ICTlogy

Keynote speech: Khalid Rabayah
ICT as an enabling tool to ease tension, relief hardship, and resolve conflict: application within the Palestinian case

Despite the decreasing GNP and GNP per capita, the instability of the region, etc. the literacy rate in Palestine is 92% and the computer literacy is 51.2%. The explanation seems to be that precisely education seems to be the way out of the situation the region is immersed. So, the background seems appealing for ICTs for Development… but some failing projects seem to bring evidence on the contrary. The question being: can ICT work without a leading body?

NGOs provided most services before the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority. The difference being since the establishment of the PNA is that, even if it is now the PNA who supplies most of these services, it does not have financial stability, while NGOs do — depending on foreign policies. So, how to build one’s own IT policy?

The brain drain (more Palestinian IT experts in the Gulf than in Palestine) has done nothing but worsen things.

Two E-Government projects… we don’t even have a Government on our own!. Palestine Educational Initiative (PEI)… was fully halted when the PNA composition changed.

The ICT centers of Excellencies, built besides main universities, has or is being a successful project. The idea is to have the business community to interact through the centers with the academic community.

Lessons learnt

• Despite of ups and downs and minor government role, progress has continued (ICT indicators continue rising)
• Government failed to lead the sector
• NGOs played a major role increasing capacity, raise awareness
• Private sector lobbies to open market, defends the sector interest
• Importance of people centered development
• Politically motivated initiatives strongly affected the ICT environment
• ICT in some scenarios provided the only solutions
• The demand driven are the most successful

Jonatan Stanczak
Teaching information, communication and technology to empower children in a low intensity conflict area: a case study from Jenin refugee camp, West Bank, Occupied Palestenian Territories

How performing arts can be combined with ICT to empower children and how to assess/evaluate this?

One important problem to overcome is the researcher’s background and the biased language of “development” issues.

On the other hand, when uncertainty and security are such big issues, working with ITs is not really easy.

So, the goal is to occupy oneself by creativity, engagement, how to enable… and what’s the role of ICTs in this? It’s a very important tool, such as sports or theater, but it surely has a more special role.

Salma Abbasi
Role of Telecentres in Gender Empowerment: do they really work for women?

Despite everyone saying that telecentres are “so good”, why do they sometimes/often fail to achieve social goals?

• “North knows best”
• No consideration to community needs
• Exclusion of marginalized
• Irrelevant information
• Lack of localized content
• Illiteracy
• Inaccessibility by community
• Insecure locations
• Donor funding
• Expensive services

requirements to ensure women’s access to ICTs

• Overcome Technophobia
• Fight Discrimination
• Conduct active outreach
• Ensure financial accessibility
• Ensure physical accessibility
• Relevant content

More Info

• Salma Abbasi: Practical ways to deploy and sustain ICT to enable development and gender empowerment. Preliminary field observations of ICTs.
• Green, L. (2003), Gender-based Issues and Trends in ICT Applications in Education in Asia and the Pacific (PDF)

Marcus Duveskog
Tekkie Kids – A learning laboratory for future engineers

Goal: create an interest in kids for science engineering and technology; and provide researchers with a live lab for distance education

What are the key elements that make a tech club successful in developing positive attitudes towards Science Engineering and Technology?
What is needed to support massification of technology clubs among South African primary schools?

Research method: Action Research

Fun factor is important, and so is competition, but there’s a trade-off between engaging and “creating losers”. Planning is hard, being that some kids are “spoon-fed” one of the possible reasons.

As per massification issues, hub schools and teacher training might be good answers.

How should we asess and evaluate the TekkiKids project?

My reflections

• Markus brings out as a main working tool Lego Mindstorms, but states that though it is a very good learning tool, is is quite expensive and out of reach for most schools’ economies. It is important to notice that the same people that developed Mindstorms also developed Scratch, which is based — more or less — on the same concept of making programming easy and very effective. And being Scratch a web 2.0 project, it’s cost is just the one of the access to the network — which might be, of course, also quite an issue.

Muhammad Atif Ishaq
Usability in e-learning

The usability of a learning system is quite tricky as it involves fuzzy concepts and multiple dimensions and factors.

Indeed, developing countries have added factors that make usability even more complex to define, such as:

• Low DOI
• Basic level operating skills
• Digital Divide
• Heterogenous cultures and languages

Evelyn Kigozi Kahiigi
Exploring the e-learning state of art

Evelyn begins by describing an overview about the fundamentals of e-Learning

Main challenges of e-Learning

• Lack of technical skills
• lack of time management skills
• Credibility of e-learning
• Integration of emerging tech
• Digital Divide
• lack of policies and strategies
• Increasing dropout rate

To explain the why of failures (and successes in e-learning for development), Hypothesis: Applying social presence factors of communication, interactivity and feedback can create successful e-learning experiences

My reflections

• Connectivism, as a new approach beyond Behaviourism, Cognitivism and Constructivism, and really related with the hypothesis of the project, as Connectivism is really about feedback, interaction, co-participation, etc. Same with e-Learning/Education 2.0
• Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age
• Connectivism.ca
• Downes, S. (2006). Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge

Annika Andersson
The (jigsaw-) puzzle of e-learning: case study Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

Thesis theme: Inhibiting and facilitating factors for e-learning in developing countries

• which are the nhibiting and facilitating factors for e-learning in developing countries
• which of these factors are of specific importance to developing countries
• Contribution: a conceptual framework on factors that contributes to enrollment and completion of e-learning courses in developing countries: student, teacher, course, technology, support, institution, society.

But, besides the difference in degree of factors, is there a difference in concept between developed and developing countries? Maybe not…

Nevertheless, in academic literature, when analyzing this factors the focus in developed countries is in the individual (the student) while when analyzing developing countries the focus is usually in culture. Isn’t this a prejudice?

Arguing for a holistic approach but still focusing on a few factors.
Categorizing and looking for differences between “developed” and “developing” countries… Extremely unhappy with this terminology.

More Info

• Annika Andersson: What is so special about e-learning in developing countries?

In the following articles I’ll be writing about the Second Annual ICT4D Postgraduate Symposium organized by IPID, the International Network for Post Graduate Students in the area of ICT4D, and supported by SPIDER (The Swedish Program for ICT in Developing Regions). Sincerest thanks to all those that have made possible this second edition, especially Gudrun Wikander, Annika Andersson and Marcus Duveskog

Keynote speech: Tim Unwin
ICT4D: a dialectic exploration

We might do quite well in practice, but… what about an ICT4D theory?

• Dialectics: seeking a synthesis, a/the resolution of the thesis and antithesis
• From a European intellectual apparatus (from Socrates through Hegel to Marx) to… an alternative African and Asian modes of thought? Might the solution to some problems be elusive unless you changed the way you look at the problem?
• What are the conditions under which ICTs may indeed be of value for “development”? And, in this train of though, what would be the role of technologies?

What is development? The dominant hegemonic model:

• Focused on the MDGs

Absolute poverty to be eliminate by economic growth
Providing the appropriate liberal democratic governance structures are in place

An alternative model?

• Focused on relative poverty
• Placing emphasis on social culture
• enabling people to fulfill their own voices — empowerment?

Thesis vs. Antithesis

• Exogenous or endogenous?
• Top down supply driven or bottom up demand led?
• Software and Knowledges: proprietary or open source
• Partnerships or project delivery?

Technology as exogenous: a thesis

• Much of literature addresses ICTs as exogenous: the Knowledge Society
• An “externally” introduced “innovation” that can bring significant benefits
• ICTs delivering “development” solutions in health, education, rural development…
• ICTs as technologies developed primarily in the major global economies, and made available to deliver on development (defined as MDGs growth…)

Exogenous Technologies: an antithesis

• ICTs are endogenous to “developed” capitalist economies
• Central to speeding circulation of capital, reducing labor costs, increasing market
• Need to focus on endogenous I&C technologies in other parts of the world

A top-down supply-led thesis: new ICTs developed in dominant economies and rolled out to developing world. Arrogance of economic and political power. Solutions that should “always” work, as norms; companies wanting to expand markets; countless self-proclaimed “successful” initiatives.

We should begin with needs, design needs based solutions.

Knowledge as private profit: proprietary thesis.

• Knowledge and education enable benefits
• People should therefore be willing to pay
• People should profit from their endeavours: intellectual property rights and copyright
• What is worth has a price
• Focus on the individual

Knowledge as global common good: an antithesis.

• Focus on the community
• Knowledge for the betterment of human society; must be shared
• Communal development

Thesis: Partnerships as the solution

• Complexity of problems requires new skills
• Engage all relevant stakeholders
• Reduce duplication and wheel reinvention
• Gain from synergies
• Combining demand and supply approaches

Where’s the balance?

Comments/Debate

Khalid Rabayah makes an interesting comment I fully share: the focus in ICT4D strategies is usually in Technologies (in Infrastructures) and neither in Information nor in Communication. There’s an urgent need to shift to content — local content — and design Information Strategies. While agreeing, Tim Unwin’s counterargument is based on the benefits of globalization: sharing what’s out there, not reinventing the wheel, being able to communicate across the World, etc.

Back in March 10th, 2006, I was asked to impart a workshop about Web 2.0 and diffusion of research. The workshop was improved, repeated and even published with a strong focus on teaching.

The subject quite caught on me and I’ve been working since to (a) strengthen the theoretical framework and (b) give it the “for development” bias that I’m so fond of. There’s quite a bunch or articles that I’ve been publishing here exploring ideas, doubts, thoughts about the issue — just on my previous article, for instance.

Finally, it has taken the appropriate shape and been published in the Knowledge Management for Development Journal, in an issue under the topic of Stewarding technologies for collaboration, community building and knowledge sharing in development, coordinated by Nancy White, Beth Kanter, Partha Sarker, Oreoluwa Somolu, Beverly Trayner, Brenda Zulu and Lucie Lamoureux. Having an article accepted — and commented — by such a team is something that makes you feel really good, as they all are people of reference in both the researcher and practitioner fields.

The full reference is:

Peña-López, I. (2007). “The personal research portal: web 2.0 driven individual commitment with open access”. In Knowledge for Management Journal, 3(1), 35-48. Amsterdam: KM4Dev Community. Retrieved July 30, 2007 from http://www.km4dev.org/journal/index.php/km4dj/article/view/92

On the other hand, a live presentation of the contents of this article will take place at the Web2forDev Conference in Rome next 25 to 27 September 2007.

Feedback welcome!

TOC:
Conferences 2.0
Why Academic Blogging
What Is Web Science
Acknowledgments

If I were asked to summarize everything that’s happened at the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme 2007 here at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society I would, undobtedly, quote Jonathan Zittrain in one of his comments past Thursday: Why did not Academia came up with Wikipedia?

To explain why, I can (1) draw a list of all the applications and/or online resources we used during the course, (2) write a little digression about academic blogging and (3) explain one of my recursive reflections during these days: what is Web Science.

Conferences 2.0

Speaking in public has changed, specially if you pretend the audience to interact. Solemn one way speeches are over; prettily packeted content is too. The full deployment of ways to interact with people and information during the course was astonishing. I might be forgetting some of them, but here comes a rough list:

• Presentation tools, such as PowerPoint or the like. Some speakers also used mind-mapping applications. Some of them uploaded here.
• The Live Question Tool, to publish questions on the fly why listening to the speaker
• Wiki, as the main reference, schedule and content manager of the seminar
• Blogs: many of them.
• Flickr, for the photos
• YouTube and other video streaming platforms to watch some footage
• del.icio.us, for the links
• BibCiter, for bibliographies…
• …and eMule and Ares to share them in PDF or other formats on P2P networks
• H2O Playlists, for academic references in general
• Instant messaging, to keep in touch with people home or students
• Skype, to call home
• One ring to rule them all: OII/Berkman 2007 Summer Doctoral Programme planet aggregator
• One ring to find them: Technorati
• One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them: Google Reader
• Facebook, with his corresponding group, to build and manage the social network
• doppler, for the followup geolocation followup
• Also for followup purposes and appointments Twitter or Upcoming
• In the meantime, some of the attendants are sharing their music tastes through Last.fm
• And, of course, there’s always plenty of e-mail.
• And SMSs
• And phone calls
• All these things on mobile phones, public phones (using fixed liines), handhelds, laptops and desktops either connected via wireless or LAN, some owned, some accesible at public points.
• Somebody even watched TV

And yes, most of them we used simultaneously all of the time, some of them were for post-conference purposes.

The fact: number of business cards delivered? Just one, to Samuel Klein in our visit to the OLPC Foundation.

The anecdote: Karoline Lukaschek asked me to borrow a pen for the card. I gave her a pen drive to download into it the photos on her camera card. Well, she just wanted to sign the greetings card for the Berkman staff. Weird.

Why Academic Blogging

The use and goals of these tools were many, but the main philosophy behind was absolutely the same: disclosure. Disclosure and engage in the conversation. As stated by John Palfrey himself the first day, blogging (and diffusion in general) will be the default; anyone interested in not to be blogged or whatever, should manifest it explicitly.

I still remember the reticences around when the MIT set up the OpenCourseWare project: nobody’s gonna enroll in your courses anymore, they said. Well, the reaction to this Berkman disclosure policy has been twofold and crystal clear:

• For those not being able to attend the course, infinite gratitude (I’ve got e-mails) for sharing the materials, the experiences, the reflections, etc.
• For those aiming to attend the course, no crowding out effect at all but the contrary: the awaiting of a long long year before the call for applications for SDP2008 is out. I’ve got e-mails too.

But besides this unselfish sharing of knowledge (I wasn’t actually being unselfish, but just taking notes on my geeky notebook: WordPress) the real thing has been networking. On one hand, the ones blogging during the seminars have created a densest grid of posts, interlinked ones to others, and by thus enriching one’s own posts about a subject or session.

On the other hand, some posts got out of the circle and were mentioned by some other people such as John Palfrey, Ethan Zuckerman or Doc Searls, to name some of the ones that linked to me. Other faculty linked other attendants as well.

And not just contact, but also good input, as Julen’s on the XXVIIth session about IP incentives and peer production.

Reversely, I could almost close the circle I opened when I first met online Tobias Escher, by meeting in person Helen Margetts and Ralph Schroeder, both working with him. The circle will actually close formally in September in York when I’ll meet Tobias himself.

What Is Web Science

This eagerness to use these many online tools leads me to my next topic of reflection. Because, somehow, I think it can be used as some kind of proxy to measure what has been one of the recurrent subjects of personal analysis these days.

Related to the Internet, in particular, and this ICT enhanced society, in general (informational society, information society, knowledge society… whatever), I believe there are two opposite approaches to do research about it.

The first one, the traditional approach, is taking the changes in the society as a second derivative: I do research in Intellectual Property and I found that the Internet is changing my field of knowledge, the target of my research, hence, I will study the interaction between Intellectual Property and the Internet.

Second, the one I’d call the Web Science approach and is better explained with an example: I want to explore the concept of the Digital Native (I actually do, specially his relationship with the concept of e-Awareness). To do so, I must know about psychology and neurosciences (as Mark Prensky did), about how technologies work (Web 2.0, usability, server-client technical relationships, AJAX), sociological implications (social networks, digital identities), economical (broadband diffusion, mobile penetration), legal (cybercrime, intellectual property, spam), political (civic engagement, hacktivism, e-democracy), education (e-portfolio, personal learning environments, long-life learning, e-learning, game-based teaching), communication (citizen journalism), art and culture (mashups, rip-mix-burn), and the longest et caetera ever.

People I know range from one endpoint to the other, being myself, philosophically, no doubt in one of the furthest edges of the Web Science approach. I don’t think there’s a best or a worst approach, but I also believe that:

1. Some aspects of today’s (and tomorrow’s even more) life can only be fully explained (if possible) through a Web Science approach, e.g. Digital Natives
2. Some other aspects can be perfectly be approached in the traditional way, but will require a “digital effort” that, if not done, no valid conclusions can emerge from such researches. Cybercrime is, all in all, crime, but it will be absolutely necessary to understand what an ISP or an IP is, what and how works digital watermarking or hashing or electronic certificates, the technical difference between phishingh and pharming. Or why e-Democracy and e-Governance will be “2.0” (and what this exactly means) or they just won’t be. Or why the number of secure servers is a good proxy to measure e-Business (I owe Michael Best pointing me to this last one, thank you!).

And I suspect that, besides our darkest geeky side, most of the scholars signing up to each and every new next killer app of the year just pretend to analyze things from the inside, to learn by doing, to catch up with our recent digital nationality.

The answer to the question Why did not Academia came up with Wikipedia? is, under this train of though, quite easy: we were far and outside. In another galaxy. In a dimension made out of atoms and time.

Acknowledgments

I can help but end this series of articles by thanking the people that made possible one of my best fortnights so far, both at the intellectual and emotional levels.

Amar Ashar, Suzanne Henry, Colin Maclay, John Palfrey, Jonathan Zittrain, Marcus Foth, Urs Gasser and Ralph Schroeder — the core organizing committee, if I’m not wrong — deserve my highest gratitude, the one you pay by giving them your home keys and a bed in your best room when they’re around town, just that one.

The Faculty leading the seminars is one of that treasures you’d like to keep forever, specially when knowing that they came just for the pleasure of it — and how accessible, willing to share and how good listeners they were.

The attending students — my colleagues… my friends — are responsible for one of my worst headaches (knowledge overload) and heartaches (emotions overdose) ever. Never forgive you about that. I mean it. I just wish the hangover will last for long if not forever… or even get worse.

Last, but not least, I have a huge debt with Tim Kelly, Pere Fabra and Julià Minguillón for their support in me coming here. You all added up to make it possible: thank you, thanks a lot.

More Info

• My SDP Square Metre, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• Wrapping up: SDP, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• SDP 2007; My Final Report, by Joris van Hoboken
• Berkman Buzz, week of July 23, by Patrick McKiernan