Tim Unwin, chairing the session, encourages the speakers to elaborate on the future (10 years ahead) of ICT4D research, what topics, fields, etc. should be on the table.
ICT4D research is too much often disentangled from what practitioners are doing. And when it approaches the field, it is quite often “market analysis” for telecom companies rather than real research.
There is a strong need for deeper analysis and, especially, focus on policy, on strategy. more analytical thinking. And an analysis that is based on hard data that practitioners cannot usually extract and analyse.
Indeed, to reach policy makers, research should also be about blogging, about communicating, about reaching out.
Stop looking at the solution (e.g. mobiles for development) and look instead at the problems (e.g. lack of drinkable water).
Many research is not related with the “community factor” of reality. Thus, it fails at linking the importance of the community with empowerment, solidarity, progress, development.
How we make sense of the models, the numbers, and translate them into real application at the political, democratic, macroeconomic level.
On the other hand, how do we train or engage practitioners in the academic dialogue, in the ethos of research.
How do we measure and look up at data? What should we be looking for to measure impact?
We should make some research that lists the tools to do research and the tools to measure the impact of that research. There also is a need for an organized directory of Who works on ICT4D, where, how. And, a list of projects and their impacts.
We spend too many time isolating the “ICT factor” of projects that work. We should shift the focus to what is the context where these ICTs worked, because that might be the actual success factor.
On the other hand, academics should cluster together and create bigger research groups that somehow stepping out of the structures of Academia. Academics cannot be just reporting on the work that practitioners are doing; they’re behind the curve, amateur journalists, if that is all they do.
Discussion
Q: What happens with ICT governance? Anita Gurumurthy: Definitely the UN should be having a word on that.
Q: What should the role be of local communities in ICT4D? Ken Banks: local communities should be the ones leading the implementation of projects and solutions. Erik Hersman: Indeed, there are many innovations that rise amongst local communities.
Q: We need all components: practitioners, academics, different disciplines and approaches…
Q: There should be bridges between academics and practitioners. The former should be more aware of what happens down on the terrain; the latter should be more knowledgeable about methodology, impact assessment, etc.
Q: There is a big issue in ICT4D concerning non-accessibility for disabled people, including illiterate people that never went to school. The accessibility factor should be urgently addressed in ICT4D research agenda.
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Information and Communication Technologies and Development (2010)
A shift has happened one we can attend an event and everyone has a camera with which they are taking their own pictures, besides the official photographer. Everyone becomes a creator.
on the other hand, the Internet brings any kind of content to our homes, so not only the idea of the creator becomes drastically changed, but also the idea of space becomes irrelevant.
Feedback is enabled between (creative) people anytime, anywhere. The sole condition: openness. There are plenty of technologies that enable feedback at a very low financial cost, low risk, low maintenance and low costs of organization.
Openness can be understood in many ways:
Having access to the content.
Having access to the code of the content (relevant when multimedia).
Being able to change or contribute to the content.
Having the possibility to take the content away and embed or syndicate it elsewhere.
Not only about open content, but also about open structures.
Having the ability to create new platforms or sites very quickly, with most flexibility, with low technological thresholds.
Understanding the process how things are achieved, and not only accessing the final outcomes.
Having access to the source, data of the content.
But it is not about how the Web is changing Education, but how Education is changing the Web.
And part of this “educating the Web” includes the debate around Net Neutrality, with which Education has a close relationship.
Repositories of Open Educational Content: cases and paradigms. Ma Antònia Huertas.
Historically, the question has been how to get quality educational content that is available, reliable and that can be reused.
Nowadays availability might not be more an issue, maybe not the possibility of reusing, but reliability is still an unsolved matter.
Some of the “answers” to the question are:
Distributed open repositories.
Tools for the user to search, create, catalogue, publish.
MeRLí is a catalogue of digital educational resources developed by the Education Department of the Generalitat de Catalunya [Catalan Government]. Its aim is to thel p the educational community in cataloguing, indexing and searching learning materials.
Search engines are a norm amongst repositories, and it does an intensive usage of metadata that describe the content of the educational resources.
The community — though quite a passive one — is also a core component of the repository.
Content belongs to an educational curriculum, features its life cycle (creation, validation, modification history).
Edu3.cat is also a Catalan repository, but this time featuring only audiovisual content and with quite a restrictive source of content, mainly academic institutions.
The repository has over 7,000 learning objects integrated according to curricula, an own search engine and a certified process of acceptance of the learning content in the repository.
Unlike the previous two, Proyecto Agrega is a federation of institutional educational repositories around Spain, mainly belonging to regional governments. The good thing of Agrega is that it renders the individual repositories interoperable and integrable, so that searching or browsing becomes easier and more transparent for the end user.
The platform, notwithstanding, enables specific users to create and upload new content to the repository. The problem is that though the technology is a very advanced one, the community of active users (i.e. creators) is so small that the repository is almost empty — that is, besides what is syndicated from third parties’ repositories.
The critical elements of repositories are the users, not the technology. The weak links of the chain are the submitters, the managers, the curators and the end-users.
Open Educational Practices and Resources. Revisiting the OLCOS Roadmap 2012 César Córcoles.
The roadmap made (2007) several recommendations so that educational institutions could open their resources and apply them to their mainstream activities. What has happened with the recommendations of the OLCOS Roadmap for 2012?
Promote open education partnerships: there have been advances, but arguably not enough. Still closeness is the norm. Same with open educational resources.
Support the development and use of state-of-the art open access resources has quite often been translated on investing on lots of technology and little on training and usage. A bias towards sexy technology.
Public-private partnerships: still very difficult to achieve, especially because the public sector (e.g. Universities) are not in line with the pace of times. This has also been a barrier to switching away from teacher-centred knowledge transfer.
Sharing and reusing has also not been accomplished. Maybe because, most times, people rather create their own content instead of looking what is out of their own institution walls.
Of course, intellectual property and copyright have, definitely, been a huge barrier for the adoption of open educational resources and practices. Indeed the topic has neither been seriously or constructively addressed nor has the industry made any approach or move towards understanding.
Teachers are having hard times using open educational practices to help learners acquire competences for the knowledge society, partly because these competences are rapidly changing, and thus it is difficult to tell which content applies to what (changing) competences.
A key factor is the shift from the “know how” to the “know who”, and open educational practices should be able to support collaborative learning processes and learning communities. This should certainly be a very important reason for institutions to support openness.
From the students’ point of view, openness should be translated into ePortfolios, accessible to third parties.
César here presents the making of Curriculum de estándares web Opera, the Spanish (and Catalan) version of the Opera Web Standards Curriculum, which was published with an open license and, thus, enabled its translation and reusage for educational purposes. The content has proven successful not only for educational purposes, but for a broad community of people interested in the field of Web Standards and that has found in the new version a resource for their own purposes.
The part of the “Preacher 2.0”: it’s not about technology, but methodology; open knowledge, the power of networks and the versatility of blogs, etc.
We are witnessing the convergence of our personnae and our environment, in part through mobility, augmented reality, etc.
The starting point, before exiting or circumventing institutions, is to operate a switch and make people (teachers, students) to work not in the framework of the textbook, but in the framework of tasks, of projects.
The profile of the (Aníbal’s) students is secondary education students that need studying from home: elite sportsmen, housewifes, etc. Thus, lots of new content has been created to adapt them to the new methodologies deployed to meet the needs of these students (circa 30,000). The repository will feature circa 2,000 learning objects by the end of the course 2010-2011.
An important realization is that, when the student is put in the centre of the educational methodology, the learning material becomes not irrelevant but an accessory: by no means the educational material is an important part of the equation. Indeed, the material is frequently updated and complemented with other materials and educational resources: the learning material is no more the central monolith around which the educational process goes around.
If the content is not the centre — though still important, of course — it is because the new centre is the student and working based on tasks and projects.
Taking 30,000 students as the base, it has been calculated that the average cost per student of providing them with all the open educational content they need is 1.50 €.
Some issues/problems:
Openness requires team-working. Individualism is not an option. And team-working requires hard work and commitment.
Assessment is extremely slow. While people have feedback of their actions almost immediately in their daily (digital) lives, the educational system provides them with feedback once a year at the end of the course. This has to be addressed.
Copyright still a hard barrier to overcome.
Openness has to be an institutional decision.
Public funding should absolutely imply openness.
Educational environments should have their own open licenses or legal frameworks to ease openness, authorship recognition, etc.
We should measure how users are doing, not how products are doing. Assessment of people, not products.
We have to explore how to assess learning performance with the same tools that learning takes place. E.g. we cannot teach with Internet in the classroom and make exams without it.
Encourage group- or team-work.
Learning by doing enables changing tasks, contents, syllabuses, etc. extremely easy.
Mobiles for Learning in Africa…. Too Good to be True? John Traxler, University of Wolverhampton, UK
Technology should address three kinds of problems, in this order:
Problems that are difficult;
problems that are impossible; and
problems that are inconceivable.
This in part means that solutions may not be extrapolated because most problems aren’t (mainly because of their context-dependent nature).
We also have to be aware that all technologies have embedded ideologies, and in this specific case contain embedded pedagogies. This might put in danger pre-existing (to our technological landing) learning communities or learning systems, communities or systems that may be fragile compared to the steamroller power of technology. Bottom-up developments are here replaced or impersonated by outside-in developments.
A deeper look at the local context, institutions, needs should be taking place. We’re looking at the sewer and the seeds, and not at the soil.
John Traxler quickly highlights here several examples of m-learning, open and distance learning in Africa. One of these projects is about an SMS-enabled Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) [which reminds me of an exchange of tweets that some of us had long ago about creating “FrontlineSMS:Edu”].
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UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning VII International Seminar: Mobile Technologies for Learning and Development (2010)
Mobile Phones and Language Literacy in Rural Developing Regions Matthew Kam, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
When analysing what the user is doing with technology, it is very important to have a multidisciplinary approach.
Needs and problem statement: fluency in “power language” (e.g. English), public schools in developing regions (e.g. India) are not succeeding, 101 million primary school-age children do not attend school (36M in South-Asia, 39M in Sub-Saharan Africa).
How can cellphones make education more accessible through out-of-school environments? Can game-like exercises provide an enjoyable learning experience? Can one learn anytime, anywhere without disrupting work?
The project began in India in 2004 with 10 rounds of fieldwork (adding up to more than 12 months of fieldwork). Since 2004 and during that time, there has been several rounds of pilots that included needs assessments, exploratory studies in slums and villages, feasibility studies again in slums and villages, testing, classroom and out-of-school studies and controlled studies.
A classroom study deployed throughout 2008, three times per week, after-school program at a private village school, demonstrated significant post-test improvements on spelling skills, with learning gains correlated with grade levels.
Another out-of-school pilot study focused on the use of cellphones in children’s daily lives over an extended time. The participation in the study was voluntary. m-Learning consisted in cellphone-based game when “working” in the fields to improve English literacy. It was a task-based language teaching, with an instructional sequence around tasks. Much of the methodology was already out in the market (do not reinvent the wheel), so best practices in 2nd language teaching were analysed and more than 50 design patterns where distilled to be applied in the own project.
On the other hand, it was also analysed what were traditional Indian villages games like, how were they different from existing Western videogames. Thus, 296 game design patterns where documented, identifying 37 non-tribial differences. At last, educational games were designed on purpose and based on traditional village games.
Access to electricity was a major issue, and the average user could use the mobile phone for learning during 2:23h per week. Social environment was also an issue, as some kids had to hide the phones away from their parents or brothers, had maintenance issues, etc.
The average participant covered 46 new words over 16 weeks of unsupervised usage of cellphones. At this rate, each participant is expected to learn 150 words in a calendar year. Benchmark is 500 words, given good learning conditions. The problem is that during the first 8 weeks, the rate of number of new words completed is very high (up to 40-65 words per week), while the rate falls to under 10 words per week for the rest of the weeks. So, the novelty effect has a very hight attraction power, but it ends up fading out.
This project has been now on a scaling-up phase with a Nokia grant that enabled the extension of the pilot to 800 low-income children in 40 locations.
A major challenge for this project is not scaling in quantity, but also in quality, making it advance towards the acquisition of advanced literacy skills. The project is now being designed based on Chall’s stages of reading development. On the other hand, one size fits all approach does not scale, which implies quite a complex deployment strategy.
Discussion
Ismael Peña-López: Has there any research been made to analyse the fading out of the novelty effect? Any ideas on how to extend it? A: There are two strategies to extend the novelty effect. The most evident one is, of course, to include more and more novelties along time. This is, usually, not economically sustainable, as content production is very expensive. On the other hand, introduction of more and more novelties might be misleading. A second way, which is not actually extending the novelty effect, is to make the games more engaging. This is the strategy the project is taking and that is why a game designer has joined the team to specifically focus in this aspect.
Eva de Lera: Why not using bigger devices/displays that allow for more users at the same time that the tiny cellphone screen? A: There is not really a single approach. There are many experiences on several users converging on a single device, like the multi-mice PC. On the other hand, engagement in language learning often depends on oneself being in charge of his own learning, and being in control of the game. But, yes, definitely, there is not a single path.
Carlos Fernández: Why not using less multimedia-intensive learning games (e.g. quizzes) with lower requirements of adoption and, especially, with lower power/battery requirements? A: This is already done, but it also has a trade-off with engagement, so it is difficult to tell where the balance is.
Q: How far can we go on in m-learning for language literacy? A: It depends. It certainly can go really far, but we should definitely consider (i.e. do not forget) the role of the teacher. Thus, maybe the upper end of m-learning should more be about teacher training rather than direct student education. Talking about individual vs. group activities, the shortcomings are not obvious; sometimes individual use is better.
m4Lit project is about mobiles for literacy, a project set out to explore the viability of using mobile phones to support reading and writing by youth in South Africa.
South Africa has an excellent mobile infrastructure, with good mobile coverage and relatively cheap mobile data plans.
Most people in South Africa do their reading at school, but 51% of homes have no books at home, there is no leisure in reading. Thus, reading activity is really low, which has a negative impact in literacy as a whole.
The project created Kontax, a mobile novel (m-novel) was written and published in September 2009 on a mobisite and on MXit. The story, called Kontax, was published in English and in isiXhosa. Readers were invited to interact with it as it unfolded – teens could discuss the unfolding plot, vote in polls, leave comments, and finally submit a written piece as part of a competition for story sequel ideas.
The project got more than 63,000 subscribers, +28,000 aged 11-18 and 27,000 aged 19-24. That is a lot of youngsters, but not all of them where. On the other hand, not everyone read the whole story, but only 17,200 did, of which +7,000 teens. Nevertheless, this are astonishingly high reading figures for South Africa.
Findings
Most digital writing takes place on mobile phones, but it tend to be short, like SMS.
Most reading took place on mobile phones or on paper.
Word-of-mouth was the main channel by which people came to know about the project.
The isiXhosa became very popular, especially in relationship with the presence of the language in written literature in South Africa.
The pilot project became Kontax 2, Kontax 3, Kontax 4 and then Yoza, a mobisite that brings content (literature) to mobile phones. Even Shakespeare (Romeo & Juliet, on the public domain) has been uploaded to the site for it to be read on a mobile phone.
Some topics (youngs, romance) work better than others on mobile phones. And we find that people do comment on the works and even enter in a “dialogue” with the characters of the novels.
Lessons learnt:
Mobile is a content monster. People wait for more content to read.
Mobile content is instant. And people will participate, comment, engage in conversations.
The readers never sleep, they connect at any time to the website. Content is read anytime, anywhere.
The platform matters: to create one’s own platform is hard. It is better to use someone else’s platform that has already caught in the market.
Interest is difficult to maintain.
Audience is fickle, fans are loyal. Fans left lots of comments and spent many time on the stories.
When reading becomes “snacky”, it is hard to make it sticky. You’re waiting for the bus, you read; when the bus comes, you quit reading: you have to take this context into account.
You might end up with something you didn’t expect.
The economic sustainability of the project is definitely an issue. Either you partner with a funder, or you embed your project in the educational system so that, in mainstreaming it, diffusion becomes more easy and straightforward.
South Africa is book poor, but it is mobile rich: Africa’s e-readers use mobiles as their Kindle.
Open questions:
What are the effects on non-English mother-tongue speakers?
To what extent will teens allow “us” to occupy “their” space?
Who is excluded from the mobile Internet?
When reading becomes “snacky”, what does it do to concentration abilities?
There is a distance and conflict between mobile literacies and school literacies. This needs to be explored and better understood because mobile literacies are so pervasive in young peoples’ lives (Walton, 2010). What do we do with this?
Discussion
Q: Was there any criticism for having people with their eyes stuck on a small screen? A: Not at all.
Emma Kiselyova: When the project is over, what’ll be next? A: The main goal now is looking at sustainability options. These options range from other sponsors, ads in the stories, etc.
Gardner Campbell: What is going to happen with the generated content? A: Everything is online and it is available for everyone and under an open license.
Q: Wasn’t it possible to stablish agreements with book publishers? A: It seemed that their tempos were really slow. Q: But, nevertheless, now that the project has shown success, a second contact may be advisable. A: Maybe, but there still is the issue of affordability of content. For now, content has been freely available on the net. If it’s put behind a paywall, audience may decrease dramatically, and the goals were not making money, but contributing to increase literacy.
Interesting round of comments on “texting literacy” here. On the one hand, some people state that young people underestimate their own literacy or their own language skills. On the other hand, there is also the debate whether “texting” can be applied anywhere and whether there is a need to teach the critical skills to be able to tell when this text-speak is appropriate. Personally, I’ve always thought that e-mail and SMS is not written language, but transcribed oral language. We should address the issue from this standpoint of view.
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UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning VII International Seminar: Mobile Technologies for Learning and Development (2010)
Between Conservatism and Messianism: Is Technology Really Changing Student Expectations in Higher Education? Francesc Pedró, Senior Policy Analyst at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI).
Has a thing like Facebook, or technology in general, changed the way learners understand learning and the world as a whole?
What do we know?
Most young students have a computer at home, and many of them own a good array of digital devices: cell phone, music or video device, laptop, etc. A quarter of them up to 5 or more. E-mailing, text messaging or instant messaging are also widely adopted practices.
The fact is that youngsters have a deep link to technology, and technology mediates most of their daily life.
But the results are not the same: higher amounts of economic, human and social/cultural capital lead to improved results thanks to ICTs. Lower socio-economic status leads to a negative impact of technology. Technology magnifies the former differences amongst individuals.
Indeed, the concept of “digital native” has become too generic to describe what’s happening at the intersection of youth+ICTs.
Have expectations changed?
So, youngsters are intensive users of technology and technology mediates their lives: do they have different expectations concerning learning? Should we have to change the way we teach?
A first problem raises when we see evidence that there are disparities between teachers’ perceptions of students and their own self-perceptions. This is especially evident when looking at the most preferred ways to learn vs. the way students are taught nowadays. For instance, though students are technology intensive users, they believe that learning is more about teamworking or learning by doing rather than about using computers in class (which on the other hand is what most edutech projects are heading to).
Some basic misconceptions:
In general, higher education students prioritise contact, face-to-face. It cannot be tell whether this will still be this way in the nearer future, but today’s data say so.
Students do not want experiments, do not want “educational innovation projects” with no guarantees of improving their learning efficiency.
What will the impact be like?
First of all: intensity of usage of computers and web 2.0 tools at school is almost non-existent or, to say the least, very very low. At the University, the level of usage amongst teachers is still low, but there seems to be a changing trend. Many of them, for instance, already use learning management systems in their teaching or have a useful library website.
Lessons learnt:
Technology must be engaging. Educational innovation must be risk-free.
Technology must be convenient. Technology must enable learning wherever, whenever. And make it easy.
Technology must help to increase the student’s productivity in learning. No burdens added but, on the contrary, more efficiency.
All in all, context matters, and no conclusions can be raised without taking into account the context of the educational initiative, the student, etc. Listening matters too: Universities have to listen to what their students “say” in order to get feedback (about their context) and so adjust their educational technology initiatives.
