ICTlogy

Ismael Peña-López
Unpeeling the layers of the digital divide: category thresholds and relationships within composite indices

The goal of this research is to add reflection and knowledge to the belief that there is an important lack of tools to measure the development of the Information Society, specially addressed to policy makers aiming to foster digital development. We believe there is still an unexplored point of view in measuring the Information Society which goes from inside-out instead of outside-in. In other words, the main indices and/or reports focus either in technology penetration or in the general snapshot of the Information Society “as is”. There is, notwithstanding, a third approach that would deal with working only with digital-related indicators and indices, thus including some aspects not taken into account by the technology penetration approach (i.e. informational literacy), and putting aside some “real economy” or “analogue society” indicators not strictly related to the digital paradigm. Relationships between subindices would also provide interesting insight for policy makers on which to ground the design of their initiatives.

Presentation as a mental map:

Unpeeling the layers of the digital divide
[click to enlarge]

Working bibliography

Some comments/suggestions I got:

• The importance of context when designing indices and how this context might challenge the accuracy, objectivity, suitability of these indices
• The importance, beyond infrastructures, of international services broadcasters such as BBC or Voice America
• Analyzing what the (real) goal, purpose of the indices is. How and, over all, why are they built the way they are
• The importance of not only looking at what worked (e.g. projects and policies to foster the information society), but also what has failed, what and how many are the failed projects
• The opportunity to develop different indexes according to the different countries, contexts, etc.
• context, context, context

Florence Nameere Kivunike
Measuring the Information Society: An Explorative Study of Existing Tools

Why assess the Information society

• Current status
• Comparison
• Tracking progress
• Policy, decision-making
• Research-related
• Value-judgment

What is assessed

• Social
• Economic
• Institutional

Temporal concept

• Readiness
• Intensity
• Impact

Limitations

• Focusing mainly on infrastrucutre
• Relationships among features
• Limited consideration of context in terms of the enabling factors e.g. social or cultural setup and flexibility
• Oversimplified methods characterized by subjective approaches

Challenges of IS Assessment

• Dynamic and complex nature of the IS
• Data constraints especially in development countries
• Challenge of measuring transformation

More info

• Menou, M. & Taylor, R. (2006) A “Grand Challenge”: Measuring Information Societies. 22, The Information Society p 261-267

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?

Leads: John Kelly, Jake Shapiro*

The blogosphere is an emerging online global community of enormous proportions. Blog search engines find blogs and posts for you, ranked by the blogger’s authority. But what is “authority,” really? Authority about what, and among whom? The blogosphere is a complex social network, in which people who share interests, affiliations, values and ideologies are more densely connected. This network can be mapped, to understand the emergent structure of who is online, what they care about, and where they get their information. The methods are hard-core statistical network science, the results are often subtle, qualitative insights into politics, culture and ideas. We take a closer look at the English language blogosphere, and a quick tour of others as well.

(*) though scheduled, Jake Shapiro could not come

Words found within five words of “security” in blogposts: Bush, energy, agency, border, immigration, internatl, vital, illegal, enforcement, Palestinian, documents, vital, basic, sensitive, archive, documents, fence, Islamic

Categorization of political blogs according to inbound and outbound links:

• Partisans: get and send links to the same “side”
• Watchdog: get the ideas of the “other” side and bring them to their “side”
• Lightning dog: contrary to the watchdog
• Anomaly: contrary to Partisans

In English language, blogs are mainly driven by USA politics, being technology a (surprisingly) rather minor issue (among biggest issues, of course).

Blogroll seems not to be a very accurate measure of a blogger’s network, as it is too static. Linking is a more actual, live measure of what they care about. Actually, blog measuring sites (Technorati, BlogPulse, etc.) do take this into account more than blogroll. Attentive Clusters are people linking to similar things (of course, crosslinking too).

Looking at outlinks from the blogosphere, The New York Times is the most linked and by difference (on aggregate terms), which supposes both an interest on formal brainfood and also a rol in highest traditional media information diffusion by blogs. And media lead the outlinks taking out blogs. Technology and so — remember: no blogs, now, only non-blog sites — go on second place getting links from blogs.

The intelligentsia looks more one to each other — regardless of what “side” they’re in — in linking patterns than they do with other bloggers from their “side”: they’ll link to news media, to scientific reviews, to “intellectual” blogs and sites on politics, etc. Each one with its own flavor, but their core is quite similar across political color.

The real interesting things in the blogosphere happen heither on the A-list bloggers — real hubs that congregate huge amounts of links — nor on the long tail of the power distribution, populated with micronetworks of very particular interests. Between these two extremes, among the few thousands to the few hundreds of links exchanged, analysis of networking patterns within the blogosphere begins to make sense.

My reflections

• How are links normalized in a blog? repeated links in same post don’t count? do they?What about comments? John Kelly just answers that comments are not counted in the analysis, even if they might bring some interesting light about networking between blogs.
• I share Ralph Schroeder‘s concerns about whether link measuring is a good method to arise some conclusions about how the blogosphere connects to each other and non-blogs media, as linking policies may vary a lot among different bloggers.

Readings

More info

• Citizen Kane? No, Citizens Gilmour, Shifferes and Kelly, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• OII Day 3, by Alla Zollers

In 2005, the e-Divide Team carried on a survey and compared computer use among US and Vietnamese students. They found that that Americans did use computers more frequently at home and at schools. One of the reasons might perfectly be that even if the proportion of students having one computer at home almost equal among US and Vietnamese students, most of these computers in the US where connected to the Internet, while more than half of the Vietnamese where not. When looking at computer availability at the school, 92% of American students almost never had problem to access computers at school, vs. only 21% Vietnamese.

So far, the charts bring no big news. But the following one is really interesting:

Source: e-Divide!

The authors of the survey read these data this way:

Awareness of the role of computers in the future
Most students at Pinkerton Academy think that computers are important for their future career. However, Vietnamese students have much higher awareness of this issue. While only 38% of American students think that computer is very important to their future career, this number is 70% in Vietnamese students.

One explanation for this way of thinking is that while computer use “wouldn’t make a difference” for any American, digital literacy in Vietnam really can, as we have seen in Bangladesh or India’s Bangalore, where — among others — offshoring of coding routines to these countries have hugely impacted local economies and created the emergency of new middle classes based on the IT Industry.

But I’d rather explore a second explanation. In 1987, Robert Solow stated his famous aphorism You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics, known as the Solow Paradox. These “invisibility of computers” has sometimes been related to the “invisibility of technology”: some technologies (i.e. electricity) have become so natural that have become factually invisible, hence you click on the switch and don’t see light coming out of a miracle. Thus, computer are so perfectly integrated within productive processes that have become invisible for statistics.

Under this point of view, the question is: who is, really, more aware of computer’s impact on one’s career: Vietnamese students, 71% of whom state that computers are very important to their future career? or American students, which for a 62% of whom computers have already become invisible?

To stress this last point, let’s remember that Vietnam ranked 178th (out of 181) in the Digital Opportunity Index for year 2006 and had just 23% of the value of the US score to the ICT Opportunity Index for the same year (76.66 vs. 322.73). To make things simpler, let’s consider a country with almost 100% literacy (not digital, but just read and write), and another country ranking quite poor in this aspect. And let’s put the former question under this new approach: Importance of being able to read and write to future career?. In the first country, the highly literate, no one would even consider saying that being able to read and write makes any difference, as everyone is supposed to be able to, hence you’ll be judged by other skills. In the second country, literate people would consider, on the contrary, that this is a highly valuable skill.

Yet another example. Put it in another scenario: all in all, who’s got more e-Awareness? Digital Immigrants or Digital Natives?

A continuació hi ha algunes dreceres a continguts nous o continguts significatius del meu treball més recent o rellevant:

A continuación hay algunos enlaces a nuevos contenidos o contenidos significativos de mi trabajo más reciente o relevante:

Here come some shortcuts to new content or significant content from my most recent or relevant work:

The Congress on Internet, Law and Politics has the aim of continuing the task of reflecting on, analyzing and discussing the main changes taking place in law and politics in the information society. This third congress focuses on the questions that currently represent the most important challenges and new developments in the fields of copyright, data protection, Internet security, problems of responsibility, electronic voting, and the new regulation of e-Administration, as well as dedicating a specific area to the current state of the use of new technologies by law professionals.

John Palfrey, Executive Director Berkman Center of Internet and Society
Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation, Oxford Internet Institute

John Palfrey

[live simulation of somebody uploading copyrighted material to YouTube and the copyright holder’s lawyer and Google’s lawyer fighting one to each other. John Palfrey dynamizing the event and Jonathan Zittrain taking notes on a beamed PowerPoint presentation and putting all sort of things on a browser. Too good to describe it here in full detail ;D ]

Summing up: copyright has worked to distribute content under a scarcity model. Digital technologies have made scarcity an ancient thing, so we should be able to set up a new business model to get to people what they’re looking for without infringing the law, and by avoiding costly transaction costs (i.e. sues, punctual agreements, etc.)