This years report has been published:
World Economic Forum - Global Information Technology Report
There's an incredible amount of movement over the years in the Network Readiness Index. It's not entirely clear to me what of these changes are due to actual progress in the area, changes in the way the index is formulated, or both. Nevertheless, there is some very interesting information in this generally optimistic report that specifically highlights the transformative power of ICTs.
Also check out the interactive map that comes with it. Mac users will need to use a browser other than Safari to view it because the Flash compatibility check doesn't catch the relevant info on Safari.
World Information Access Project - 2006 Briefing Booklet - See also the main web site here.
This report is based on existing data from a variety of sources, so don't expect anything too earth shattering. I think some of the assumption might be stretching it a bit. For instance, finding #4 of the five that are mentioned concludes that "developing countries - especially countries in Latin America - are putting more cultural content online than they are pouring into books." As far as I can tell, the internet part of this claim is based entirely on the number of web hosts in each country. Going from there to cultural content seems a bit of a leap to me.
It's Sunday - time for a big post! A few days ago I posted a couple of things about Negroponte's $100 laptop. One of the things that I mentioned was the common criticism, which extends to ICTs for development in general, that there are more pressing problems in developing countries than the lack of ICTs. This got me thinking about how we justify the ICT4D agenda and sent me back to the Millennium Declaration in a quest for answers. What follows is a fairly lengthy analysis of the Millennium Declaration, what it says about ICTs for development and how this relates to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). What it boils down to is that the Millennium Declaration and the MDGs do make it clear that ICTs should be leveraged in whatever way possible to facilitate development efforts. But, to get a complete picture of how they are to do this and what are the intended outcomes, we have to look beyond both the Millennium Declaration and the MDGs. Click below to read on...
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It's fairly widely recognized that information and communication technologies (ICTs) are important for developing countries, although there are always a few who differ in their opinions. One of the primary defining documents for current development efforts is the UN's Millennium Declaration (UNMD) on which the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are based. What I want to do here is to analyze the UNMD to determine what it actually says, or suggests, regarding ICTs and development, and especially, education. As I've mentioned in the past, documents of this nature are sometimes criticized for being rather vague in terms of their descriptive and prescriptive function. This is not entirely a fair criticism because these types of documents need to be regarded as living documents that can continue to serve their function even though the issues that they aim to address change over time. Therefore what is perceived as vagueness or ambiguity, is better described as a necessary openness to allow for different interpretations in a rapidly changing world.
The primary aim of the UNMD, as stated in the document itself, is to acknowledge globalization and promote it in a positive light. It is claimed that the central challenge for development is to ensure that the benefits of globalization are evenly shared and distributed. The implications of these claims are that development efforts must focus on the need to create a shared future and that this requires that policies and measures that affect the global population must correspond to the needs of all, especially developing countries.
So what is the view of globalization that is being promoted here? Well, the UNMD doesn't tell us that, but I think we do have to be clear about it. Obviously, globalization means different things to different people at different times. But, in a general sense, I would say that what we refer to as globalization concerns the increasing interconnectedness of social institutions due to growth in international trade and internationalization of production processes, fueled by the increased speed at which information is transferred across the world. The key words here are "interconnectedness", "international trade and production processes", and "information". Hence, globalization is an economic trend that transcends borders by making use of information technologies. If we accept this definition, I don't see how we can discuss globalization, as it presents itself today, without acknowledging the central importance of ICTs to the concept itself. So, we see, right at the outset, that although ICTs are have not been explicitly mentioned yet, they are of central importance to the primary aims of the UNMD.
ICTs are not mentioned in the UNMD until in section 20, and then only in a very vague context. There it is stated that we need "To ensure that the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communication technologies, in conformity with recommendations contained in the ECOSOC 2000 Ministerial Declaration (ECOSOC2K), are available to all." Hence, ICTs should be available to all, but to find out why, we have to look at the ECOSOC2K. This is important, because, while the UNMD is vague about the purpose of ICTs, the ECOSOC2K is not. It specifically address the relationship between ICTs, the knowledge-based economy and development as is made quite clear in the subtitle of the document, "Development and international cooperation in the twenty-first century: the role of information technology in the context of a knowledge-based global economy." Paragraph 2. clarifies this position, where it states that "... [ICTs] are central to the creation of the emerging global knowledge-based economy and can play an important role in accelerating growth, in promoting sustainable development and eradicating poverty in developing countries as well as countries with economies in transition and in facilitating their effective integration into the global economy."
The ECOSOC2K goes on to make a very good case for ICTs for development in terms of capacity building and providing opportunities for change. Furthermore, it associates goals with economical prospects that are consistent with a global society that values all kinds of knowledge. It places great emphasis on the importance of harnessing the potential of ICTs in education to increase human and institutional capacity to access, utilize and generate knowledge. This is seen as necessary to create a conducive environment for participation in international markets. What is especially interesting about these recommendations, is that these last few points are stated in general terms and may be taken to apply equally to developed and developing countries. Though this is not explicitly stated, we can surmise that it is the authors' belief that the goals being promoted are of equal value to everyone. That is to say, that developed countries will benefit from the inclusion of developing countries in the knowledge-based society, not only the other way around, because we are creating an "emerging global knowledge-based economy" that requires input from diverse sources.
The overall language of ECOSOC2K and how the knowledge-based economy is construed, suggests certain approaches to education. The knowledge-based economy is considered to be based on widespread generation and utilization of knowledge. The goal then for human resource development is to strengthen "... the production, acquisition, absorption and dissemination of knowledge products." Integration in the knowledge-based economy is therefore based on specific processes, with which we can associate certain key skills:
knowledge production: the ability to use and generate knowledge,
knowledge acquisition: the ability to locate and evaluate relevant knowledge,
knowledge absorption: the ability to learn from others' knowledge,
knowledge dissemination: the ability to produce reflections of one's own knowledge, i.e. information, to share with others for their learning benefit (see here for why I say "reflections of knowledge").
It would be absurd to deny the importance of literacy and computer skills, and it is by no means my intention to do so. What I wish to highlight is that this view of the knowledge-based economy suggests additional skills that are central to the need for "capacity building" and a "conducive environment" described in the ECOSOC2K. These are the skills that are not necessarily directly related to the use of ICTs, but are indirectly related, and necessary, as they constitute the key skills related to an ICT driven knowledge-based economy. Hence, the justification for ICTs in development education is clear - these are the tools that define the knowledge-based economy, just as machines were the tools that defined the industrial age. But it is not enough that people are able to use the tools, they have to be able to use them in a way that is consistent with the values of the society that they are meant to serve. In this instance, that means being able to engage in knowledge work and to be able to use ICTs to maximize the outcomes of that work.
It is very clear that this is the thinking behind the ECOSOC2K. Since the UNMD references the ECOSOC2K to clarify the role of ICTs in development efforts, the cultivation of skills related to the knowledge-based economy are encompassed by the MDGs. Since ICTs are only mentioned in target 7 of goal 8, which states, "In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies - especially information and communications technologies", we have to assume that this goal is related to section 20 of the UNMD, and therefore, further defined by the ECOSOC2K. The alternative is to concede that this important section of the UNMD simply didn't make it into the MDGs. In any case, it is clearly stated in the UNMD and therefore a concrete resolution of the UN General Assembly, and I think that WSIS was intended to illustrate the development community's commitment to ICTs for development.
This interpretation raises the question of whether efforts to monitor and measure the impact of initiatives related to the UNMD and the MDGs are measuring what has been outlined above, i.e. the promotion of skills related to the knowledge-based economy. There are some good examples, such as infoDev's "Monitoring and evaluation of ICT in education projects", which includes an excellent chapter on indicators that specifically discusses the "Learning of “21st century” skills". There are also rather dismal examples, like "Core ICT indicators" which was produced by the UN's "Partnership on measuring ICT for development" project. This publication that was presented at last years WSIS Phase II does little more than measure access to ICTs, and a limited number of ICT related activities that focus more on the information consumer aspects of ICT use, rather than knowledge production use. ECOSOC2K repeatedly mentions the need for synergy and coherence in development strategies. There is clearly a gap in that regard as far as knowledge work skills are concerned. Providing accurate and relevant indicators is extremely important because, not only do they provide a picture of what has been done, they also reflect the priorities of the development community, have an impact on what types of projects are funded and they affect policy and decision making.
Another interesting twist that ECOSOC2K puts on ICTs in development work is that, because the goals are specifically related to the knowledge-based economy, pedagogy becomes an inherent overarching concept throughout the ICT for development agenda. The concept of lifelong learning, in the "Delors" sense, i.e. "lifelong, lifewide and lifedeep", is central to the view of the knowledge-based economy that is presented in ECOSOC2K, i.e. an open and democratic environment where knowledge is continuously generated, shared and utilized. Therefore, when considering the impact of ICT for development initiatives, we should also consider their potential to foster learning environments consistent with the concept of lifelong learning. This would include the ability to critically analyze and utilize existing information for personal and institutional benefit, and the ability and self-confidence to generate and share existing and new knowledge.
The nature of ICTs and the way that they allow us to work with information and knowledge can be both revealing and deceiving. On the one hand, we can think of ICTs as tools that augment our natural capacities for processing and generating information and knowledge, and as such highlight the processes involved so that we can gain a better understanding of those processes. But ICTs can also appear to be automation devices, sort of a layover way of thinking from the industrial age, and this can easily deceive us into thinking that ICTs constitute an end in and of themselves. If we focus on the revealing aspects of ICTs and consider how these relate to our increasingly knowledge-centric society, we stand to gain considerably by expanding the knowledge-base to which we have access and which form the building blocks of the emerging knowledge-based society. But, to achieve this, it will not be enough to provide access to, and the basic skills needed for, the technology, or even the existing information and knowledge made available by the technology, for that matter. These will be needed, but they are not enough. We need to think of this in terms of the greater knowledge-based society and the types of activities that individuals will need to perform to benefit from that society.
A recent interview with Tim Berners-Lee: Isn't it semantic? : Articles : Internet : BCS.
There are some interesting points there, but the real significant stuff is towards the end, about the "Semantic Web". People familiar with Berners-Lee's Book, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web, will know that this has been his pet project for many years now. I think that for the development community it's an especially important project. If things work out as planned, the development of the semantic web and web savvy ontologies will make it possible to tie together, by various levels of association, a wide range of electronic resources, no matter what the language or context. For example, this could increase the accessibility of indigenous knowledge. It could also increase researchers' accessibility to resource from other fields, where a different terminology may be used to describe similar things. Lots of potential, lots of uses.
I posted on the original study, so I figure I have to post on the follow-up: BBC NEWS | Technology | Wikipedia study 'fatally flawed'.
Encyclopaedia Brittanica has posted a rejection of Nature's evaluation of Brittanica and Wikipedia, calling for a retraction of the original article. Nature has rejected Brittanica's rejection and says that they will not retract.
And I ask, but which one is more of a knowledge development tool? (Hint: I think transparency is necessary for the knowledge development process.) Evaluating something like Wikipedia based solely on content sort of misses the point, in my view.
An interesting interview with Ward Cunningham, creator of the wiki: Father of Wiki Speaks Out on Community and Collaborative Development
"I think of software being a work—very much like a wiki being a work—where people see an area that's weak and they make it stronger," Cunningham said.
... and the more people with more diverse origins reveal more weaknesses and make things even stronger. (Did I mention that I like wikis?)
I watched a short version of the film, "Uganda: Education Reforms", in one of my courses yesterday. I don't doubt that there is an element of propaganda in the USAID produced film, but I was very impressed with the Ugandan reforms presented. Not surprisingly (and not unjustly), Uganda is something of a "darling child" in development education circles.
One of the things that really impressed me is the provisions for continuing training of teachers. As part of the "Teacher Development Management System" (TDMS), tutors travel throughout Uganda disseminating information about developments in pedagogy and education and encourage teachers to be creative in their approaches. Furthermore, the call for creativity is passed on to the students, with teachers actively encouraged to promote independent and creative thinking among their students.
What this all amounts to, at least as it was presented in the film, is the cultivation of a mentality about education and learning that is intended to reach all levels of society, from the teachers to the parents and to the students. What kept coming to my mind while I watched the film was, with the Ugandan vision and approach regarding education, imagine what they could do if they had good ICTs? And what made this question so persistent in my mind was that they seem to have largely cultivated the type of collaborative knowledge development and dissemination strategies that are so often associated with ICTs without having broad access to ICTs.
One of the things I've thought about is whether ICTs are a necessary prerequisite to the type of knowledge development activity that we associate with ICTs because, when talking about ICT4D, one often hears things like, "What are people going to do with ICTs when they've never sat in front of a computer before?" What the Ugandan example suggests to me, is that there are ways, and in fact concrete examples of, ways to promote strategies that will make ICTs, once they are available, a relatively seamless addition to ways of doing things, rather than a scary new paradigm (which is questionable whether they really ever are, but that's a different topic).
Peter Day's article, "Universities challenged" on the BBC News website this morning discusses some of the assumptions about innovation and the role of higher education in innovative systems. Day hits on some interesting points, but I wouldn't say that he reveals any particularly profound ideas. Nevertheless, he does point out the problems with the tendency to connect innovation to universities and research and development. This is important for the development context, because many developing countries lack the infrastructure, in higher education and the commercial sector, that this assumption about innovation makes a prerequisite for establishing cultures of innovation. And innovation is important for development in today's global society because the global market requires it. In an age where information and knowledge are easily transferred all over the world, societies find themselves with few options as to how to operate in this marketplace - they can either service the innovators, provide raw materials to the innovators, or they can themselves innovate. But, here the question of how we define "innovation" becomes crucial.
First we have to confront the assumption that Day discusses. The assumption is that research and development in higher education will have commercial applications. This assumption has been challenged many times by many people in many places. Stephen Allott, who Day talks about, is not entirely unique in this, nor are his credentials much more surprising than others who have raised this issue. For example, Herb Baum, CEO of Dial, has famously claimed that innovation is not R&D, and has gone on to promote innovation within Dial among all his employees to feed the R&D department, not the other way around. 3M is another interesting example of a company that has acknowledged that innovation happens everywhere and anywhere and is not necessarily a product of R&D.
What is being suggested here is that innovation is the generation and dissemination of ideas, not bringing them to market, and examination of the history of ideas supports this. There was an entertaining and interesting show on the Discovery Channel here in the US recently titled, "How William Shatner Changed the World", that discussed how the science fiction TV show "Star Trek" influenced the development of several technologies. The authors of Star Trek acknowledge that they didn't know about the technologies that they were proposing, they just thought they were cool and fit with their vision of the future. It wasn't up to them to make these technologies work, they just had to make them plausible. Making them work was someone else's job, and indeed, those people eventually came along and did make them work (or are making them work). Science fiction is full of examples like these. For example, the grandfather of all superheroes, Doc Savage, had sonar several years before this technology was developed for practical use (I don't remember which book (The Polar Treasure, maybe?). May as well read them all, very entertaining). The point is that innovation comes from personal or communal knowledge and vision and the ability to influence the right people with ideas.
Innovation is consistent with (and in my view, required for) leapfrogging development. In this sense, leapfrogging is not about implementing the right technology, it is about using the knowledge available to generate ideas that can put societies in a strategic position in the global marketplace. All societies/communities have a knowledge base. The question is about their ability to stake out their knowledge claim and how they eventually use it. I'm making it sound easy, but believe me I know it's not. But, I'm only vaguely suggesting an approach for development, it's more a way of looking at things at this stage.
Finally, Day makes a big deal about the lack of research on innovation. I don't agree. I think that there is a lot of good research out there on innovation. Some good starting points (these may be biased toward my view of innovation) would include Bengt-Åke Lundvall, Erik von Hippel, Richard Florida (he discusses "creativity", but still relevant) and many many more.
A couple of interesting readings I've been going over that illustrate the "information age" version of dependency theory:
Globalisation, ICTs, and the New Imperialism: Perspectives on Africa in the Global Electronic Village. Yunusa Z. Ya'u.
A continental Association of African Internet Service Provider Associations. Richard Bell.
These two articles discuss the difficulties of implementing ICTs in developing countries, specifically in Africa, due to the policies of international organisations and multinational Telecoms. Bell's article is not exactly new, but relevant nonetheless.
Reading these makes me want to take a better look at the famously doomed MacBride Report. Indeed, some people already are.
I wanted to add a little bit concerning the $100 laptop, or the "green machine", because I've seen a lot of things about this on blogs today after the news about Bill Gates' comments. There seem to be a fair number of people that agree with Gates, and I think that this is more often than not based on a misunderstanding of Negroponte's project. The thing is that this project is not about business and it's not just about laptops. I think that Negroponte and his team have put a lot of thought into this project and come up with something that constitutes a very feasible development aid. Before people criticize the idea of the laptop, I think that they should consider the following:
1. Yes, there are other more pressing issues to be dealt with in many developing countries. But, as is stated in the Dakar Framework for Action,
"Education is a fundamental human right. It is the key to sustainable development and peace and stability within and among countries, and thus an indispensable means for effective participation in the societies and economies of the twenty-first century, which are affected by rapid globalization."
If there is a possibility to provide educational opportunities in developing countries, it should be done. Affordable information technologies make this possible. Furthermore, the globalized society that we are educating people for is based on the flow of information and knowledge. These laptops can make it possible to increase and enhance educational provisions in a manner that is more consistent with the type of world that we now live in.
2. The price point makes it affordable but also detracts from its resale value, both because a feasible resale price will be low, and that at that price it is more likely that communities will be able to supply all their students with them. In areas where money is scarce, desirable technology that is handed over to people might be seen as easy money for the recipients if they can resell it.
3. Using open source software is cheap, but it is also easier to localize and customize since this would not involve the licensing issues of proprietary solutions. Also, using open source software opens up the possibility of engaging the international open source community, raising their awareness of the needs of developing countries and providing a cheap and accessible platform to train IT people in developing countries.
4. The handcrank is a brilliant feature. Face it, what good is a laptop, a computer, a PDA, or even a cellphone, if you don't have access to electricity?
5. It is important to put computers into the hands of individuals. Studies have shown that having the opportunity and means to "tinker" with the technology results in considerably higher levels of confidence in performing complex computer related tasks, like the types associated with producing content for the Internet, i.e. multimedia, webpages, etc.. Telecenters don't provide ample opportunity to "tinker".
6. Cellphones can provide access to some electronic resources, but are not useful for all. They are miserable for producing content and we need for individuals in developing countries to become producers of content (read some of my other entries to see why I think this is so).
Bill Gates recently made fun of MIT's $100 laptop program at a forum with government leaders of the Americas: Bill Gates mocks MIT's $100 laptop project.
Gates has been accused, and indeed found guilty, of some pretty dubious dealings, but this time he has hit an all time low. His snide criticism of the $100 laptop program is not only crass, but entirely wrong. Gates specifically pokes fun at the notion of a "shared computer" and emphasizes the true cost burdens of providing computers; applications, network connectivity, and support.
1. MIT's program is titled "One laptop per child". The computer is not intended to be shared.
2. The laptop will use open source software (n.b. not Microsoft), which is free of cost.
3. The laptops will have built-in mesh networking, allowing users to experience network environments even where Internet is not available, or to share a connection when it is available.
4. The open source software community has established a very effective community based support structure, free of charge (n.b. not requiring prohibitively expensive Microsoft Certification), which still manages to befuddle proprietary companies.
Meanwhile $600-$1000 Origami/Ultra-mobile computers, which no one seems able to figure out what are supposed to accomplish, that will only run on proprietary software (and this from a company that refused to support right-to-left script in its software) are a better idea?
UNESCO is collecting opinions on their action plan for moving towards knowledge societies: WSIS Consultation. This is your opportunity to be heard. Go for it.
I already submitted my comments under Action Line C3: Access to info and knowledge and Action Line C7: E-learning. All pretty much in line with my previous statements on this blog.