TAD Consortium October 1999 Information Update 3

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CONTENTS
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NEWS
--- Professor Says Distance Learning Can Increase Colleges' Income

PROFILED ORGANIZATIONS
--- LoveLife - South Africa
--- Foundation for African Development (FAD) women's desk
--- Radio CDC - South Africa
--- Satellife

ONLINE RESOURCES

--- OECD study on the knowledge economy
--- The Sustainable Development Reference Link
--- The Role of the University: Leveraging Talent, Not Technology by Prof.
Richard Florida
--- Personal-development.com website
--- Report looks at comparative studies of distance learning approaches for
adults
--- Listservs that discuss distance learning
--- Report on "Virtual Classrooms and Communities"
--- The World Health Report 1999 -Making A Difference

PRINTED AND OTHER RESOURCES
--- "Entertainment-Education - a Communication Strategy for Social Change"
--- Measuring Student Knowledge and Skills: A New Framework for Assessment.

Paris
--- Black Student Politics, Higher Education and Apartheid : From SASO to
SANSCO, 1968-1990
--- The Making of Education Policy in South Africa
--- Motivating Students
--- University Teaching: International Perspectives
--- International Perspectives on Lifelong Learning
--- Educational Software for Constructivist Learning Environments:
Subversive Use and Volatile Design
--- Screen Design Guidelines for Motivation in Interactive Multimedia
Instruction: A Survey of Framework for Designers
--- Swiss Virtual Campus: History and Perspectives

ARTICLES
--- First-World Myopia: The Invisible Context of Computing - Philip E. Agre

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NEWS

Professor Says Distance Learning Can Increase Colleges' Income

Austin, Tex.

Although some colleges use new distance-education technology to improve

teaching, one professor thinks the technology can also increase enrollment

and revenue. Christopher J. Dede, a professor of education and of

information technology and engineering at George Mason University, told

those attending a conference here this week that college officials need not

worry about the cost of the new technology. Distance education, he said,

will enable colleges to increase the number of students they serve -- and

increase tuition income. The math is complicated, but Mr. Dede explained

that a college -- if it used space efficiently -- could enroll one-third

more students by holding one-fourth of each course's class meetings on line,

rather than in the classroom. The extra revenue in tuition and fees would

more than pay for the cost of the technology, he said. "It's much more

expensive to build a building than a virtual building," he said during the

conference, called Telelearning '99. The conference was organized by Austin

Community College and several other sponsors. But additional revenue is not

the only benefit of distance-learning technology. Other speakers at the

conference said that so-called "hybrid courses," which incorporate elements

of traditional and on-line courses, improve the learning experience for many

students. Virginia Crank, an assistant English professor at Rock Valley

College, in Rockford, Ill., said the hybrid approach helped shy students

participate in her course, the face-to-face meetings of which are often

dominated by a single student. "He consumes the class time with his energy,"

Ms. Crank said. "When we go on line, this student is forced to listen to the

other students." Ms. Crank also said that students respond to their

classmates' written work in greater depth if they have to write out a

complete response, instead of simply nodding their heads in approval in the

classroom. "I predict that hybrid classes are going to be even better than

both traditional and on-line classes," Ms. Crank said. The barrier to

effective use of information technology isn't the technology itself, Mr.

Dede said. Rather, the barrier is the professor who doesn't know how to

incorporate it well. "Learning the technology isn't very difficult," he

said. "Learning the pedagogy is going to be more difficult." But he

predicted that distance-education technology eventually will become

commonplace in higher education. "Within my lifetime, refusal by a faculty

member to use distance-learning technology will be considered professional

malpractice," said Mr. Dede.

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PROFILED ORGANIZATIONS

(This component of the TAD Consortium Newsletter kindly sponsored by Times

Media Limited - www.tml.co.za)

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LoveLife - South Africa - primary goal is to positively influence adolescent

sexual behaviour to reduce teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases

(STDs), and HIV/AIDS. Seeks to get South Africans talking about sex,

sexuality and gender relations. Activities include: Jika Jika - TV youth sex

talk show; S'camto - young people's films of impromptu conversations with

peers about sex and relationships; "New Youth Crossfire" on radio with Paul

'Rude Boy' Minisi; and others. For more detailed paper contact: Michael

Sinclair msinclair@kff.org

For information on the Foundation for African Development (FAD) women's

contact address at fadevelo@imul.com

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Radio CDC - South Africa - provides pre-packaged programming and live

national call-ins via satellite, to 21 community radio stations in all 9

South African provinces. They are developing a "Peace Radio" programme of

short radio documentaries and call-ins on political violence in the

Greenfields and Mandela Park informal settlements. Contact Chris Armstrong

carmstrong@icon.co.za

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SATELLIFE is an international humanitarian organization employing satellite,

telephone, and Internet technology to serve the health communication and

information needs of countries in the developing world through a global

computer-based communications network, HealthNet. Emphasis is on areas where

access is limited by poor communications, economic conditions, or natural

disasters. Now opening a Regional Information Technology Training Centre

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ONLINE RESOURCES

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On September 24, the OECD posted a study on the knowledge economy. It's 35

kb and is entitled "OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 1999

Steve Cisler

The Sustainable Development Reference Link (This site was last updated on 5

October, 1999)

The Site This site has been developed specifically with the needs of public

servants, academics and individuals in developing countries in mind. The

site is designed to provide links to some of the most useful sites on the

World Wide Web, including sites which provide software for sectoral

management, economic models, data or references. The site is updated

regularly. At the last update there were more than 2,300 unique annotated

links in the main part of the site which in turn are linked to thousands of

other sites.

does not appear to be much in it yet.

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The Role of the University: Leveraging Talent, Not Technology by Prof.

Richard Florida

He said, "We are in danger of undermining the value of research universities

if we regard them simply as sources of technology."

For reading the article, please point your browser to

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Taken from the Training Zone LearningWire - Issue 69

The personal-development.com website is a newly discovered and excellent

resource for all matters related to its title. In a simple, low-frills, easy

to navigate website you'll find downloadable resources, plenty of links to

other sites with a high PD content, news, events, discussion areas - a good

community for people working in or actively involved in personal

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Taken from the Training Zone LearningWire - Issue 69

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Report of a recent research study now published online looks at comparative

studies of distance learning appraoches for adults. Part of a partnership

with the University of Barcelona, University of Helsinki and Lulea Tekniska

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There are several listservs that discuss distance learning from a variety of

Kristin Evenson Hirst

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The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released their 1999 report on

the state of the World's Health. Citing successes in the decline of

mortality and an increase in health and economic productivity for much of

the world, the report balances its good news with analysis of continuing

problems of malnutrition, infectious diseases, tuberculosis, and tobacco use

in much of the developing world. Data provided by the report include

mortality rates and the burden of disease by country, sex, cause, and WHO

region; demographic characteristics of WHO regions; and statistics on

infectious and noncommunicable diseases broken down by region, sex, and age.

Users may download the report in its entirety (2135K) or chapter-by-chapter.

[DC]

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PRINTED AND OTHER RESOURCES

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"Entertainment-Education - a Communication Strategy for Social Change" is a

new book by Arvind Singhal and Everett Rogers. Focuses on history,

programming examples and best strategies in the use of

entertainment-education strategies to achieve development goals. Programmes

reviewed include Soul City, Hum Log, Dialogo, Twende na Wakati and

Simplemente Maria. Contact SINGHAL@ouvaxa.cats.ohiou.edu OR erogers@unm.edu

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SAIDE Resource Centre : Selected Abstracts No.5/1999

Assessments

Measuring Student Knowledge and Skills: A New Framework for Assessment.

Paris : OECD, 1999.

The 29 Member countries of the OECD, together with other countries, have

launched the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to

develop international indicators, on a regular basis, to assess whether

children are acquiring the necessary skills and knowledge to become

tomorrow's citizens and continue learning throughout life. PISA aims at

assessing how far students approaching the end of compulsory education have

acquired some of the knowledge and skills that are essential for full

participation in society. This first volume in the PISA series, provides the

conceptual framework on which the PISA 2000 assessment is based. It defines

the domains of reading literacy, mathematics literacy and scientific

literacy forming the core of PISA in terms of the content that students need

to acquire, the processes that need to be performed, and the contexts in

which knowledge and skills are applied. It also describes the methods

developed to ensure that the assessment tasks are valid across countries,

are strong at measuring relevant skills and are based on authentic life

situations.

Education : South Africa

Black Student Politics, Higher Education and Apartheid : From SASO to

SANSCO, 1968-1990 by Saleem Badat. Pretoria : HSRC, 1999.

This book examines two black national student political organisations - the

South African National Students' Congress (SANSCO) and the South African

Students' Organisation (SASO), popularly associated with Black

Consciousness. It analyses the ideologies, politics and organisation of SASO

and SANSCO and their intellectual, political and social determinants. It

also analyses their role in the educational, political and social spheres,

and the factors that shaped their activities. Finally, it assesses their

contributions to the popular struggle against apartheid education as well as

against race, class and gender oppression. Black students were not just

victims of apartheid, but were also thinkers, conscious actors and

historical agents. In the face of an authoritarian and repressive political

order, SASO and SANSCO constituted black students as an organised social

force within the national liberation movement, and contributed to the

erosion of the apartheid social order and to educational and social

transformation in South Africa.

The Making of Education Policy in South Africa by Ken Hartshorne. Cape Town

: Oxford University Press, 1999.

In this book the late Dr Ken Hartshorne contends that the education system

is not a machine that can be overhauled, but a living organism which grows

out of its earlier incarnations. He demonstrates how the legacy of apartheid

persists and how acts of protest and signs of hope during that era have

borne fruit in the 1990s. Based on essays and lectures written every twenty

years, this book charts the state's role in education from the earliest

years of white settlement, focusing on black education at the time of the

Soweto revolt, the liberal recommendations of the HSRC De Lange Committee,

and the oppressive and malfunctioning bureaucratic machinery of the 1980s.

The book ends with an exploration of education in the 1990s.

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Higher education

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Motivating Students by Sally Brown, Steve Armstrong and Gail Thompson.

London : Kogan Page/SEDA, 1998.

Well motivated students have always succeeded in Higher Education and will

continue to do so: the challenge has always been to stimulate, engender and

enhance the motivation of those students whose enthusiasm for learning

cannot be taken for granted. Under-motivated students are hard to teach,

gain little benefit from their studies and drain the resources of the

institutions in which they study. The authors explore ways of motivating

these students, balancing theoretical approaches with practical ideas and

case studies. The aim of the book is to increase awareness of the factors

that influence student motivation, with the explicit purpose of using this

understanding to bring about improvements in curriculum design and delivery

and assessment in Higher Education. The chapters are organized in four

sections: the impact of teaching on student motivation; motivating diverse

students; the impact of university practices on motivation; the impact of

assessment on motivation.

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University Teaching: International Perspectives ed. By James JF Forest.

London: Garland Publishing, 1998.

The primary scope of this book is to address the question of what is going

on in the world of university teaching. University and college teaching and

the assessment and reward of teaching are among the most important topics in

higher education worldwide, and increasing in importance. However,

surprisingly little has been done towards collaboratively presenting the

growing wealth of quality research on university and college teaching from

around the world. A cross-cultural perspective in research on higher

education helps to extract from a set of different social arrangements that

which, if not universal, is at least true in a large number of cases. Even

when a research attempts to enhance our understanding of a single nation and

its uniqueness, this is often best accomplished through comparison with

other national contexts. Thus, this book offers for consideration several

comparative and international perspectives on teaching in post secondary

education.

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Lifelong Learning

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International Perspectives on Lifelong Learning by John Holford, Peter

Jarvis and Colin Griffin. London : Kogan Page, 1998.

Today, everyone is talking about lifelong learning. Schooling is not enough:

we must take responsibility and continue to learn throughout our lives. This

collection examines theory and practice in lifelong learning from a range of

international standpoints. What the policy rhetoric means, and how practice

is really changing, are discussed in studies of lifelong learning in higher

education, workplaces, schools, social movements, international

organizations and national governments. The seven parts of this book address

key areas of debate and analysis, highlighted by many international case

studies, including Australia, New Zealand, USA, South Africa, China and Hong

Kong. Issues and themes include the nature of learning society, and what it

means for teaching, learning, ethics and gender. Contents include:

International Policy, Lifelong Learning in the Learning Society, Lifelong

Learning and Political Transitions; Learning, Markets and Change in Welfare

States; Learning and Change in Educational Structures; Learning and Change

at Work; Aims, Ethics and Social Purpose in Lifelong Learning.

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Technology Enhanced Learning

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Educational Software for Constructivist Learning Environments: Subversive

Use and Volatile Design by David Squires. In Educational Technology: The

Magazine for Managers of Change in Education, vol.39, no. 3 May-June 1999

pp48-54.

Discussions about the use of technology based learning environments often

assume that use is defined, or at least severely constrained, by the

inherent intentions of the designer. However, typical uses of educational

software involve a subversion of the designer's intentions to match

contextual needs. Designers should consider designing for subversive use,

recognizing that users fit the use of technology-based environments into

contextually tuned "situated" learning environments. In this sense, good

design is volatile design, i.e. design which changes with contextual use.

These ideas are illustrated with reference to a range of technology based

learning environments.

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Screen Design Guidelines for Motivation in Interactive Multimedia

Instruction: A Survey of Framework for Designers by Sung Heum Lee and

Elizabeth Boling. In Educational Technology: The Magazine for Managers of

Change in Education, vol.39, no. 3 May-June 1999 pp19-26.

The purpose of the study reported in this article was to identify the

available guidelines for screen design that would improve the motivational

appeal of interactive multimedia for instruction, and organize those

guidelines into a useful framework for application by designers of

interactive multimedia instruction. Available guidelines for creating

well-designed, motivating screens in multimedia are poorly organized within

the literature. Two primary types of guidelines were discovered - those

aimed at enhancing motivation and those aimed at preventing loss of

motivation. The authors call the first type of guideline "expansive," and

the second "restrictive". The authors propose a framework for considering

motivation in the process of designing interactive multimedia instruction,

and speculate that instructional designers guided primarily by restrictive

guidelines may be kept from discovering the strategies used by graphic

designers, multimedia designers, and others in related disciplines to

enhance the motivational aspects of screen design.

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Swiss Virtual Campus: History and Perspectives by Daniel Peraya and Bernard

Levrat. In: Educational Media International, vol.36, no.2, June 1999

pp97-109.

In 1996 the Swiss University Conference mandated a group of experts to study

the problems of the introduction of information technologies into higher and

university education and make some proposals, including the financial

aspects. The paper presents the institutional and historical context of this

initiative as well as giving an overview of the role of TECFA, the

Educational Technologies Unit of the University of Geneva, in this field.

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ARTICLES

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First-World Myopia: The Invisible Context of Computing

Philip E. Agre

Department of Information Studies

University of California, Los Angeles

Los Angeles, California 90095-1520

USA

This is a draft. Please do not quote from it.

Version of 16 October 1999.

1100 words.

Information is everywhere and nowhere, immaterial and abstract, cleanly

separable from the concrete world of cows and cars. That is the common sense

we learn in school. But the common sense cannot be quite right, or else we

would not need the Internet to move all of this information around. The

Internet is strange in this way, an ontological hybrid, with one foot in the

world of atoms and the other foot in the world of bits. Metaphysics since

Plato and political science since the Enlightenment make it easy to imagine

the world of universal information that the Internet promises to bring -- so

easy, in fact, that we can underestimate the work that will be required to

bring this world about.

Here is the problem. We all know that computers are complex beasts. But for

all of their internal complexity, computers are just as complicated in their

embedding in the outside world. Yet the complexity of this embedding is

largely invisible to the people who design computers, and to the people who

make a living promoting their use. Call it first-world myopia: taking for

granted the sprawling background of infrastructure, institutions, and

information that make modern societies possible.

It may seem implausible that infrastructure, institutions, and information

could be invisible, since in public discourse these days we hardly seem to

discuss anything else. But it happens all the time, and here is why. Modern

society exhibits a tremendous division of labor, and a division of labor is

only possible if every occupational community can focus on its own

speciality, letting everything else fade into the background. In a society

with a thousand and one occupations, everyone will be socialized into an

occupational discourse and practice that simply presupposes the products of

a thousand others. This is efficient, but it is also dangerous. The products

of industrial society often do not travel well. Computers, for example,

require electricity and an overnight delivery system for spare parts -- both

complex infrastructures that are not always available. These are familiar

examples; let us consider three examples that are less familiar.

Thing first about data. What is data? In fact computer scientists have

thought about data in several ways (Agre 1997). In the early days, they

spoke of computation as data processing, the idea being that data was an

industrial material like iron ore. But this metaphor did not do justice to

the representational nature of data -- the fact that data makes claims about

something in the world. So techniques like data modeling arose to make

clearer what sorts of entities in the world the machine was supposed to

represent. But that hardly exhausts the topic. Once a computer is filled

with well-defined numbers, consider what it means to add those numbers (or

subtract them, or compare them). Those numbers originated somewhere, for

example a 3 from Europe and a 4 from Asia. The sum of those numbers, 7, is

only meaningful if the 3 and the 4 are commensurable, and that requires that

they be measured in the same way. A working computer thus requires more than

functioning circuits. It also requires a far-flung institutional arrangement

that provides for the standardized capture of data. Bowker (1994) refers to

this kind of realization as an infrastructural inversion, and it is a good

example of the first-world myopia that takes such things for granted.

Think next about the settings in which computers are used. It is

extraordinarily common for organizations to invest large sums in complex

computers without any investment in training. Schools often invest their

scarce resources in computers without any thought to the curriculum. In some

cases the responsible authorities are duped by claims that the systems are

easy to use. In other cases it is assumed that computers will pay for

themselves by displacing staff, and further investments in human capital

seem like the opposite of that intention. In each case, what is neglected is

what Kling (1992) calls the web of relationships around the computer.

Computers are easy to see, but webs are not.

This effect is especially pronounced with the Internet. The Internet's

design was motivated in large part by "end-to-end arguments" (Saltzer, Reed,

and Clark 1984), according to which it is more efficient to move complex

networking functions from the network itself to the computers that use it.

This made perfect sense in places like MIT and UCLA, where the researchers

could depend on a web of skilled people and advanced technical resources. It

makes less sense in the real world, and organizations that adopt the

Internet are often unprepared for the cost and managerial overhead of hiring

a system administrator to maintain it. In the telephone system, most of

those administration skills are internalized by the telephone company

(Odlyzko 1998). The Internet's distributed architecture also distributes the

social and technical complexity. An analogy can be found in Latour's (1988:

90 [?]) account of the spread of Pasteurization in France. Pasteur's process

worked in his laboratory, and in order for the process to spread around the

country, the relevant aspects of the laboratory had to be spread around as

well. The consequences for Internet services are considerable. For example,

most first-worlders are accustomed to the decades of cross-subsidies that

brought basic telephone service to rural areas. They take this universality

for granted, and they too readily imagine the rural utopias that universal

Internet service will bring.

Think, finally, about neoclassical economics, which continues to dominate

first-world economics departments despite its programmatic neglect of

institutions and information (e.g., Hodgson 1988). Such a theory is only

plausible if a tremendous framework of both can be taken for granted. Of

course, some neoclassically oriented economists have spent the 1990s

relaxing these extreme assumptions, so that institutions and information

have started to become visible in mainstream discourse (e.g., Stiglitz

1985). Nonetheless, the neoclassical idealizations of perfectly information

and perfectly functioning economic institutions are deeply ingrained in a

vast economic rhetoric, and this rhetoric is still routinely applied in

contexts where the idealizations do not hold. Economic playing fields are

thus made to seem much more level than they really are.

These few examples hardly exhaust the depths of first-world myopia. But they

do get us started on an important project: understanding how technologies

and ideas can be perfectly valid in one context and disastrously

wrong-headed in another. Once we acquire this new, clearer-sighted variety

of common sense, we will become less susceptible to what Leigh Star and Gail

Hornstein (1990) call "universality biases": the uncritical assumption that

discoveries in one context will necessarily apply in another. Instead, we

will take the transfer of technology and ideas as an opportunity to make

visible the taken-for-granted background of technical and economic work. Bad

advice will be replaced by dialogue, and we will all be better for it.

References

--- Philip E. Agre, Beyond the mirror world: Privacy and the

representational practices of computing, in Philip E. Agre and Marc

Rotenberg, eds, Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape, Cambridge: MIT

Press, 1997.

--- Geoffrey Bowker, Information mythology: The world of/as information, in

Lisa Bud-Frierman, ed, Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of

Knowledge in Modern Business, London: Routledge, 1994.

--- Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Economics and Institutions: A Manifesto for a

Modern Institutional Economics, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1988.

--- Rob Kling, Behind the terminal: The critical role of computing

infrastructure in effective information systems' development and use, in

William Cotterman and James Senn, eds, Challenges and Strategies for

Research in Systems Development, London: Wiley, 1992.

--- Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, translated by Alan Sheridan

and John Law, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.

--- Jerome W. Saltzer, David P. Reed, and David D. Clark, End-to-end

arguments in system design, ACM Transactions in Computer Systems 2(4), 1984,

pages 277-288.

--- Gail A. Hornstein and Susan Leigh Star, Universality biases: How

theories about human nature succeed, Philosophy of the Social Sciences

20(4), 1990, pages 421-436.

--- Joseph E. Stiglitz, Information and economic analysis: A perspective,

Economic Journal 95(supplement), 1985, pages 21-41.

End

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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

www.saide.org.za

* 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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