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July 8, 2004
The ABCs of E-Education
This afternoon, I moderated a panel session on education technology, chaired by Evans Namanja, Director General of the Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority. Matthew Chetty opened the session with a presentation on the NEPAD E-Schools Initiative. NEPAD developed a vision that the digital divide, in an African context, must be addressed from the perspectives of ICT skills, education and public health. "The digital divide is an issue that must be addressed as a matter of urgency…. as is the challenge of bringing ICT skills to your entire country," Chetty said. "Education is a necessary condition for sustainable development." The NEPAD E-Schools Initiative intends to provide Internet access and ICT skills to students, teachers, administrators and community members so they can "make every learner an active member of the knowledge society."
Over the next 10 years, they seek to convert all 600,000 schools in Africa into NEPAD e-schools. This means providing them with ICT tools and Internet access, technology professional development for teachers, technology-driven curricula that's locally relevant and appropriate, and establish a telecenter within the school focused on community health. The project will be deployed in three phases, with 15 to 20 countries participating in each phase.
"NEPAD provides a continental platform to solve shared problems together, thereby benefiting participating countries both individually and collectively," he said. And by developing the initiative as a continental network, it will provide policymakers and educators with a network for sharing best practices and avoid making mistakes. Chetty said there is also a lot of goodwill for the project, as it has been endorsed by leaders in each African country and embraced as a flagship project for the African Union.
From the UK, we then heard from David Beard of British Telecom and Neil Shaw of the British Council. Beard described BT's Academy Learning Center , a Web-based training for BT employees. The system can handle 90,000 learners in one week, as had been the case recently when all BT staff were required to take an online course in new changes enacted to Britain's telecom laws. Neil Shaw came to talk about a new initiative the British Council is developing with the British Department of Education and Skills called the Global Gateway. The site is striving to be an international education portal for students, parents, teachers and administrators. The site is designed to allow for collaborative projects and international partnership building.
Samer Halawi of Inmarsat and a team of colleagues then discussed an Inmarsat/ITU initiative to bridge the rural/urban digital divide. He presented a video of their project, launched initially in southern Lebanon. Their partner villages in Lebanon lacked the telecommunications infrastructure to connect schools to the Internet, so they gave the local high schools RBGAN satellite terminals, no larger than a laptop, which provides Internet access with download speeds up to 144 kbps. They hope to triple the download times by next year. Satellite access allowed students to become engaged in online science experiments and improve their English speaking skills, increasing their ICT skills across the board. Because it was also their communities' first exposure to the Internet, the program helped engage parents and increase their involvement in their children's education. The RBGAN satellite terminal, currently sells for USD $1500, though soon the price will come down to $700. Internet access costs $36 per month for 10 megabytes per month.
The video then showed a series of brief interviews with Lebanese students; the boys and girls discussed how the Internet had changed the way they viewed education and interacted with their teachers. "We are here in a region far away from any city, any library," said one teacher. " Now a whole world is in our reach because of the Internet." He also added that teachers are no longer forced to travel all the way to Beirut to track down particular educational materials that weren't physically available in the village. After the video, two of Halawi's colleagues talked about the satellite service. When one of them picked up the satellite terminal and started using it as a prop, one of the conference techies thought she was trying to connect it as if it were a laptop, so he unplugged her actual laptop and promptly shut down her Powerpoint presentation.
Following the presentations, I was given the opportunity to summarize the presentations and offer a personal perspective. I noted how the various panelists had discussed education technology from three different perspectives: access, basic training and curricular content - the ABCs of education technology. The challenge, I noted, is crafting initiatives that address all three of these perspectives; otherwise countries might find themselves in a situation like the US did, when we spent large sums of money on wiring schools and libraries to the Internet, but treated teacher training as an afterthought, leaving us with a lot of wired classrooms and a lot of unprepared teachers.
I also noted that projects like the BT online training program assume that learns have a certain level of ICT skills. While BT would certainly expect all of its employees to be ICT literate, least-develop countries are faced with major deficits in basic literacy, let alone ICT literacy. This means that literacy, in all its shapes and sizes, must be addressed in any national edtech or digital divide initiative. Lastly, I said that partnerships are key - governments, the private sector and civil society would never be able to bridge the digital divide on their own or make their efforts sustainable.
During the Q&A period, I also noted there are educational initiatives like IEARN and Global Schoolhouse that should be seen as important curricular assets for teachers, and that educators the developing world should be encouraged to tap into these resources.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at July 8, 2004 10:52 AM
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