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This TAD Consortium Information Service has been sponsored by Juta Publishers - web: www.juta.co.za - phone: +27 21 797 5101

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Dear TAD friends,

Here is the latest compilation of information. TAD

participants may also be interested in a paper I recently

wrote on ICTs and social development in South Africa for

Remember to diarize the next meeting. It is between 09.00 and 13.00 on 12

August at the CSIR Conference Centre. The agenda for the meeting will follow

in the next few days.

Regards

Neil Butcher

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Please see www.nic.in for the entire document entitled 'Information

Technology Action Plan' of Government of India.

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Call for Papers:

International Journal of Educational Technology (IJET)

The International Journal of Educational Technology is currently accepting

articles for publication in its inaugural issue

October 1, 1998 for the December inaugural issue.

The International Journal of Educational Technology (IJET) is a new

international refereed journal in the field of educational technology,

sponsored by The Graduate School of Education at the University of Western

Australia and the College of Education a

t the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. IJET will be published

online biannually each year (beginning in the fall of 1998) and will be

available without an access charge. The journal is of interest to academics,

students, practitioners, and edu

cational leaders who wish to keep abreast of scholarship, theory-building

and empirical research in areas where educational instruction is offered

through computer-based technologies. The scope of IJET includes research

areas where education is offered t

hrough computer-based means such as CD-ROM, DVD, or the Internet.

The International Journal of Educational Technology (IJET) welcomes

contributions from scholars, practitioners, policymakers and researchers in

the area of computer-based educational technologies. Authors may submit

research articles or book and software

reviews. Guidelines for submission, as well as additional information about

Please direct any questions to IJET@lists.ed.uiuc.edu

------------------------------------------------------

D. Michelle Hinn

National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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 Village phones ring up profit

CELLPHONE CRAZE / Rural women in Bangladesh have taken loans with the

intention of turning dirt yards into chat booths.

Monday, July 6, 1998

By John Stackhouse

Islampur, Bangladesh -- BY some counts, Sajeda Akhtar ranks among the

world's poorest people, but she doesn't have time to worry about it. She's

too busy with her new cellphone.

Using the same kind of small loans that helped her parents buy chickens and

a cow, the 21-year-old student is among 100 Bangladeshi villagers -- all

women -- who have borrowed money for cellphones to create the country's

first rural phone booths.

"The money is easy," Ms. Akhtar said, as a chicken darted through her phone

booth, a dirt courtyard. "Every month, I make a profit of at least 2,000

taka."

That's $65, which is about double Bangladesh's average monthly income.

In one of the world's poorest countries, where daily survival is a concern

for many people, Bangladesh's best-known development organization, the

Grameen Bank, is now lending money to rural women to buy cellphones as it

has for years to buy milk cows and

rice thrashers.

It's a pure business opportunity for the women, the bank says. But the

phones may also help their villages leapfrog into the 21st century.

"This is basically a technology revolution," said Shahed Latif, managing

director of Grameen Telecom, which runs the rural network.

When the village cellphones were introduced in March, 1997, the idea seemed

heretical to development purists, but not to villagers such as Ms. Akhtar.

In her village of emerald-green rice paddies and swaying coconut trees, 40

kilometres from the capital,

farmers line up at her door to order seeds and farm implements by phone, and

call their sons or husbands working in Malaysia and the Middle East.

"This will be a good business for me," said Dolli Hussain, a mother of two

teen-aged boys who started a cellphone operation in her village last Sunday.

Dressed in black burka, Mrs. Hussain travelled by bus to pick up her Nokia

phone, battery charger, Grameen Phone signboard and stopwatch and take a

60-minute training session.

"It's very charming," she smiled, holding a cellphone for the first time.

Mrs. Hussain is not sure how much she'll earn from the phone, but at least,

she said, she will not have to walk to town any more to call her sister in

Dallas. More important, she added, she can check poultry prices in Dhaka

directly from her 1,000-chicke

n broiler farm, which she and her husband, a retired soldier, started with a

previous Grameen Bank loan.

To reach the nearest land-line phone at this time of year, you have to

traverse a half-kilometre of muddy paths and hail a rickshaw in the monsoon

rains. At night, when it's cheaper to call Dallas or Dubai, no woman dares

leave her village. Few enjoy the

crowded phone centres in town anyway.

"They feel more comfortable here," Ms. Akhtar said. "They don't want

strangers to listen to their private affairs."

Her phone booth consists of a wooden chair in a dirt courtyard, surrounded

by her extended family's four mud-walled huts that seem, like everything

else, to drip with summer humidity when it's not raining. Inside her hut,

she keeps a neat ledger, a rate

card and a stopwatch by the cellphone.

When villagers come from the neighbouring villages to make overseas calls,

she demands payment in advance. When an incoming call comes, she dispatches

her younger brother or a neighbour's child to fetch the person being called.

There is no incoming-call charge on the Grameen network, but as Ms. Akhtar

said, "when people get a call from overseas, sometimes they're so happy they

give us 100 or 200 taka [$3 to $6]."

In a typical week, she and her four sisters handle 50 outgoing calls and

book $50 in revenue. One-third of that is profit, from which the sisters

repay $7 to Grameen Bank. In two years, their $585 loan for the handset will

be repaid and the phone will be

theirs, along with an income stream that would impress most utilities.

(The bank began in one village more than 20 years ago and now issues small

loans -- 94 per cent of them to women -- in 38,000 Bangladesh villages; it

serves as a model for similar efforts around the world, including Canada. At

a recent meeting in New Yor

k City, founder Mohammed Yunus announced that Grameen would go after

investors, as well as donors, for the microcredit bank, which boasts an

enviable loan-repayment rate of 98 per cent.)

Thanks to $1,400 in previous Grameen Bank loans, Ms. Akhtar and her sisters

have a thriving garment-stitching business that earns them the equivalent of

$50 a month, and two rickshaws they rent out for another $55 a month. On the

side, Ms. Akhtar is abou

t to complete a bachelor of arts degree; she put herself through a local

government college by tutoring school children at night.

Her gold watch and earrings reveal how well she's doing. Her ambition to be

a high-school teacher (her mother didn't complete primary school) shows how

much rural Bangladesh has changed in one generation.

"When you make money out of it, the fear of technology is gone. Next, we'll

bring computers to village schools," Mr. Latif said.

The rural phones are linked to a larger network, called Grameen Phone, that

is 51-per-cent owned by Telenor, the Norwegian phone company; 35 per cent by

Grameen Bank; and 10 per cent by Mirubeni, a large Japanese trading house.

The rest of the shares are

held by a group of Bangladeshi Americans.

To pay for the initial investment of $100-million (U.S.), the group borrowed

money from the World Bank's private-sector arm, known as the International

Finance Corp.; the Asian Development Bank; and Norway's overseas aid

program.

"It's a little world (and sustainable too)," is Grameen Phone's motto.

The village phones are no charitable add-on. On average, they rack up 4,000

taka ($130 Canadian) in billings a month, or about double the average city

bill. And because bills are distributed through Grameen Bank's vast branch

network, there is no collect

ion charge -- and there have been no missed payments so far.

Operating only in Dhaka and the surrounding district, Grameen Phone has

22,000 subscribers and a 60-per-cent market share against its two local

competitors, backed by companies from Malaysia and Hong Kong. Within two

years, Grameen Phone plans to expand

across Bangladesh, using the bank's presence in 40,000 villages and a

fibre-optic cable that was laid along the national rail line years ago but

rarely used. Each of the villages is to get a cellphone, and by 2000 the

network plans to have 500,000 subscr

ibers.

Just to reach India's level of telephone coverage -- and that would be low

by Asian standards -- Bangladesh needs to jump to three million connections

from its current 500,000. Few believe the inefficient and highly corrupt

state phone company is up to t

he challenge.

"It's a huge potential, and it would not only be expensive to add land lines

but would take who knows how many years," Mr. Latif said. "Cellphones are

the answer."

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Canadian Teachers' Federation on Technology and Education When I spoke at

the Canadian National Library in Ottawa back in April, a woman named Marita

Moll introduced herself to me. She is Head of Research and Technology for

the Canadian Teachers' Federat

ion, and she assured me that the CTF was that rarity I no longer expect to

find on my travels: a major institution with a vested interest in education

that was nevertheless resisting the demands to launch every high-tech

educational vehicle it could get

its hands on. As Moll put it in an op-ed piece:

The educational system is being re-engineered on a grand scale to

accommodate expensive, high-tech tools. Yet research has shown quite clearly

that the desired skills are common outcomes of the much cheaper, much more

inclusive, just as interactive, coll

aborative and effective, music and arts programs. The explanation for this

discordance lies not in the objectives of education but in the politics of

technologies. (Toronto Star, Mar. 26, 1998)

I want to draw your attention to two resources available from the CTF. One

is a sourcebook called Tech High: Globalization and the Future of Canadian

Education. Edited by Moll, it contains papers from a number of authorities,

including NETFUTURE's own La

ngdon Winner ("The Handwriting on the Wall: Resisting Technoglobalism's

Assault on Education"). The book was co-published in 1997 by the Canadian

Centre for Policy Alternatives (ccpa@policyalternatives.ca) and Fernwood

Publishing (fernwood@istar.ca).

in the papers listed as "critical.htm" and "critical2.html". The former,

incidentally, leads off with

this interesting little quote, taken from an 1889 issue of Scientific

American:

The improvement in city conditions by general adoption of the motor car can

hardly be overestimated. Streets clean, dustless, and odourless, with light

rubber-tired vehicles moving swiftly and noiselessly over their smooth

expanse, would eliminate a grea

ter part of the nervousness, distraction, and strain of modern metropolitan

life. So you might want to look to the Canadian Teachers' Federation if

you're needing some moral support for the struggle within your own, more

faddishly inclined organization.

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This information has been taken from Netfuture, Issue #74

Garbling the Seeds of the Future

--------------------------------

Anyone who thinks new technologies are "only tools", which we can

selectively use in whatever way we want, should look at the continuing

transformation of agriculture. A few relevant developments:

** The United States has been quarreling with Europe regarding the export of

genetically altered seed and food products to European markets. European

agencies have insisted on labels so that concerned citizens can choose,

while U.S. officials bluntly sta

te their own concern: "Strict adherence to labeling requirements would do

damage to our trade" (Timothy Galvin, Department of Agriculture). The sooner

the transgenic products get inextricably mixed up with conventional products

in the enormously complex

food industry, the happier these officials will be.

** They needn't wait for long. "Our genes are incorporated into

approximately nineteen million acres around the world -- covering an area

larger than Switzerland and the Netherlands combined", according to Tom

McDermott of Monsanto. And that's just one c

ompany. Further, no laws and regulations can prevent insects from carrying

pollen from one plant to another; the problem of determining what is

transgenic and what isn't may eventually become insoluble.

So when the seed companies complain of vagueness in the labeling

requirements, they have a point. There's also the question of second and

third-order effects. Should milk, for example, be labeled if the cows

producing it have consumed some amount of tran

sgenic food?

** Many people worry that gene-spliced corn designed to produce Bt (Bacillus

thuringiensis, a natural insecticide) will give rise to Bt-resistant bugs.

The remarkably facile response of the seed companies: No problem; we

recommend that farmers interplant

normal, unaltered crops along with transgenic ones. (Sure, and your salesmen

are out there urging farmers to limit the size of their orders for

transgenic seed, right?)

** New technology announced in March allows seed companies to prevent

seed-saving and replanting by farmers. Due to genetic twiddling, the seed

self-destructs in the second generation. Whereas formerly the seed companies

could readily control only the pr

oduction of hybrid seed, the new technology opens the way for effective

control of any seed whatever.

As farmers become ever more dependent upon the seed companies, the

implications for biodiversity are hardly rosy. This is one illustration of

the many, systematic ways our new "knowledge economy" makes for a drastic

contraction of knowledge. (More on tha

t another time.) Skillful seed selection by farmers based on intimate

familiarity with the local environment, soil, and pests may well become a

lost art. Meanwhile, until the new technology takes hold, any farmers with

rebellious intent will face the Pin

kerton investigators that Monsanto has hired to track down seed-saving

farmers.

** A number of African nations are having second thoughts about the Green

Revolution (which came to their continent much later than elsewhere). As the

*Economist* reports,

For a few years, Ghana's maize yields did indeed increase with imported

hybrids, but they required more and more fertilizer. When farming subsidies

were cut under IMF-inspired economic reform, Ghana's small farmers faced a

triple problem. They could not

afford the soaring cost of chemicals; the land had become saline (they came

to call fertilizer "the devil's salt"); and they had largely abandoned their

own seeds. (May 16, 1998, p. 50) It's a familiar pattern: subsidize a new

technology to get people ho

oked, burn all bridges to the more sustainable practices of the past, and

then (you can be sure this is the next step) start in again by developing a

new round of commercially profitable, technological "fixes". (Genetically

altered, salt-tolerant crops?)

(News taken from press releases of the Rural Advancement Foundation

Feb. 2, 1998. Thanks to Neil Ruggles for passing along a report on

seed-saving.)

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The Education Commission of the States has just published "Harnessing

Technology for Teaching and Learning," a resource guide designed to

strengthen policymakers' understanding of educational technology, including

teacher professional development, classr

oom methods and materials, technology infrastructure and funding. It seems

to be geared toward K-12, but should definitely be of interest! The report

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CIJE SOURCE JOURNAL INDEX NOW ONLINE AT ORYX PRESS

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you're an educator, librarian, researcher, student, or anyone else who

has struggled to find contact information for an education journal, you will

be happy to know that the "Current Index to Journals in Education (CIJE)

Source Journal Index" is now o

nline at the Oryx Press Web site.

The Index, which can be searched by keyword or browsed by title, lists all

the journals regularly indexed in CIJE, along with subscription information

and the ERIC clearinghouse covering each.

explore the CIJE Source Journal Index. Please direct suggestions or comments

to Magon Kinzie at (mkinzie@oryxpress.com).

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Telematics for African Development Consortium
P.O. Box 31822
Braamfontein
2017
Johannesburg
South Africa
Tel: +27 +11 403-2813
Fax: +27 +11 403-2814

neilshel@icon.co.za