ICTlogy

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

Last September 25th, 2007, I had the chance to present my paper The personal research portal: web 2.0 driven individual commitment with open access for development (paper, presentation) at the Web2forDev Conference in Rome.

The hardest criticism I got was that my presentation was too theoretical and lacked practical evidence or, at least, a real example to illustrate what it was thought to be a good theory. Ironically — for me at least — I did have some of these examples, being the one I new better in the field of Information and Communication Technologies for Development my own case: ICTlogy. Ironical, I said, because I did not pretend to be immodest by presenting my own site as a good practice, so I “shifted to theory”. After a good time talking about the differences between pretentiousness, humbleness and plain idiocy, I promised Wang Zhong (Guangdong Academy of Agricultural Sciences) to seize the opportunity of yesterday being the 4th Anniversary of ICTlogy, be completely unhumble and picture some of the benefits that scholarly blogging has given myself, most of them about facts that scholars in developing countries, junior scholars or scholars working on marginal subjects — i.e. people out of the mainstream — could perfectly use to leverage their own digital and offline presence and reputation. And I might add, following Olivier Berthoud’s suggestions, that they could be useful for practitioners too.

There’s an added reason to write such a practical — but grounded, I’d dare add — article about research and development: the Council of Science Editors has proposed all science editors to publish a Global Theme Issue on Poverty and Human Development for today. And ICTlogy has committed to join this proposal.

ICTlogy began its way in October 21st, 2003, as the blog of both a practitioner and a researcher in the field of ICT4D. Since then, it has evolved into a Personal Research Portal, covering a wide range of disciplines directly or indicrectly related to ICT4D: the Digital Divide, e-Readiness, e-Inclusion, Digital Literacy, Open Access, Nonprofit Technology, ICT Reglulation, the Information Society, e-Learning…

The information gathered here is organized across the following sections:

• ICT4D Blog (, ), with news, links and reflexions.
• ICT4D Events (), a list/calendar of events (congresses, conferences, symposia, etc.).
• ICT4D Wiki (, ), with all “static” data I gather around: people, institutions, resources…
• ICT4D Bibliography (), a good bunch of authors and works.
• ICT4D learning objects repository (), with courseware in the field of nonprofits and development.

In June 2006, retroactively, an edited version of the blog became ICTlogy, review of ICT4D (ISSN 1886-5208), destilling the best blog posts. The reasons to do so were many, but can be summarize as avoiding establishment allergy.

Quantitative data of the whole site are as follows:

• 550 blog articles
• 70 static pages
• 70 events
• 350 wiki articles
• 760 works references
• 625 authors references
• 100 unique visitors per day
• 200 feed subscribers

All this content is accessible (for me and for each and everyone) everywhere and everywhen. Indeed, it is highly searchable and, hence, findable. The first benefit thus in having such a site is knowledge management: from my notes to my finished and polished articles, from my thoughts to my bibliographical references, from some links to expert dataset sites, everything is here and, at least for my needs, neatly organized.

The second benefit is that from time to time I can extract the essence of some ideas going on and on and feed with it an article, my PhD Thesis, a conference. I (almost) never wrote anything for the blog, but the contrary: the blog helped me in writing something. The story of my Master’s Thesis (e-Learning for Development: a model) or the story of my article The personal research portal: web 2.0 driven individual commitment with open access for development are perfect examples of this.

The third benefit comes from this good amount of content gathered around my digital persona, shaping a live CV that automatically gets updated as soon as I upload new content, news, etc. Thus, searches by keywords representing recent subjects dealt with here usually make the site appear on the first or second pages.

The interesting output of it all is not having a happier ego, but finding people, networking being a third, highly valuable, benefit: doing reverse engineering and replicating the searches helps me to find people, institutions, projects working in the same fields that I do. It happens every time. And same applies with visits to the site coming from links (not searches). I’ve noticed that this site belongs to the list of recommended resources of several other sites and, indeed, courses about ICT4D. Again, the good thing is not knowing you’re there… but knowing they are: thanks to this, I now know of courses and scholars interested in the field that otherwise I maybe wouldn’t.

Of course, it is great when, at last, you get to know personally some of these “e-people” and kindred souls can end doing things together: most of the editorial committees and board of reviewers I belong to either (a) began as a formal invitation through the site or (b) took the site as my CV/e-portfolio in which to base their resolutions to accept me in. Same applies to the conferences, speeches, seminars that I have been invited to impart.

My calculations are that half the visitors of this site come from .edu or related domains. The other half come mostly from the practitioner field — leaving just a very narrow margin for lost people and occasional voyeurs: the site is pretty focused and I believe people are seldom mislead here. And this gets me back to networking, closing a virtuous circle where the more you share the more you find interesting people and can access things they know and share. I think it’s way more useful knowing that this site is a reference for some ICT4D courses than having a six digit number of daily visits. More is OK only if it adds to my general purpose: LEARN, or reach people from whom to LEARN.

Summing up:

• this site does serve my purposes of keeping all my knowledge under control
• having all content open, it helps interesting people coming by
• having all content open makes me findable not by myself, by thanks to the content gathered around me
• interesting people leave their tracks behind them, tracks I can explore and find them, their institutions, their resources
• those people sometimes send me feedback
• sometimes I get invited to events, where I find more interesting people
• sometimes I get invited to review papers, from whom I learn from firsthand interesting approaches and information
• sometimes I get invited to review papers, from whom I learn how to write good papers (and how to avoid not-so-good practices)
• being a reviewer puts me, directly or indirectly, in contact with interesting people once more
• the more you know, and share it, the more these issues repeat along time… and the more you can reach new people to learn more and more

Want to step inside the virtuous circle or let it pass by?

infoDev has published the report of a survey about the state of ICTs implementation in the education sector in Africa.

Some highlights:

• Growing commitment to ICT in education on the part of government leaders across the continent. Leadership, leadership, leadership.
• Public-private partnerships are important mechanisms enabling the implementation of ICT in national education systems in Africa. Mark Davies also spoke about this at the Web2forDev Conference when he presented Tradenet, and it’s getting a subject on which everyone comes over again and again.
• The need for digital content development relevant to local curricula is becoming more
  urgent as ICT use becomes more widespread. Surprisingly, there’s few mentions to initiatives such as Creative Commons and no mentions at all about open access policies, strategies, debates and so.
• Interest in open source software and operating systems is growing rapidly in Africa, but this growth is constrained by a lack of sufficient human resource capacity to support such systems and applications. Once again, the problem is not only infrastructures, but capacity building, digital literacy at all levels — and a strong local ICT sector, strong local industry. A chance for endogenous development?
• Internet connectivity remains a major challenge, which is no surprise but becoming a major challenge as Web 2.0 demands more and more connectivity quality.
• Wireless networks are developing rapidly throughout the continent, and of increasing relevance to the education sector, something that projects like One Laptop per Child have turned as their main asset/bet
• e-Learning for Higher Education is still not widely adopted, despite efforts like the ones made by the African Virtual University, USAID’s DOT-COM, SchoolNet Africa, to mention a few. Lack of content, hardware and connectivity being some of the main barriers.

It is especially relevant to me what the preface states:

Despite widespread beliefs that ICTs can be important potential levers to introduce and sustain education reform efforts in Africa [and] much rhetoric related to the ‘digital divide’; there has been no consolidated documentation of what is actually happening in Africa in this area, nor comprehensive baseline data on the state of ICT use in education in Africa against which future developments can be compared.
A lack of information impacts planning […]
A need for coordination […]
No consolidated information resource […]

which I honestly think could be transposed to many many other areas of the ICT4D field. Hence, the need to establish a methodological framework for ICT4D and pursue more research, analysis, indicators, raise datasets, etc.

More info

• Piece of news and main findings
• Survey web page
• Farrell, G. and Isaacs, S. (2007). Survey of ICT and Education in Africa: A Summary Report, Based on 53 Country Surveys. Washington, DC: infoDev / World Bank. (569 Kb)

(Thanks Michael)

Akeh Lucas Kunen & Zigo Morfaw Damien
E-Health Africa: Overcoming the Barriers to its Implementation. A case study of Sub Sahara Africa

Intend to identify the barriers to e-Health implementation in sub-saharan Africa and see how can these barriers be overcome.

• Political barriers
• Economic barriers
• Socio-cultural factors
• Technical barriers

Solutions to Political barriers

• Leadership
• Leadership
• Leadership

Solutions to Economic barriers

• Infrastructure development
• Poverty alleviation
• Assistance from donor organizations

Solutions to Socio-Cultural barriers

• Education
• Digital divide
• Use of ICTs in public institutions

My Comments

• During the debate, issues arise about citizenship awareness (on e-Health) and overriding (corrupt) governments, which reminds me of some good hints Francisco Lupiáñez about ICTs and e-Health in some cases not empowering but disempowering people, e.g. the distrust on online information about Health in general thus strengthening the link/dependence physicist-patient. Thus, overriding governments with the required awareness might by a tricky issue.

Marije Geldof
ICT for low-literate youth in Ethiopia: the usability challenge

The instruments of literacy create a demand for literacy (Lewis)

Explore current role & future opportunities of ICTs in the live of low-literate (limited reading and writing skills) youth (1o to 20 y.o.) in Africa

Methodological challenges

• Sampling
• Phrasing questions
• Visual representations
• Answering behaviour
• Translation
• Research setting

Preliminary results

• Divide urban and rural
• Gender differences
• Main ICT use: communication long distance; information about country
• Mobile phone popular
• Technology for the educated only
• English necessary for using ICT
• Reading and writing for education, letters, obtaining knowledge, job perspectives
• Impact video
• Imitating
• Low sustainability

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!

Student research seminar: Ismael Peña-López

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.

Michael Best comments that it’ll be interesting to test too the impact of the indices that measure the information society on policy makers and the policies they make up to foster the information society. I guess that maybe the way to do this would be to compare the series of an e-readiness indicator and the series of regulations issued during the same period of time in a country.

More info

• Working bibliography
• Slides for the Presentation