ONLINE RESOURCES
--- Some sites on higher education that may be useful:
--- The Gazette Goes On-Line – Botswana
--- Tracks journal (published by the Danish National Centre for Technical
Supported Learning)
--- Peter Honey and Alan Mumford's Learning Styles inventory

ANNOUNCEMENTS/REQUESTS
--- Request on book titles
--- Sangonet training courses

ARTICLES
--- Science, Education and Information: underpinning natural disaster
reduction - Badaoui Rouhban

***************************

NEWS

-----------

Taken from ‘The MEDIA Beat’ (June 13 1999)

Gender Violence On Stage – Kenya

Daily Nation on the Web - Friday, June 4, 1999 - By NATION Correspondent

The Mombasa women's network centre has embarked on a vigorous campaign to

'NET ECONOMY GENERATES $300BN Source: PC Week Online

The Internet economy generated an estimated $301.4 billion in U.S. revenue

last year and is on track to continue its astonishing compound annual growth

rate of 174.5 percent, achieved during the last four years, according to a

new study released today. The report, "Measuring the Internet Economy," was

prepared by the University of Texas at Austin's Centre for Research in

Electronic Commerce, which surveyed 3,000 U.S. Internet companies.

The study found that, during 1998, the Internet economy was responsible for

1.2 million jobs, with the average annual revenue generated by each

"Internet economy worker" totalling about $250,000, or about 65 percent more

per individual than workers in the industrial economy. Those figures place

the United States at the pinnacle of the new digital economy, although

leaders in Europe and, to a lesser degree, Asia are beginning to grasp the

significance of the trend.

The Daily Star Internet Edition, June 02, 1999

Electrification changed rural people's life

MADARIPUR, June 1: Rural electrification in the district has ushered in a

qualitative change in the economic and social life of the people, reports

UNB. Local people said the infrastructural development in the rural areas

has been achieved to a great extent with the introduction of power supply.

Side by side, agriculture sector has got a further boost in applying modern

technology. As a result, the scope of rural employment is much higher now,

they added. Madaripur Palli Bidyut Samity was formed in December 1985.

Official sources said till February this year, the samity has brought 331

villages under its network. Of the total villages, 107 are in Sadar thana,

88 in Kalkini, 13 in Shibchar and 105 in Rajoir thana. Besides, 18 villages

in Moksudpur thana of Gopalganj district are also under the coverage of the

samity. There is a total of 1,47,060 km transmission line under rural

electrification with a total of 34,253 subscribers. The subscribers include

residential 28,018, commercial 3,364, irrigation (deep tube well) 18,

shallow tube well 1,403, LLP-320, irrigation subscribers 1,481 and

industrial subscribers 410. A young man of Char Muguria village Ataur Rahman

said from the very beginning of the introduction of the electricity in his

village he utilised the facility and became a self-reliant farmer of the

area. He said the socio-economic condition of his area is changing with the

introduction of the rural electrification. In many areas, the yield of crop

has been doubled during the last few years. Because of the availability of

electricity, the people could work at different places even after darkness,

he said. The farmer said electricity has also increased demands for various

industrial and luxury goods including radio and television. The people are

increasingly becoming interested in education and programmes like family

planning. The roads and other infrastructural facilities are also developing

in the face of people's demand and increasing allocation from the

government. The unused labour force of the rural areas is being utilised in

Internet Growth Lags In Developing Nations

(06/09/99, 4:00 p.m. ET)

By Mo Krochmal, TechWeb

NEW YORK -- The idea that the Internet is the fastest-growing communications

medium is false, said a Syracuse University professor Tuesday.

"It could take a hundred years for the Internet to reach diffusion levels

similar to that of the telephone," said Milton Mueller, director of the

graduate program in telecommunications and network management at the

university's school of information studies. Mueller spoke to a media

gathering here in New York hosted by the Association of Computing Machinery,

a nonprofit computer-industry organization.

The growth of the Internet in the United States overshadows the reality of

the rest of the world, especially in developing countries in Africa, Asia,

and Latin America, Mueller said. It's the nature of a technology that is

based on services in contrast to television or radio, which can be used

after being plugged in.

"When you buy a service, there are long, extended diffusion curves," he

said. "There is a distinction between that andbuying equipment." The

struggles in the developing world are more basic.

"If you don't have roads or electrical power, it's hard to do anything with

a computer," he said. "Americans are just not appreciative of how early it

is in the development of this technology."

Part of the barrier to the spread of the technology is political and closely

tied to monopolies in the telecommunications industry, he said.

"The world is breaking these up, and we will see how critical that is to the

development of the Internet," he said.

In Haiti, Mueller said, ISPs are skirting the country's telecom monopoly by

building wireless local-access networks and using satellite and microwave

technologies.

Haitian Internet providers are also servicing a largely rural population by

opening small telecenters -- central points where users pay small charges

for short periods of access to do things such as download and send e-mail.

"This a model that may be imitated elsewhere," Mueller said. If developing

countries can remove the political and economic barriers to the growth of

the Internet, the economic opportunities for growth will be huge, he said.

"If [developing countries] can get their institutional acts together,

foreign capital will flow in quickly," Mueller said. "If they succeed, they

will have a local advantage U.S. companies cannot compete against."

If they don't, the United States can maintain a technology lead for 50 or 60

Iridium India to push solar satellite phone booths

New Delhi 20 JUNE 1999

THE SATELLITE telephony major Iridium Llc is hoping to overcome its present

financial problems by pushing portable solar-powered satellite phone booths

(SPPB) developed by Motorola in India and Asia.

Iridium India Telecom Limited (IITL) has received the exclusive rights from

Motorola to manufacture and distribute the solar phone booths, which

promises to revolutionise rural telephony, IITL sources said.

"The company has bought exclusive rights from Motorola to manufacture and

distribute solar-powered phone booths in the country and to export

internationally."

SPPB is designed to promote village telephony and to take basic telecom

service to remote villages in countries such as India and other developing

nations, where telecom services are yet to penetrate. According to company

sources they are yet to fix the price of SPPB and would be finalised

according to the order and response they get from the market and government.

The booth is portable and does not require any other telecom or power

utility to establish calls and can be deployed anywhere, Iridium engineers

said. "It can be installed in villages where basic telecom service cannot

reach. With government aid or other private agencies coming forward to

sponsor, our villages can have a solar booth," said its technical

vice-president T K Sreedharan.

For a village public telephone (VPT), in an application of this kind, a

mobile exchange unit (MXU) is used to connect calls from remote areas to a

basic operator switch which will ensure that the calls are routed

economically and efficiently, he said.

The working of the booth is similar to that of a hand-held satellite phone

with normal dialling and connecting time of about 15 seconds. "The call

signal will reach any of the 66 satellites in the Iridium constellation

orbiting the earth in six phases." The booth is constructed out of fibre and

has two telephones installed in it. For power generation, the roof is fitted

with a solar panel. This system is ideal for India's terrestrial conditions.

"We can only propose this value-added device to the government or the

society. If they agree, we will go ahead," a top executive of the company

said.

Iridium, the first company to enter global satellite communication business

with hand-held telephones last year, has been facing financial problems

because the demand for satellite phones is nowhere near initial

ONLINE RESOURCES

-----------

Some sites on higher education that may be useful:

--- SAIT (Southern Alberta Institute of Technology) Learning Enhancement

--- Grant MacEwan Community College Technology Integration Plan in support

Taken from ‘The MEDIA Beat’ (June 13 1999)

The Gazette Goes On-Line – Botswana

Botswana Gazette - June 8, 1999

ADDRESSING GUESTS at the launch of The Gazette website last Tuesday, the

Executive Chairman of the Botswana Telecommunications Authority (BTA), Mr

Moses Lekaukau, spoke of the impact that the new media technologies will

Taken from The TrainingZONE LearningWIRE - Issue 54

Tracks is the international journal published by the Danish National Centre

for Technical Supported Learning. It's avaiable online in six different

languages, including English. All the archive articles on a wide range of

learning issues in which technology has supported the learner are available

Taken from The TrainingZONE LearningWIRE - Issue 54

The PSI-Press website has made available Peter Honey and Alan Mumford's

Learning Styles inventory as a free download. This makes the material even

more available to a wide audience. The best-selling publication of the same

title is also available on CD-Rom and as a series of Internet pages. The

same publisher has similarly made available their new 'Impress to Sell'

training and development resource for people working in sales and marketing

ANNOUNCEMENTS/REQUESTS

-----------

An educational institution has the budget to buy 30 new books on telematic

education / using the internet to teach/ using video conferencing/ distance

education for the year 2000/creating top web sites. Please send your

suggestions to the editor of the newsletter ( please include ISBN number,

publisher, year published) with a short paragraph why you think this would

be a sensible buy. Please do not include any books published before 1997

unless you think they are top of the pops.

If you can help, please send names of books to Tyna Lamprecht at

ajl4@icon.co.za

We are pleased to announce that we are running 2 training courses in this

month of JUNE.

1. Web Publishing / HTML (23-24 June)

2. Using the Internet for Lobbying and Advocacy (30 June)

WEB PUBLISHING

Date: 23 and 24 June 1999

Time: 9.30 a.m. - 5.00 p.m.

Venue: SANGONeT offices, 13th Floor Longsbank Building, 187 Bree Street,

Johannesburg.

Course Content:

The course will introduce you to the basics of building a site and enable

you to maintain your organisation's site - add content to existing pages,

add new pages, adapt the site's design, and develop the content and

structure of the site.

Please note that participants should have a thorough grounding in basic

computer literacy and Web browsing.

Course Content:

- Document Formatting- HTML syntax and commands

- Images, Table

- Graphic design for the web

- Site mapping and planning

- File structure for web sites

- Site design, Content organisation

- Page maintenance, development & FTP software

- WYSIWYG editors

- Hands on experience building sites

- Site evaluation strategies

- Organisational approaches to web development

Course Fees:

R 1600.00 per SANGONeT member

R 1800.00 per non SANGONeT member

ACTIVISM on the 'Net : Using the INTERNET for LOBBYING AND ADVOCACY

Campaigns

Date: 30 June 1999

Time: 9.30 a.m. - 4.00 p.m.

Venue: SANGONeT offices, 13th Floor Longsbank Building, 187 Bree Street,

Johannesburg.

Course Content:

- Defining the concepts

- Using WWW, email, newsgroups, mailing lists for campaigning

- Browsing advocacy sites

- Guidelines for writing effective Internet alerts

- Planning and conducting a online advocacy campaign

Please note that this training is oriented to people who are working in the

development sector and is geared to empowering you to make a significant

impact upon the exploitation of the Internet.

Please encourage your colleagues/members to distribute this training

information to all relevant contacts they may have within the NGO/civil

society world.

HOW TO APPLY

OR

Phone Lauren or Njenga at (011) 838 6943 and we will fax you a form to fill

in to confirm your attendance. OR E-mail the following address

info@sn.apc.org to make a booking.

We look forward to meeting you at our exciting and stimulating training

sessions. Should you have organisation-specific training needs, contact us

and we will tailor a course to fill your skill

ARTICLES

-----------

Science, Education and Information: underpinning natural disaster reduction

Badaoui Rouhban

Chief

Unit for Disaster Reduction

UNESCO, Paris

Email: b.rouhban@unesco.org

Considerable discoveries and breakthroughs have been achieved during the

last three decades in the science and technology of natural disaster

prevention. Early warning systems, design and construction of

state-of-the-art constructions and infrastructures, have been made possible

to withstand hazards of nature. Despite this, losses stemming from violent

natural phenomena are on the rise. Temptations are great to feel that

progress in the science and technology of confronting disasters has brought

with it disillusionment and conforted fatalism.

It is time to bring the full force of scientific and technological

advancement into synergy with broader education and public information to

prevent disasters. Sustainable safety cannot be attained without empowering

individuals to learn, understand and act, without ensuring that communities

at risk have the endogenous capacity and « culture » of disaster prevention.

The long-term goal should be to have an informed populace prepared to

support new policies, new legislation, new research, new products or new

technology, new attitudes and lifestyles which are tailored to cope with

natural hazards. There lies the critical importance of education and

information to bring about the behavioural change required to achieve

disaster reduction. Governments, business and industry, the academic

community, and other « stakeholders » in disaster reduction cannot bring

about the needed change without public support. Public understanding is thus

the fuel or energy which must drive and support change at all levels of

society which will ultimately achieve the culture of prevention.

Education and information embody the means to empower people to become

agents of change, to take charge of creating a future which corresponds to

what people most need: the legitimate safety.

For there is now recognition that people are the primary agents for change

and that the role of education is thus key to achieving disaster reduction.

The challenge ahead is to impart a new understanding to people of all ages

of the functioning of the Earth and the interrelationships among

environment, natural phenomena, and population.

The role of science in bringing about this new understanding is fundamental.

Education and public awareness need to draw on the best knowledge and

information available. At present there is a serious gap between the

availability o such knowledge and information, and its being effectively

used as a basis for decision-making and education, and by the media and

other communications channels through which people receive information.

The increasing emphasis on raising awareness and taking action at the

community and municipality levels needs to be put into practice. An initial

step would consist in reorienting both formal and non-formal educational

curricula and programmes towards the integration therein of disaster

prevention considerations.

Disaster reduction cannot be attained essentially through large-scale

infrastructure-building operations and high-technology devices and systems.

Experience with approaches to disaster reduction which have favoured for

many years material development over human development has revealed that the

problems which these approaches were to address have either persisted or

were exacerbated because: disaster-public awareness did not improve,

learning was not encouraged, access to knowledge and know-how was not

facilitated, exchange of information and partnerships were not eased. The

time is ripe for a shift in emphasis from mere investment in the material to

investment in learning and knowledge-building.

Disaster reduction is pursued when research, education and information go

hand in hand. Research and scientific knowledge are necessary for they

enable us on the one hand to improve our understanding of the problematique

underlying natural phenomena and their consequences, and on the other, to

base decision-making on sound scientific data and assessments of the issues

in hand, of likely future developments and possible solutions. Education is

a vital tool for assuring the full development of the potential of each

individual living in a hazard-prone area and for ensuring a full

participatory approach to anticipating and confronting the risks at their

very origin. The new communication technologies, where available, offer

significant opportunities to convey key messsages world wide rapidly and

inexpensively, reaching down to the grass-roots level and promoting dialogue

and exchange of experience.

It is the development of human resources that plays the key role in enabling

societies and communities to cope with hazards.

***************************

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

www.saide.org.za

***************************

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