner if energies/resources are not properly measured/allocated.

Philosophical approach

• Open: Needs sharing (for many reasons: principles, unselfish etichs, pretentious ego, self-esteem, selfish benefits…). Above all, awareness that what you give is what you get, that your wealth is — you are worth — what you contribute to your network.
• Passion to learn: needs knowing. Learning is both a pleasure and a must. Keeps (or tries to keep) him/herself informed and up-to-date.
• Led by the “procrastination principle“: “[to deal] with problems only as they arose—or [leave] them to [other] users to deal with” (read, for instace, Jonathan Zittrain). In other words: do what you are good at and leave the rest to other contributors of your network… and work/learn while you enjoy doing it. Can also play havoc on the knower/learner, as well as multitasking, if priorities or long-term strategies are not properly defined.

Psychologycal/Social aspects

• Networker: can work with different people/teams for different projects. I see it quite different from the teamworker: one team for everything. Networking means that people and resources are assets that allow infinite (in possibilities) and finite (in time) combinations (Yochai Benkler puts it better than I).
• Ubiquitous and always online: no time/space boundaries. People and information are just a click away; not being able to click them (because of being off-line) is not an option.
• Multidisciplinar: other disciplines (than his/her default one) can bring good solutions/information on our problems. And there are many and new problems that can only be explained by a mix of different points of view and approaches.
• Autonomous: can design, plan and lead his own learning; knows what he does not know / needs to learn, who can train or where the information is; can be self-discipline and draw an strategy and path towards his/her own (training, need for information) goals. Actually, doest not really care for what a “discipline” binds inside of it.

When preparing my speech about The Web 2.0 and the role of the University for the UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Fourth International Seminar: Web 2.0 and Education, I gathered a good bunch of references to prepare what I wanted to say. You can find all the references I used — and some more, added after — after this words. But as this is an evolving selection, the up-to-date version of this list can always be consulted here: A Reader on Web 2.0 and Education. Feel free to write back to me with proposals for inclusion in the list and/or corrections for found errors.

The collection is far more than just “Education” or “University” or “Web 2.0” but pretends to give a framework comprehensive enough to approach the Education 2.0 phenomenon. I personally think that a good approach to Education 2.0 should include:

• digital capacity building, including the zilliion different digital literacies: technological, informational, media, e-awareness…
• team working
• digital identity, presence on the Net, e-Portfolios
• creation and importance of social networks and connectivism
• the digital natives concept
• long life learning and student-centered learning
• open educational resources
• …

To which I would add Business 2.0:

• creation based on gift economies
• distributed creation and the wisdom of crowds
• entering the conversation with the consumers… and the prosumers
• …

And a longest etcaetera of concepts, hypes, buzzwords and so — easy to see this is just a superficial reflection, not a deep analysis of the concept. Of course, the categories are arbitrary and just a means not to have 47 references one after the other without a break:

Economy

Digital Literacy & Digital Media

Pedagogy

Open Access & Open Educational Resources

What is the Web 2.0

Education 2.0 & e-Learning 2.0