TAD Consortium October 1999 Information Update 2
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CONTENTS
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NEWS
--- Internet Radio in Sri Lanka
--- Creative Radio for Development
--- First Hindi Internet portal launched
--- Yizo director garners Silver Lion at Venice Film Festival
--- Somalia's First ISP Opens for Business
--- Microsoft Corp. will underwrite research at MIT
ANNOUNCEMENTS/REQUESTS
--- Co-ordinated Masters' and Doctoral program on Internet-Based
Development and Empowerment.
ONLINE RESOURCES
--- UNESCO's projects for developing community media
--- The Disrespected Student - Or - The Need For The Virtual
University
--- Study Finds Problems With Web Class
--- Students' Frustrations with a Web-based Distance
Education Course: A Taboo Topic in the Discourse
--- Financing Health Services in poor countries: feeding a
white elephant.
--- Colorado State University's Information and
Instructional Technology Plan.
--- The Development of Virtual Education: A global
perspective
--- Electronic Collaboration: A Practical Guide for
Teachers
--- Website focusing on Flexible Open Distance Learning and
Telematics is available at:
--- IY2KCC
ARTICLES
--- Does Information Technology Really Promote Knowledge? - By
Kunda Dixit
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NEWS
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Internet Radio in Sri Lanka
http://www.idn.org/pprofiles/pp051699.htm
Reproduced from UNESCO Communications, Information, Informatics Web Site.
The Internet is increasingly used for broadcasting radio programmes. The Kothmale Internet Community radio project in Sri Lanka demonstrates that this a particularly interesting approach in rural areas. This pilot project, which aims at assessing the potential benefits of new communication technologies to remote areas, is being implemented by UNESCO in collaboration with the Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications and the Media, Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, Sri Lanka Telecommunication Regulatory Commission and the University of Colombo. Kothmale is located in the central part of Sri Lanka. It takes about three hours bus ride from the capital city Colombo to reach the location. Kothmale community radio serves a target area of 20km radius, which includes a number of rural towns such as Gampola, Nawalapitiya and Thispane.
Related Links
UNESCO's projects for developing community media
http://www.unesco.org/webworld/com_media/society_communities.html
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Creative Radio for Development
by Gordon Adam
For four days in May ( 1996 ), radio broadcasters from twenty countries gathered in Birmingham, England, to examine how radio can be used more extensively in humanitarian crises throughout the world. Entitled "Creative Radio for Development." the conference was concerned not with radio's reporting role, but with its ability to convey life giving basic educational skills such as child health, farming, coping with environmental and human disasters.
The participants were united in believing that radio has great potential in this field , and they started making plans to campaign for its greater use worldwide. In the following articles, CROSSLINES looks at some of the issues raised in the Conference. First, Gordon Adam, deputy editor of CROSSLINES and coordinator of the Conference, considers its outcome and how the "creative radio" initiative can be carried forward.
Full item at..
http://www.cinemedia.net/SFCV-RMIT-Annex/rnaughton/RADIO_HELP.html
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First Hindi Internet portal launched
by Vineeta Mishra, India Abroad News Service
New Delhi, Sep 23 - Indian Internet users need no longer communicate in English. With the launch of an Internet portal in Hindi, www.webdunia.com, on Thursday, the information superhighway has been opened up for millions of people who use only Hindi as the means for communication.
Webduniya has been promoted by Suvi Information Systems, a software consulting and development company based in the western city of Indore. Apart from the usual e-mail and chat service provided by other websites, Webdunia.com provides its users rich information on India from news and current affairs to culture arts and music, entertainment, astrology, religions, festivals and rituals.
Says Vinay Chhajlani, managing director, Suvi Information Systems, "We feel our users would be more interested in knowing more about (Congress party president) Sonia Gandhi than the U.S. vice president, or they would be more interested in knowing about Sachin's (Tendulkar's) back, so our news focusses on India and Indians in depth."
Developed by a dedicated team of 32 people comprising content editors and sub-editors, Webduniya.com took almost a year and a half to be completed. The portal sources its news from various agencies, although company sources didn't want to name any. Says Parvinder Gujral, marketing manager of Suvi, "The news would be updated on a daily basis, but other features would be updated as and when a new development takes place in the specified area."
Elaborates Chhajlani, "While developing this portal we did have a lot of problems -- non-standardisation of the Indian characters, contents were not available in Hindi, non-compatibility of some components across different browsers, and a number of technical barriers. But it was ultimately hours of hard work and dedication which helped us develop this site."
But what is it that would drive people to the site? Says Gujral, "We will pick up contents of interest to Indians, for example guiding Indians living abroad on how to do a 'puja' (Hindu prayer), etc., we will provide value-added service."
Suvi Information Systems has developed E-patra which, it claims, enables one to send e-mail messages in Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Malayalam and Punjabi even if one does not have a lingual keyboard. It has also developed E-varta, which enables multi-lingual online chat.
The success of the Hindi portal has now encouraged the company to plan developing a similar service in other Indian languages. But for this Suvi is looking for franchisee arrangements. Talks are on with a Mumbai-based company to start a service in Marathi, company sources say.
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Screen Africa News Bulletin 28 September 1999
Yizo director garners Silver Lion at Venice Film Festival Teboho Mahlatsi, co director of the controversial and phenomenally successful television series, Yizo Yizo was awarded a Silver Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival for his short film, Portrait Of A Young Man Drowning. In the 54-year history of the festival, this marks the first time that a South African has garnered a Silver Lion. Mahlatsi and his partner at Laduma Film Factory, Angus Gibson, are currently developing a follow-up series of Yizo Yizo. Both Mahlatsi and Gibson will be attending MIPCOM in Cannes next month to seek partners for a new project they are developing for the international market.
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BBC Online Network: Somalia's First ISP Opens for Business
Against all the odds, the first ISP has opened for business in Somalia, bringing one of the few remaining unwired African countries online. Only two countries are now technically without access, Ertirea and Congo-Brazzaville.
The ISP will serve the capital city Mogadishu and Borama in addition to Hargeisa, the capital of the neighbouring Somaliland.
The number of consumers the provider will serve, however, is minimal. At present the company has just over thirty customers in Mogoadishu and expects to serve just 100 people across the country.
The cost of access is largely prohibitive. The installation fee alone at USD120 is the equivalent of the monthly income of many Somali families. The monthly line rental cost is set at USD30 while it costs USD.75 per minute to surf the Net.
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IN A $25-MILLION DEAL it plans to announce this morning, Microsoft Corp. will underwrite research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop information technology for use in university education.
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ANNOUNCEMENTS/REQUESTS
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The University of Pretoria's Department of Information Science will be presenting a Co-ordinated Masters' and Doctoral program on Internet-Based Development and Empowerment. The whole programme can be previewed at http://hagar.up.ac.za/catts/guide/index.htm
The project will be guided by Prof Johannes Cronje who has been involved in this field as co-ordinator of the Masters' Degree in Computer-Assisted Education, The Masters' Degree in Information Technology and the Group for the Advancement of Multimedia Exploration. His home page is at http://hagar.up.ac.za/catts/abchome.html
Prospective M & D students wishing to work in the field of Internet-Based Development and Empowerment are urged to visit the site and contact Prof Cronje at jcronje@up.ac.za
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ONLINE RESOURCES
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UNESCO's projects for developing community media
http://www.unesco.org/webworld/com_media/society_communities.html
UNESCO supports the development of community media
http://www.unesco.org/webworld/com_media/society_com_media.html
to give different social groups especially the more isolated or disadvantaged, a chance to participate in the development of strategies and projects that promote dialogue and the pooling of experiences at local levels. To share experiences worldwide, a handbook reviewing the principles, policies and materials relevant to the development of community media is being prepared and will be made available to member states.
Support is being provided, principally in the small islands states, for pilot projects combining traditional and new technologies (including access to the Internet) in order to help local populations gain access to international programmes and services and encourage them to use the information gathered for local purposes. Special attention has been paid to initiatives developed and carried out by women. Assistance has also been provided for setting up of low-cost equipment production units and appropriate maintenance services.
Ghana: Radio Ada goes on the air
http://www.unesco.org/webworld/highlights/radio_ada_110599.html
Nepal: Radio Sagaramatha
http://www.unesco.org/webworld/com_media/society_com_media.html#1
Promoting and enhancing the development of community media in Africa,
http://www.unesco.org/webworld/highlights/uganda_190499.html
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THE DISRESPECTED STUDENT - OR - THE NEED FOR THE VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY - A Talk with Roger Schank
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/schank/schank_index.html
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Study Finds Problems With Web Class
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/09/cyber/education/22education.html
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Students' Frustrations with a Web-based Distance Education Course: A Taboo Topic in the Discourse
http://www.slis.indiana.edu/CSI/wp99_01.html
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Taken from the ELDIS DEVELOPMENT REPORTER No 2, September 1999
Financing Health Services in poor countries: feeding a white elephant. Danida, 1998
Questions common donor assumptions on health finance policies. Concludes that there are no simple, blueprint models that are transferable between countries. Programmes need to be tailored for local political and cultural environments.
http://nt1.ids.ac.uk/eldis/ele.htm
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Here is the URL for Colorado State University's Information and Instructional Technology Plan.
http://www.colostate.edu/services/acns/csuiite/index.html
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The Development of Virtual Education: A global perspective
(c) The Commonwealth of Learning, 1999
ISBN: 1-895369-74-6
The term "virtual education" is something that is heard with increasing frequency now as the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) becomes ever more present in the conduct of open and distance education. To examine the degree to which the "virtual institution" has really arrived, The Commonwealth of Learning, with funding from the British Department for International Development, commissioned an international group of experts to look at this phenomenon and provide a snapshot report. While it is clear that the application of ICTs to the practice of open and distance learning is growing rapidly, the study team determined that the concept of truly virtual education is still more rhetorical than real. The report provides a detailed look at the differences in this development around the world through a series of regionally-based papers and concludes with a number of suggestions for policy makers and education leaders regarding the development of models for virtual learning. The entire study is available on-line [in pdf format] from http://www.col.org/virtualed/index.htm
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Electronic Collaboration: A Practical Guide for Teachers
http://www.lab.brown.edu/public/ocsc/collaboration.guide/index.shtml
This 69-page document, produced by The Northeast and Islands Regional Educational Laboratory At Brown University in the USA (LAB), in association with the Teacher Enhancement Electronic Community Hall (TEECH), provides an excellent introduction to the instructional uses of the Web. Avoiding the hyperbole of some material on the Internet in the classroom, this guide gives practical advice about the types of collaboration facilitated by the Internet, setting up collaborative environments, and the technological choices currently available to instructors. [DC]
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You will be interested to note that a website focusing on Flexible Open Distance Learning and Telematics is available at:
http://www.fae.plym.ac.uk/tele/tele.html
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The IY2KCC was created in February, 1999 under the auspices of the United Nations, with funding from the World Bank. Our mission is to promote increased strategic cooperation and action among governments, peoples, and the private sector to minimize adverse Y2K effects on the global society and economy.
Use our links to get information about Y2K and to contact over 170 national "http://207.233.133.234/newy2k.nsf/webreport/, regional http://www.iy2kcc.org/Regional.htm, and sector http://www.iy2kcc.org/Sectors.htm coordinators. Review our latest press releases http://www.iy2kcc.org/Press.htm. Check out our calendar of events http://www.iy2kcc.org/Calendar.htm. Take a look at conference presentations http://www.iy2kcc.org/Y2KConferences.htm and upcoming agendas. Delve into our tools and templates http://www.iy2kcc.org/Resources.htm to gather information about contingency planning and connect to international and multi-national organizations. Volunteer to serve in the YES Corps http://www.iy2kcc.org/YES.htm or, if you are a national Y2K coordinator, sign up http://www.iy2kcc.org/CountryForm.htm for assistance for your country. Contact Pellegrin@IY2KCC.org us with your questions and suggestions. http://www.iy2kcc.org/
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ARTICLES
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DOES INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY REALLY PROMOTE KNOWLEDGE?
While new technologies make it possible to move more information faster than ever before, we should ask questions about the quality of the information: what is it that we are communicating? Is it relevant? Will it make the world a better place? And does all this information add up to knowledge?
By Kunda Dixit
Third World Network Features
As new technologies make it possible to move more information faster than ever before, we are dazzled by the millions of gigabytes that move across the world in nanoseconds. We are infatuated by bandwidth, digital television, by gadgets and gizmos. Yet we hardly ask questions about the quality of the information: what is it that we are communicating? Is it relevant? Will it make the world a better place? And does all this information add up to knowledge?
The challenge is to get the information to where it is needed through the most cost-effective method possible. Only when information helps people communciate and participate and allows them and their rulers to make informed choices does that information become knowledge.
The growing gap between the world's haves and have-nots is today reflected in the gap between the knows and the not-knows. If we want to turn information into knowledge, and give the developing world a chance to take a short-cut to prosperity, the knowledge gap needs to be bridged urgently.
Here we are not talking about the top-of-the-line computers in each classroom in India, we are talking about a teacher who is trained and motivated, a classroom that has a roof, school children who have enough to eat so that their brains are not stunted by low-calorie intake.
The scriptures are right: 'Knowledge is a sword, and wisdom is a shield.' Perhaps nowhere is the raw power of knowledge as relevant today as it is for the two-thirds of the world's people who live in the countries of the South. And yet in the developing countries of the South, the holy trinity of the Information Age (television, telephone and computer) is present, if at all, only in its cable and satellite television incarnation.
South Asia, where one-fifth of the world's population lives, is today within the footprint of at least 50 broadcast satellites. In India, Pakistan and Bangladesh alone there are more than 70 million households with television sets, giving a viewership of 300 million. By the year 2007, there will be 550 million television viewers in these countries, and half of them will be hooked up to cable and able to watch 350 channels that will be available by then.
Advances in information technology are supposed to shrink distances, but they don't necessarily bring people together. Better communications through satellite may give people a wider array of programming to choose from, but it does not guarantee that they will be more tolerant of diversity.
In fact, more information seems to mean more ignorance, and better communications initially at least tends to highlight the differences between peoples. Knowledge may be a sword, but it is double-edged. The delivery mechanisms for knowledge are today in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Globally, media ownership reflects the supranational ownership patterns and mega-mergers with other worldwide businesses. More and more of the message therefore propagates a global consumer monoculture that is wasteful, unjust and environmentally unsound. It is when this culture is put forward as the only one to aspire for that it helps perpetuate economic disparities and unsustainable lifestyles.
It also leaves more and more people out of the knowledge loop. They have lost the knowledge they had, and what has replaced it is no longer relevant or useful. Ultimately, this provokes an extremist backlash against an uncaring elite and a soulless global culture. In a lot of ways, it is just like the loss of genetic diversity. High-yield hybrid seeds have replaced a rich variety of local cereals, improving harvests but also making the crops more susceptible to disease, and needing expensive inputs of agrochemicals to make them work. Globalisation of the media subliminally spreads information that eats into traditional knowledge bases and indigenous processes best adapted to deal with local conditions.
The Internet may offer a chance for South Asian countries to leapfrog technology, to level the playing field, to democratise information by giving a voice to diverse groups so that a new age when better communications will spread useful knowledge will be ushered in. But going by past examples, the chances of this happening are not good. Before its 1 November launch, Iridium has launched a media blitz. The latest commercial beamed via satellite television to millions of homes across the world shows the Himalayas and Kathmandu, while the voice-over talks of how you can now wait for the dial tone at the ends of the earth.
But who really grabs satellite phones first? It is the war correspondents, the Osma bin Ladens, the businessmen or dying mountaineers on the summit of Mt Everest making their last call home. The poor will be the last to use them, or benefit from them.
How do we ensure that Information Technology will succeed where all earlier previous panaceas have failed? First, by knowing its limitations. Let us not recklessly promise that this will 'level the playing field' or 'democratise information' but do little doable things with it which will add up to change. A lot of this is already happening. It takes more than an hour to log on to the government-owned ISP in New Delhi because of dirty phone lines and although only India's information elite have private phone connections or can afford a computer and the ISP fees, the Internet in India has become a vigorous parallel information universe. Activists and the media have found this to be an efficient and fast way to counter the mainstream agenda, especially in the dangerous age of nukes and religious jingoism.
In places where official information is controlled like in Indonesia, Malaysia and China, the Internet has brought the only available means of spearheading the truth. Across the world, non- governmental organisations, human rights activists, trampled minorities and suppressed democracy supporters are bonding via email. The Internet's inherent anarchy, its decentralised nature and freedom from official control has ironically made a globalised Internet the most ideal medium to take on the ravages of a globalised economy.
If history has taught us anything, it is that technology by itself is never the answer. The corporate values that drive the Information Age are the same ones that drove the Industrial Age, and things will be no different with the Internet or Iridium. It still depends on who gets to control it, who gets to use it and how they use it. Unlike the computer's binary codes, it is not going to be either/or, plus/minus. The outcome of the Information Age is going to be a messy analog mishmash.
Parts of the world will be enslaved by information transnationals, others will be liberated. Some will cash in on a commercialised Internet, others will do just as well without it. Some will be smothered in an avalanche of information overload, others who yearn for freedom will use it to bypass tyranny. The degree to which South Asia can benefit from the Internet's potential for democracy, bring about true decentralisation, or spread knowledge will depend on how much support the information- poor get to log on.
In the final analysis, Information Technology is like a tiger. You can either ride it or be eaten up by it. You may be eaten up anyway, but at least you get to ride it for a while. - Third World Network Features
About the writer: Kunda Dixit is Director of Panos South Asia and co-publisher of Himal magazine. He is also author of the book, Dateline Earth: Journalism As If The Planet Mattered.
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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
* To view an archive of previous updates visit:
www.saide.org.za/tad/archive.htm
* For resources on distance education and
technology use in Southern Africa visit:
www.saide.org.za/worldbank/Default.htm
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