ICTlogy

Student research seminar: Benjamin Addom

This is a proposal for a theory-driven Evaluation Research using Fourth Generation Evaluation Framework (FGE). The history of agricultural development reveals that agricultural technologies over the years have been bought, borrowed, or stolen and therefore should not necessarily be domestic. The model of diffusion of innovation especially has been applied in the transfer of these technologies to developing countries. TEEAL and AGORA are two initiatives that are transferring scientific knowledge from the North to the South. The proposed research tries to explore or assess or evaluate the merit of the initiative to the primary users (researchers, students and policy makers) and its worth to the secondary users (farmers) in Ghana. The concept of global and local knowledge, theory of absorptive capacity of “community”, community ties theory, and the technique of social network analysis are being proposed.

Main aspects

• Inefficient mechanisms for informatino/knowledge “transfer” (exchange)
• Inadequate investment in research internally
• Use of outdated technologies

Arnold and Bell (2001) argue that the exponential growth of ICTs has transformed the ability to take advantage of knowledge developed in other places of for other purposes.
WSIS Action Plan, Line C-7, item 21 on e-Agriculture.
Faculty and researchers only had access to print copies of serials that were years, if not decades, out of date (Wallace & Jan Olsen, 1980).
Research background: Cornell University TEEAL Project.
Research background: FAO AGORA Project

The study will evaluate

• Link between TEEL/AGORA and researchers/students
• Link between researchers/students and the farmers
• What content do Researchers/Students “transfer”
• How does the social structure of the communities facilitate or retard use of the knowledge?
• With what effects?

Theoretical Framework

• Concept for knowledge sharing – GDN or WB, Szulanski (2003)
• Absorptive Capacity of Communities – Cohen and Levinthal 1990 Xahra and George (2002)
• Theory of Community Ties – Warren (1978)
• Social Network Theory – Perkins et al. (2002)

My reflections

• I guess I’d add some experiences from the Open Access world, specially when dealing about the diffusion of knowledge in open environments and how to measure it

More info

• FGE:
• TEEAL
• AGORA

Lead: Marcus Foth

• How do residents connect with each other to create and maintain social networks?
• How can technology dbe degisned to neotiate a balance between the opportunitiews of interactive services vs. identity, trust and privacy?
• What is the role of content?

What’s community? Social network, urban village, swarm, neighbourhood, me and my friends… Have something in common?

Shift from the “little boxes” model to personalized social networks: more permeable boundaries…

Urban tribes: swarms of interconnected friends, filling the gap between college and married life, fluidity of social networks, place and proximity matters.

Communicative Ecology

• Discursive layer
• Social layer
• Technology layer

global vs. local; collective vs. individual; online vs. offline

Community as Collective vs. Community as Network

• interest in the community vs. interest in the individual
• community activism vs. personal, social networking
• public vs. private
• many-to-many vs. peer-to-peer switchboard
• formal discussion vs. informal chat
• asynchronous vs. synchronous
• permanent vs. transitory
• hierarchically structured vs. networked to the “edge of chaos”
• discussion board, mailing lists vs. instant messenger email, SMS
• Gemeinschaft vs. Urban Tribe

Connectivity does not ensure community. If you build it, they will not necessarily come. On the other hand, social capital rich communities are likely to progress and also to have a preference for “social isolation”.

Readings

More info

• i-neighbors
• Kelvin Grove Urban Village

Lead: Michael Best, Ethan Zuckerman

Mobile Telephony in Developing Countries, by Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman introduces TEDGlobal 2007, which was held in Africa.

African issues about ICTs can be tracked at Timbuktu Chronicles, by Emeka Okafor, or at Africa Open For Business. But TED just focused on Foreign Aid, mainly lead by Bono (see Bono, I Presume?, Africans to Bono: ‘For God’s sake please stop!’ and Bono versus Mwenda — all via Ethan Zuckerman’s blog).

The point should be to fix, before you pour into Foreign Aid, government/governance, so the money goes to the appropriate place/hands. More indeed, investment should go hand to hand with entrepreneurship and infrastructures.

Number of handsets is still increasing in Africa, but the difference (among many others) between blog analysis and mobile communications analysis is that these last ones they are so difficult to track. But it is an infrastructure that can be used for entrepreneurship, activism, or governance, etc.

Interactive Radio for Justice, for instance, allow users to send SMS questions to the radio, which can feature DRC deputy minister for defence, head of military operations for MONUC. This is a way to close the loop of media system.

mobilemonitors.org also represents another way of making elections more transparent, by calling to the radio and report abuse on voting places. And not just phone, but the pervasive of phone cameras is also a fact that is changing witnessing.

M-Pesa hire air (phone) time. But it is also being used for money transfer: I load the phone with money (say, air time) and a third party “downloads” the phone and gets the money back, with even a bank account intermediating.

Even activists upload speeches in the format of ringtones that can be downloaded and installed on your mobile phone.

Vodacom Congo is a compelling example on how strong is the demand for communications in Africa.

Success of incremental infrastructure in Africa

• built on small (compared to huge projects) investments that quickly yield revenue
• partially user financed and owned
• replacement technology

Already incremental: mobile phones, internet. Possibly incremental: power grids, roads. Problems in the possibly incremental: inefficiency, coordination problems.

Answering a couple of Ralph Schroeder‘s questions, Ethan Zuckerman states that we see that there’s more voice traffic that text on mobile networks. Actually, low literacy is quite an issue for a lot of mobile users.

And concerning the role of the State, so far it seems that the mainstream is just to put some requirements on communication services, such as covering rural areas that otherwise (without State regulation) would remain uncovered. Surprisingly, telecoms end up by finding ways to actually make profit out of these requirements, by making up new business models that take into account those new clusters. But pricing regulation, etc. does not seem to be the most common answer.

Daithí Mac Síthigh expresses his concern that all the infrastructures are owned by the private sector, making it difficult to build upon them national strategies. Ethan Zuckerman’s concern is what happens with those infrastructures if they are owned by a government that you do not trust.

Incremental Infrastructure and the Democratization of Provision, by Mike Best

The question is not if we should give a poor a computer instead of e.g. food, but if there is a role for ICTs in providing the poor with food.

ICT4D – Africa – Innovation

• Technological and engineering challenges
• Supportive public policies and regulatory environment
• Smart businesses, especially SMSs
• Collaborative and socially aware interventions
• Rigorous monitoring, evaluation, assessment

Post-conflict countries are being the ones with highest mobile phone use growth… but it might be because of replacement of fixed phones. So, is the indicator a good one?

A Knowledge-based Rwanda

• Physical infrastructure
• Human capacity
• Peace, security and reconciliation
• Good governance and supportive public policy
• Grassroots opportunities
• Spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship

Where fiber is not available (and not easy to build), wireless technologies come to the rescue: VSAT, GSM/GPRS, Wi-Max, Wi-Fi, UMTS, etc.

Readiness Assessment

• Pervasiveness
• Geographic Dispersion
• Sectoral Absorption
• Connectivity Infrastructure
• Organizational Infrastructure
• Sophistication of Use

Conclusions on the e-Readiness Assessment for Liberia

• A strong independent regulator is critical to growth of the overall ICT sector
• The lack of a fiber network in metropolitan Monrovia along with a national fiber backbone limits significantly domestic Internet capacity. A revitalized Liberian Telecommunications Corporation can serve naturally as a network service provider.
• A connection to the submarine cable that travels from Portugal along the west coat of Africa (SAT3/WASC) can be realized perhaps with a link via neighboring Côte d’Ivoire

My reflections

• We’ve seen many successes of mobile phone but… what are the limitations? is there a need to shift to the desktop anyway? or can we stick to mobile communications?

Readings

More info

• Closing The Loop: Zuckerman and Best on Africa and Technology, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• Summer doctoral program at Berkman, by Ethan Zuckerman
• Balancing Africa News Update
• The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog (2005), by Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance
• To do with the price of fish, by Rob Katz
• The Global Diffusion of the
  Internet Project
• Africa, Offline: Waiting for the Web
• Wolcott, P., Press, L., McHenry, W., Goodman, S. & Foster, W. (2001). “A Framework for Assessing the Global Diffusion of the Internet”. In Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 2(6). Atlanta: Association for Information Systems.

Student research seminar: Bodó Balázs

Bodo Balazs does an overview of piracy practices along history and seeing how they actually, even if acting against the Law, they played an important role on knowledge diffusion.

Piracy exists because there is a systematic market failure created by the advent of the Internet, and is not suppliers pushed but demand pulled.

And more, piracy has evolved from evil masterminds to individuals interconnected through peer-to-peer networks. Causes?

• Not enough products at the right price at the right time, vs. the largest, most comprehensive digital archive in history: demand is there, supply is not
• Release strategies, the party next door effect: commercial campaigns cannot more be constrained to country boundaries, because they will spill over and become the former point
• User valuations: culture is an experience
• True demand: people applauding after seeing an ad

File sharing is also about identity, loyalty and can even become really important in the political agenda.

Initial guesses

• Traditional markets limited by the economies of scale
• Heavy public subsidies
• Applies to very narrow selection of target
• Heavy competition
• Public bankruptcy
• So: who will serve the marginal?

Good comment by Wendy Seltzer: even if there is no problem on not respecting intellectual property, the problem still is that pirates do not create content, which is what intellectual property is all about, not (or not just) distribution. Bodó Balázs states that there are some communities, little clusters, that self organize, create legitimate copies and somehow managet to exclude free riding from the community. A good thing about P2P downloading is that it seems to help street pirates to get out of the “market”.

Student research seminar: Ralph Lengler

In this session I will first briefly show some of my works, namely our e-learning-project visual-literacy.org with the periodic table and the VIZ-HALL.

An ad (but also other forms of visual commmunication) which elicits a mental collaboration from the consumer is more likely to be an effective ad. As the consumer contributes in the process of making meaning, he becomes “part-author” and thereby he is moving from adversary to accomplice.

What Makes Visualization Effective?

VizHall, to rate a picture. As a peer-learning tool that it is, is that it requires involvement by the user to make full benefit of it.

Likeability

• Entertaining
• Relevant
• Empathetic
• Alienating
• Confusing
• Familiar

The power of the metaphore, based on intelligence. The problem is that you have to get them, to understand them, which is quite dangerous if you can loose your chance to send your message.

Where there’s a strong brand lovemark, it might be possible to subvert the discourse and first I have interest (lovemark) in your brand, you can catch my attention, persuade me and then push me towards action; normal procedure is to catch attention, get my interest and persuade me to come into action.

My reflections

More info

• Visual Literacy: An E-Learning Tutorial on Visualization for Communication, Engineering and Business
• A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods
• Ralph Lengler’s del.icio.us
• information aesthetics

Lead: Ralph Schroeder

Researchers increasingly work at-a-distance and across institutional, disciplinary and geographical boundaries. What are the challenges of online collaboration? How is working in distributed mode different from face-to-face meetings and collaboration? When people work in a distributed group, what are the implications for trust and leadership? There are also ethical and legal issues in e-Research, such as the privacy and anonymity of data, intellectual property and access to shared digital resources. And finally, different disciplines organize online research in different ways. What are the lessons from these ways of working together? The lecture will examine both general issues in distributed research and individual e-Research projects.

Millions of people spend lots of hours online, most of them having entertainment. Besides what the goal of going online is, it actually has potentially huge implications, because we spend increasing time of our life in virtual environments. Indeed, it’s not just online, but media: TV is mediated communication and this is what the whole thing is about: mediated communication.

Definition of Virtual Environment (VE) technology as presence, plus interacting, and copresence.

Sense of presence: in a virtual CAVE-like system, a precipice is pictures with a walking plank across: do people just walk around and over/on the precipice or do they “cross” the plank? Sense of copresence: do people walk through each other in VE?

Projects

• Blue-C
• CAVE, with Anthony Steed and Dave Roberts
• Onlive Traveler

Findings about small groups in immersive systems

• As good as being there
• Presence — high, low — but also interaction
• Presence — high, low and modality
• Technology determines “leadership”
• Following and not following conventions (through avatars, leaning, pointing)

Technology determines the quality (and output) of interaction. For instance, an interaction of three people, two of them on desktops and the third one with virtual reality goggles, it is highly likely (statistically significant) that, asked after the experience, the one with virtual reality goggles will be pointed as the leader of the group — even if nobody new what was the others’ interface.

Findings about large groups in desktop non-immersive systems

• Non-verbal communication
• Control and flexibility (Sims)
• Sociability around objects (There)
• Avavatar appearance (consistency)
• Reality cheks and overshadowing
• Large groups and spaces: “Inhabitability”, stake, transferability, on- and offline relationships

Other New Media…

• Relax (visual) sense and place requirement — but people speak of presence and sharing space
• Nardi et al on instant messaging at work: outeraction as “reaching out”, awareness moments, stepping in and out
• Christian Licoppe on mobiles and SMS: copresent interactions… into a seamless web, connected management of relationships
• Other examples of Cyworlds, Japanese mobiles, webcamera use, Ling on mobiles

Linking SVEs and Other New Media

• Switching focus and multiple modes
• Mediated and face-to-face relations — more, richer, more dense?
• Being there together — historically, in media theory, and today
• Adding to and complementing multimodal connectedness

The Varieties of “Being There Together”

• Videoconferencing is proliferating in different forms, has practical constraints, and is mergins with other technologies
• Online spaces support spatial interaction, the development of social norms, and content that engages users
• Social networking relates to “always on” togetherness, and expresses identity and social “availability” and “awareness” (as with IM, mobile phones and social spaces)

My reflections

• To which extent are personal websites — specially those with dynamic content and high density of outlinking to other personal websites — shared virtual environments, in the sense that somehow the owner shares, by exposure, his digital identity to others, even in an asynchronous way? In other words, if my digital personna “is still there”, can I consider I am actually being there somehow, even if my physical personna is not?
• Does the time I spent in an asynchronous virtual environment counts as co-presence, even if there is a lag of time among digital experiences of different individuals or their digital personnae?
• If they are, a collection of them implies an emerging (in the sense of emergence), self-built virtual community made up of individual virtual environments?
• Provided there’s a bunch of academic personal pages, interlinked among them (i.e. in posts, blogrolls, comments, pingbacks and trackbacks), could be we talking about an asynchronous virtual faculty board?
• Maybe the concept of the “web page” is quite (really) poor, but imagine it evolves into a “construct” in the sense of William Gibson?

Readings

More info

• Being Ralph Schroeder, by Daithí Mac Síthigh