TAD Consortium July 1998 Information Update 2
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CONTENTS
Dear TAD friends,
Information Technology Action Plan' of Government of India.
Call for papers
Village phones ring up
profit
Canadian Teachers'
Federation on Technology and Education
Garbling the Seeds of the Future
"Harnessing Technology for Teaching
and Learning,"
CIJE SOURCE JOURNAL INDEX NOW ONLINE
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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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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
UNRISD. It is located at:
http://www.saide.org.za/conference/unrisd.htm
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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International Journal of Educational Technology (IJET)
The International Journal of Educational Technology is currently accepting
articles for publication in its inaugural issue
(http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/ijet/). The deadline for article submission isOctober 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
the journal, are available at the IJET web site at
Please direct any questions to IJET@lists.ed.uiuc.edu
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D. Michelle Hinn
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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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."
***************
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).
Secondly, there's the "research and technology" portion of the CTF web site:
http://www.ctf-fce.ca/e/what/restech/. You might particularly be interestedin 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.
***************
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
International, http://www.rafi.ca/, and from the *Economist*, May 16 andFeb. 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
is available online at:
http://www.ecs.org/ecs/ecsguide.nsf/408d0bf5da8fe1b9872565ae00711b7e?OpenView******************
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.
Visit the Oryx Press Web site today at (http://www.oryxpress.com) andexplore 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
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Johannesburg
South Africa
Tel: +27 +11 403-2813
Fax: +27 +11 403-2814
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