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Contents 1 Panel Description 2 Presentation slides 3 Notes on Peer Production and Education Panel 3.1 Andy Carvin, moderator 3.2 Jennifer Correiro 3.3 Steve Midgley 3.4 Saskia Harmsen & Jac Stienen 3.5 Questions & Comments 4 Speaker Bios 5 Papers and resources

Panel Description

As the fundamental basis for participating in the information society, education is pivotal to capacity building through creating and disseminating knowledge. Information and communication technologies (ICT) have played an increasingly important role in improving education. These technologies, ranging from distance learning to collaborative weblogs, open-access wikis, and other e-learning tools, possess tremendous potential to transform education worldwide. ICT can widely disseminate educational content and teaching resources with the digitally networked environment. Peer production approaches to ICT are particularly attractive; not only are they more adaptable and less expensive, but they also enable the building of fundamental human capabilities and encourage content creation by students themselves.

Members of the global community have recognized this immense value in ICT, and are mobilizing to strategically implement ICT solutions in education. The United Nations' 2003 and 2005 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), organized to promote international discussion on the topic, drew thousands of participants from hundreds of countries. Many of those participants were non-government actors: With the advent of ICT, and in particular open source ICT, civil societies and private entities are now stepping up to take the lead in developing solutions to bridge the digital divide.

Yet for many developing nations, the educational benefits of ICT still remain beyond their reach. Inadequate funding, limited human resources, and such global problems as extreme poverty, hunger, and gender inequality present barriers to access to education. The increasing gains in access to knowledge have only widened the social and economic divide with the information poor.

This panel will explore innovative ICT solutions currently being implemented to bridge the digital divide in education. It will examine the strategies that should direct their implementation, the success of various implementations between nations and organizations, and the insights that can be gained from evaluating these implementations.

Presentation slides

Jac Steinen and Saskia Harmsen, IICD (PDF) (PPT)

Notes on Peer Production and Education Panel

Andy Carvin, moderator

Coordinator of Digital Divide Network

• The emergence of the WWW 2 – the “read/write web”
• Lots of people are scared of this, but others are excited
  • Ex: Educators response to MySpace
  • New blog coming next week @ learning now
• Introduction of panel

Jennifer Correiro

Co-founder and ED of “Taking it Global”

• Starting taking it global at 19
  • Mission is to use internet to allow young people to build their own capacity and create community
    • Focus on ICT literacy
    • Thinking of “experience based”, interactive education
      • focus of talk today
• Addressing digital divide by providing meaningful content, context and community
  • Takingitglobal.org
    • Seven languages
      • Translation done by community itself
  • Million hits per day, 3 million unique visitors over past 5 years
  • Average length of visit is 30 mins
  • Key areas of site:
    • “Make connections”
      • Real process in creating moderation criteria
        • Balance respect and openness
    • “Take action”
      • Anyone can post
      • Verification is a challenge
    • “Express yourself”
      • Global Gallery – over 10,000 images
      • Using creative commons license
      • Contests
      • Workshops
    • “Browse Resources”
    • “Understand Issues”
    • “Exploring the World”
  • Actions:
    • Youth media is a growing area
      • Student created film festival
  • Educational programs
    • Informal
      • Big effort to help US kids learn about the rest of the world
    • And formal
  • Class room communities set up on the portal
    • Student voices – online consultation findings

Steve Midgley

Stupski Foundation

• Talk about openness and public education
• Provocative things to start
  • Anecdote from "Literacy with an Attitude" by Patrick Finn
    • 3rd grade classroom in US, one newly arrived Pakistani student who doesn't speak English; another student is African-American who is a little behind in reading. As we follow these students through to 8th grade the Pakistani student is very proficient, well educated and looking forward to college, while the African American student is 3 grades behind and not interested in further education
    • The Question is why?
      • There is no 'physical' basis, of course
      • This is not a question that we ask ourselves very often
      • Poor and minority students are often actually 'rejecting' learning as it is currently delivered
      • Many teachers have learned that "these students don't want to learn" and as a result they "teach around" these students to focus on other students in the classroom
  • Public education is stuck in a process of "negation"
    • Many of these students see mainstream America as unjust and discrimintory
    • As a result they are justifiably skeptical to "access" to mainstream knowledge
    • Access itself is not sufficient
  • My work on open systems
    • Peer production has great potential but in my experience neither availability nor cost are critical barriers
    • Systems fail to engage students with reasons to learn
    • Providing greater access won't solve this problem
  • Some context and data:
    • 4th grade white students are competitve in math w/ the Netherlands, while minority students are competitive w/ Armenia
      • Student is differentially broken
    • Achievement gap is more than 50% is many urban high schools
    • Teachers work alone with the door closed and receive very little support
      • Partly defense mechanism, partly fault of the system that seeks "not to interfere"
      • Integrated data system to help these teachers have failed to appear
      • Even electronic transfer of transcrips from highschools to colleges doesn't exist
  • On technology itself:
    • I have a bias that primary barriers to org change are more about culture and systems than about access
      • Based on research on districts that have been successful in turning around patterns of low achievements
      • Have done this by changing how they operate as educators
      • Norfolk, VA
      • Used elbow-grease and have only slowly adopted tech solutions
    • Currently working on adequated, inadequate data systems and see them as a barrier to cultural change, easier to change data systems than cultural systems
      • If educators have access to effective technology (tools that build effective communities and allow for focused educational choices day-to-day) they can do a lot more
      • Only useful w/in context of an educational culture that values colaboration and participation
  • How can we create these tools and secure their implementation?
    • Public policy is important - but don't want to wait for gov'ts to change policies
    • Focus on peer production and open content to change the market places around these institutions
    • Strategies that we might develop in these area will apply in other educational areas
    • Specific tools and catalysts that we're toying around w/:
      • Open communities of practice and support (at student, teacher and administrative levels)
        • Includes open support systems (build up from there)
        • Open resources for decision making (under-represented in market place), particularly in better decision making for products and services (cnet for education) - create reputations and accountability for providers
        • Model contracts
        • Open-source technology to move data amongst systems
  • Going back to the story at the beginning
    • Teachers and students are not soley to blame
    • Culture of failure and apathy
    • Majority of k-12 schools don't have environments of learning and collaboration but desperately need them
    • Well intentioned approaches fail b/c out of touch w/ rapid change w/in culture - viscious cycle

Saskia Harmsen & Jac Stienen

International Institute for Communication and Development (IICD)

• Jac, Managing Director IICD
  • Intro to IICD
    • Nonprofit founded by dutch ministry of foreign affairs in 1996 w/ staff of 33 located in Hague
    • Mission: help devping countries w/ implementing ICTs in: ed, health, evn, governance and livlihoods
      • Linked w/ Millenium Development Goals
    • Goals - make local orgs aware of possibilities of ICTs for sust devp't and enabling them to use to meet their own demands and to stimulate knowledge wsharing about ICT & devp't b/t local orgs and w/ int community
    • Profile
      • Process - local ownsership, capacity building, monitoring & evaluation
      • Partnerships - public, private & not-for-profit
      • Perspective
    • Working in 9 countries
    • Approach
      • Country programs - dont have officers in these countries, work fully through local partners (round-tables, cap building, knowldge sharing, monitoring) in 5 sectors
      • Thematic networks to share knowledge in field of ICT for devp't
    • Results
      • 100 pilots and policies mostly in 'livelihood' and 'education'
    • Conclusion: ICT is an effective tool for poverty reduction, challenge is to achieve MDG 8
• Saskia, Capacity Devp't Officer
  • Educational Support Network (Zambia) - SNet
    • Teachers are tired of ministry to provide them w/ content
    • Lots of teachers notes out there, less than perfect but what is important is that they are 1. phrased in tried and tested language; 2. use examples that speak directly to pupils; 3. directly related to local context and culture
    • How?
      • 1. Sensitization, identification, write-up; 2. Improve teachers' own resources and texts; 3. Creation and adoption of enhanced materials and formats; 4. Sending back edited text; 5. Approval by Min of Ed
  • Global Teenager Project - solving problems collaboratively, in communities and wider networks
    • Int. Learning Circles - 36 countries participating
      • Students pose each other ?s
  • Farmer-to-farmer - ICTs for exchange of farmers' experiences in ecological agriculture
    • ICTs and training made available for farmer groups to document and exchange their knowledge
    • Documentation & validation of experiences & indigenous knowledge
  • Some answers to the panel ?s
    • Information networking
    • Thematic netowrking
  • Partnerships w/
    • itrain.org
    • capacity.org
  • Lacking: University Research Partnerships

Questions & Comments

• Q: (Helen King) Two ?s: 1. about type of delivery mechanism, what is role of FLOSS? Especially in devp'ing world context; 2. On capacity building - lot of proof that as soon as you build capacity in education, as soon as funding org leaves those trained leave and go into private sector where salaries are bigger?
  • (Saskia) Delivery mechanism - itrain.org uses cds to reach people who are not online, keep things low-bandwidth (less images), sNet is running on OSS, also support training orgs that service OSS in devp'ing countries
  • (Jac) Regarding cap building, we are training the trainers - we train at least 2 orgs per country so as to not depend on just one. We know that 50% leave, but as long as they stay in the country hopefully the knowledge doesn't leave w/ them.
• Q: (Amos, Univ of Ghana) Two questions for IICD: 1. For Jac, can you explain point about 'embedding' ICT and the extent that this is a new direction for IICD; 2. For Saskia, on Bolivia example - is there a place for the 'mobile platform' in this type of peer-to-peer interaction
  • (Jac) Embedding is to address sustainability. We look for doners who will take over after, we do this by making our projects policy related so that ministries get involved, as well as other orgs. First have to prove that it works and that you have critical mass in order to imbed.
  • (Saskia) On mobile platforms - we don't have a lot of project experience w/ it, but what we have found that these projects are strenghened by a central coordination unit. Farmer's orgs for example.
• Q: Interested to hear about specific measures instituted to avoid the 'if we build it, they will come' pattern, how do we avoid imposing solutions?
  • (Jennifer) we build things incrementally and its built by the people who it is for. Often we wait until there is enough interest and pressure in order to initiate efforts. Build w/ people not just for them.
  • (Steve) Contract commons - need-based project are difficult for example where the issue is contracts. Admin support tools help people learn what they don't yet know, have to build appreciation of the need.
• Q: Ask Steve to come back to your story, want to understand where OSS come into play in terms of kinds of systemic change that you're talking about?
  • Conflict b/t open and closed source models is a false choice. Relationship b/t them is that they reside in an economic context. We can build tools, business and markets on multiple licensing formats. OS can crack open and make more effecient these markets. Data tools that move data from open to closed is CRITICAL.

In closing Andy poses his questions:

• Why is peer production important? whatever happend to relying on curricula?
• How would you describe literacy in 21st C?
• How does open courseware fit in all of this?
• WHat is role of gov't, media, and public access centers?
• WHere do wiki's fit into all of this?
• What about where educational technology is controled by technologists?
• How does education change when students know more about technology than their teachers?

Speaker Bios

The official website has complete bios.

Papers and resources

More information on IICD's ItrainOnline initiative

Transcript of Steve Midgley's presentation