Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] What Activities Are Offering Online Professional Development for Educators?

[Bonnie Bracey]

In a message dated 6/1/2004, "Global Knowledge Dev. Moderator" writes:
> 1. What activities use online methods to provide pre-service and/or
> in-service online professional development for educators?


The CERN group created a forum for the WSIS and the Role of Science in
the Information Society so that people of all countries could dialogue
about specific topics, environment, education, health and the economy,
(I might have left one out). The thing is, we all learned about the
developing countries and the countries that are at this time ahead. We
learned to commmunicate around a topic and to actually teach each other
online and to learn from each other. An online course can do the same
thing if we share and provide examples for educators. Most people don't
know that we have areas of need in technology in the US.

There are organizations that create a learning landscape for people
working in new technologies. One is the Inquiry Page, (Dr. Bertram
Bruce)
  
The Inquiry Page 
http://www.inquiry.uiuc.edu/ 
  
The Inquiry Page is more than a website. It's a dynamic virtual
community where inquiry-based education can be discussed, resources and
experiences shared, and innovative approaches explored in a
collaborative environment.

Here you can search a growing database of inquiry units, and you can
also build your own inquiry units. You can see pictures of inquiry-based
activities and learn more about some of our partners who use inquiry
methods. Learn how to assess and evaluate inquiry-based education or
look for more inquiry resources to support what you're doing. Or you can
simply find out more about what inquiry and The Inquiry Page are all
about.

There are some areas that are the same, it is the teaching methodology
that may differ. Here is another resource: The George Lucas Educational
Foundation, at . Developing countries may
have some ways to create learning that works even if what they see is
not what they have. It is because education is political in some
countries like the US, and in some countries people in education can
bypass so much constant change and create a better learning environment.


Bonnie Bracey 

www.tcpd.org 

bbracey @ aol.com





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[GKD-DOTCOM] What Activities Are Offering Online Professional Development for Educators?

[Global Knowledge Dev. Moderator]

Dear GKD Members,

"Education for All." Sounds great. Tough to do. A key challenge is
developing skilled educators across the developing world. One approach
capturing broad attention is the use of online professional development
for educators. Enthusiasts praise online methods for offering "just in
time" training, and building new content knowledge and modern teaching
skills. Skeptics question whether online training develops key skills,
e.g., the ability to manage classroom learning and nurture students'
development. Both worry about the constraints online programs face.

Yet we have limited concrete information about online professional
development activities. We know that many organizations are trying
online approaches, but we lack good information about who's doing what,
where -- and how well it's working. While a few donor-sponsored
activities are widely publicized, many innovative, creative efforts are
ignored, despite their value.

This week we would like to identify activities that are using online
approaches to support pre-service and in-service training for educators.
We seek to gain better understanding of the "critical success factors"
in designing effective online programs, the constraints and pitfalls,
and potential contributions of online training.

We encourage members to provide concrete information about specific
online programs training educators in new content areas and new teaching
methodologies.


KEY QUESTIONS:

1. What activities use online methods to provide pre-service and/or
in-service online professional development for educators?

2. What are the key design features of effective online programs? What
should practitioners consider before taking or developing online
courses?

3. What technologies are these programs using? What are the advantages
and disadvantages of the various technologies?

4. Do these approaches promote new pedagogical practices and education
reforms and better link education to society's needs? If so, how? If
not, why?

5. What are the gender issues related to online professional
development? Do online programs address special needs/concerns of women?

6. What is the "state of the art" in designing such programs? What
models can and should be scaled up?

We look forward to hearing your experience and insights about online
professional development programs for educators.





This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative
Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides
more information.
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[GKD] Launch of GKD-DOTCOM Discussion: Online Professional Development for Educators

[Global Knowledge Dev. Moderator]

Dear GKD Members,

Welcome to the GKD-DOTCOM Discussion on "Online Professional Development
for Educators." This has been an important topic for GKD members over
the years and we look forward to discussing it in depth during the next
4 weeks. The DOT-COM Alliance will develop a White Paper on the topic,
drawing on the valuable input and recommendations of GKD members, and
the paper will be widely circulated in the development and developing
country communities. Cases described by GKD members will be cited in the
paper.

Agenda

* What activities are offering online professional development for
educators? (June 1-4)
* What resources are required to have the desired impact and
sustainability? (June 7-11)
* What methodologies are useful for evaluating online professional
development efforts? (June 14-18)
* What's on the horizon...and where should we aim to go over the next 3
years? (June 21-25)


***Background: DOT-COM/InterAction Speaker Series***

This discussion is sponsored by the USAID-funded DOT-COM Alliance and
InterAction, and hosted by GKD. It builds on a session of the
DOT-COM/InterAction ICT Speaker Series (Washington, D.C. 6 May 2004).
Session speakers included:

* Stone Wiske, Harvard University, School of Education
* Sapnesh Lalla, Vice President, NIIT Ltd.
* Kelvin Wong, Center for International Development and Conflict
Management, University of Maryland

More information on the session, and copies of the speakers'
presentations, can be found at the DOT-COM Alliance website:
http://www.dot-com-alliance.org/

The DOT-COM Archives of this discussion (as of June 1) are available on:
http://www.dot-com-alliance.org/archive.html and in the GKD database:
http://www.GKDknowledge.org

We look forward to an exciting and valuable exchange of experience and
lessons learned on this important topic.




This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative
Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides
more information.
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[GKD] BytesForAll: South Asian ICT4D Newsletter

[Frederick Noronha (FN)]

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
_/
_/  B y t e s   F o r   A l l ---  http://www.bytesforall.org
_/  Making  Computing  Relevant to the  People of  South Asia
_/  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers 062004
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

Open Access Workshop 


MSSRF ( http://www.mssrf.org ), the MS Swaminathan Research Fundation,
held an interesting event in early May. Sunil Abraham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
reports that the focus of this workshop is GNU EPrints, a 'Mukt' and
'Muft' software. The GNU EPrints has been developed at the Electronics
and Computer Science Department of the University of Southampton. See
http://software.eprints.org/. Today there are 132 known archives running
EPrints software worldwide. And the total number of records in these
archives is 45894.

Dr Leslie Carr demonstrated the installation of E-Prints software on Red
Hat 7.3. E-Prints requires Apache Web Server, MySQL Relational Database
Server and Perl Programming Language. After that Prof. Leslie Chan
demonstrated OAIster [http://www.oaister.org This is a meta-crawler for
Open Archives. Today it has 3,163,129 records from 282 institutions.
Says Abraham: "This is really a *must see* for all researchers,
documentalists, archivists and information scientists."

OAIster is based on an Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata
Harvesting. See more at http://www.openarchives.org/

In short OAI provides standards, technologies and tools to Open Archive
projects that wish to publish data in a uniform manner and thus leverage
the collective strength of the network. This is similar to the Dublin
Core http://dublincore.org/ initiative.

Other presentations included one by Dr D K Sahu on Open File Formats and
design of Meta Data. He is making a detailed comparison of PDF, HTML,
XML and SGML.

Low or no Net access


Jude Griffin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> of the Electronic Products Group
Management Sciences for Health Boston http://www.msh.org has been
visiting India to look at the state of innovation for those with low or
no Internet access, and who is doing innovative work in ICTs in India.
Says he: "I work for Management Sciences for Health -- an international
health nonprofit whose audience is health professionals in the
developing world. This audience spans health workers in Bangladesh to
ministry officials in Latin America."

Their products and courses use a mix of delivery methodologies including
Web, email, CD rom, print and face-to-face. Says Griffin: "We are
looking for possible collaboration partners for a variety of ICT
initiatives from courses to communities of practice which would utilize
a range of ICTs."

Open publishing
---

The Journal of Orthopaedics is applying the principles of Free Software
and Open Source to the publishing world.

Open Access has already become the buzzword in scholarly discussions and
publishing circles. The scholar community, which was denied barrier-free
access to vital research, has already begun dreaming of the free world
where exchange of vital research is seamless. The Open Access Movements
are gaining momentum and public acceptance worldwide.

Open Access can change the scenario by a multi-pronged approach. Firstly
by releasing the content in an open access license, which inherently
includes reuse permissions, will make it available in different forms
and different avenues free of cost. This significantly improves access.

For example, a recent editorial published in Calicut Medical Journal[
www.calicutmedicaljournal.org] was translated to vernacular language and
republished in a popular health magazine, which made the article
accessible to a community which had no access to the primary literature.

Dr.P.V Ramachandran Professor of Radiodiagnosis Medical College Aleppey
E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: www.pvramachandran.com and Dr.Vinod Scaria
of Kozhikode in Kerala E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web:
www.drvinod.com made this point very aptly recently.

Digilibraries
-

Check out the mailing list for digital libraries, Digilib_India.  To
subscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

It brings across useful informational nuggets, like the recent one about
USEMARCON Plus v1.41. USEMARCON is a software application that allows
users to convert bibliographic records from one MAchine-Readable
Cataloguing (MARC) format to another.

To download the software please visit the the British Library web site
at
http://www.bl.uk/services/bibliographic/usemarcon.html

Database globally
-

A recent advert pointed to the work of Nexus Information Services
Company Private Limited (affiliated to National Information Services
Corporation, Baltimore, Maryland, USA). It is one of the foremost
database access, production and publishing companies in the world.

Nexus Information Services Co. Pvt. Ltd is located at Hyderabad, and can
be contacted 

[GKD] Kabissa's www4mail Server Now Permanently Offline

[Tobias Eigen]

For many years Kabissa offered access to web pages for e-mail only users
through our 'www4mail' server. It was much appreciated by many in the
Internet community, and received thousands of requests a week. We
enjoyed providing the service and have made many new friends around the
world as a result, including www4mail's developers at the University of
Trieste, Clement Onime and Enrique Canessa, and users of the service in
Cuba and other Internet-remote places. We even received e-mail once from
a person working on an oil platform in the ocean who was somehow able to
use Kabissa's www4mail server to access information on the web.

We decided to take our www4mail server offline permanently for two
important reasons. The first is that the African civil society
organizations we serve were not making much use of it, despite www4mail
being very well promoted throughout the years on our Website and in the
weekly Pambazuka News e-mail newsletter. We believe this is due to the
fact that many organizations that are able to use the Internet do have
web access, even if the amount of time they can spend online is limited.
We are therefore focussing our efforts on helping organizations to make
better use of the web access they do have, through our hosting services
and training program. The other reason is that the Kabissa server has
become more busy due to our increasing membership and the popularity of
big mailing lists we host, in particular Pambazuka News, and we could no
longer spare the server resources that were being taken up by people
requesting large files (sometimes people requested whole linux
distributions through Kabissa).

It was a great ride, and we are disappointed that it has come to an end.
We look forward to seeing other www4mail servers coming up to fill the
gap, and are always a willing partner on new innovative tools that will
also help to make the Internet more useful for people in low-bandwidth
parts of the world. I'd be glad to hear from others also working towards
this goal, and also answer any questions about the Kabissa experience
with www4mail. Below are some notes and further reading for those
interested in this topic.

Best wishes, 

Tobias

-- 
Tobias Eigen
Executive Director

Kabissa - Space for change in Africa
http://www.kabissa.org

* Kabissa, meaning complete in Kiswahili, was founded on the belief that
information and communications technologies (ICTs) can be a
revolutionary force in civil society. *

1) www4mail is an open source, freely distributable perl program that
runs on linux machines. For more information and to get a copy, go to
http://www.www4mail.org . There is also a mailing list people can join
that might want to get involved in developing www4mail:
http://www.dgroups.org/groups/w4m 

2) Other www4mail servers remain active, including: 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

3) There's a www4mail "powered" portal called VITA-Connect that we
developed with funding from infoDev but which was never implemented -
the platform is freely distributable open source available to anyone who
wants to check it out:
http://www.kabissa.org/members/vita-connect/get-vita-connect.php 

4) Some more reading on the subject of www4mail:  

www4mail: A Bit of Web-For-Email History (By Enrique Canessa, Clement
Onime)
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=24400

Email: A viable alternative to the web? (By Tobias Eigen) 
http://ictupdate.cta.int/index.php/article/view/183

PowerPoint presentations from Bellanet, Kabissa and the University of
Trieste from the "Open Round Table on Developing Country Access to
On-Line Scientific Publishing: Sustainable Alternatives"
http://www.ictp.trieste.it/~ejds/seminars2002/program.html




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Re: [GKD] RFI: Low-Bandwidth Long Distance Wireless E-mail

[Roberto Verzola]

Sorry, I'm in no position to say which was the best www4mail service.

I used the Bellanet server, until it became very unreliable. I was told
they were just making changes to the software to stop people from using
the service for downloading .mp3's but the service never improved. And I
thought the .mp3 reason was just an excuse. There are many ways to limit
file downloads. I tried 2 or 3 others (like the kabissa and trieste
servers) but they were no better.

I posted my note here in the hope that the operators of these services
would at least offer a credible explanation, but they've been silent so
far.

Funds spent on maintaining such a service would be funds well- spent,
because they would truly benefit users from low-bandwidth areas much
more than most "portals" which generally only duplicate the functions of
search engines.


Roberto Verzola
Philippines



On 24 May 2004 at 18:34, Patrick O'Beirne wrote:

> At 15:36 20/05/2004, Roberto Verzola wrote:
> > Unfortunately, the www4mail services I know have become flaky and
> > unreliable, sometimes responding sometimes not.
> 
> 
> Google tells me about 13,000 references for www4mail .. which are the
> best, do you know, Roberto?
  



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Re: [GKD] Community Learning by Radio and the Internet

[Vickram Crishna]

On 5/26/04, John Hibbs wrote:

> What would happen if micro radio would be so ubiquitous (and affordable)
> that children everywhere would have a frequent opportunity to be their
> own content developers? broadcasters? Wouldn't this activity compare to
> the piano recital? Christmas play? soccer game? How much value arises
> when the speaker knows that her grandmother is listening? or even the
> mayor? what "internal" value comes to those who have "been on the
> radio"?



What does it take to organise a reference demonstration of this simple
thesis?

Not much really - except that it would be quite illegal in most
countries, due to the same kind of thinking that has paralysed South
Africa (cf the article posted by bridges.org very recently on this list)
on the subject of WiFi and VoIP.


Here are the building blocks of micro-radio:


   * An inexpensive low power transmitter 
   * Antenna 
   * Microphone 
   * Recording device 
   * Editing device 
   * Playback device (may be the same as the recording device)


As I write this, I am listening to jazz on the radio, broadcast on the
Net by www.attentionspanradio.net and sent from my sound card to the
input jack of a tiny FM transmitter with a rudimentary antenna (their
d-i-y designs can be downloaded conveniently from
http:///www.radiophony.com, the Radiophony website), which cost a total
of IRs 200 to assemble, and the long-life rechargeable 12V battery which
powers it cost IRs 90. FYI, Rs 300 is approximately USD 6.5 these days.
The signal is just powerful enough to reach every room in the house.

For one account of what "internal value" really means, browse through
our website (Radiophony is promoted by Dr Arun Mehta and myself, both of
us are present on this list), where we describe the experience of
setting up India's first rural radio station (later shut down by some
bureaucrats). There are really no words to describe the thrill so
visible on the faces of villagers as they heard their voices on their
radio (in fact, they later named their station Mana Radio, which means
Our Radio in the local - Telugu - language). The station was powered by
a similar transmitter as the one I am listening through now, and with a
suitably placed antenna, every home (within half a kilometer from the
antenna mast) could tune in to their own village station.

But to return to the question raised by John Hibbs, what would it take
to 'scientifically' demonstrate the internal value? What would it take
to make radio ubiquitous and affordable?

By international agreement, the frequencies from 87.5 MHz to 108 MHz are
reserved for public broadcasting over FM. This fact has had a very
useful outcome, in that consumer FM radio receivers are extraordinarily
cheap in most parts of the world. This means that FM radio listening is
affordable, for the most part, but at the same time, the restricted band
of frequencies for the purpose has led to a commonly expressed fear
psychosis that the spectrum is a scarce commodity. Market forces usually
ensure that scarcity drives up prices, and in the case of FM broadcast
license fees or spectrum usage charges, this is true.

In the US, one of the world's heaviest users of spectrum in the FM band,
prices are sky-high, and the government has been stepping back from
protectionist measures that secured a place for public service radio.
Most public service radio frequencies are held by well-funded
organisations, while commercial radio has become massively dominated by
a very few media companies, and there does not seem to be much scope for
independent micro-radio to flourish, on the surface.

The reality is somewhat different.

Actually there are many 'pirate' stations that broadcast independent
content, and a groundswell movement that seeks to open the spectrum for
more micro-radio. The FCC has been forced to take note of the pioneering
study by the Prometheus Project (http://www.prometheusradio.org/) and a
hearing on Localism in Broadcasting will take place today (May 26) in
Rapid City, South Dakota. Sen John McCain is also expected to introduce
a legislation shortly to mandate bandwidth for low power radio.

Much more can be done to make the technology easily available.

The circuit on our website is not ideally temperature stable nor
filtered to a very high quality (US standards militate towards a
separation of 200 KHz between stations) - it was designed for low cost
and easy component availability.

What is needed is a handy circuit that can be easily tuned to lock onto
frequencies 200 KHz apart, encased in a simple, cheap and hardy box, and
an accompanying range of easy to build and tune antennae, so that
thousands of little stations can be set up within a few hundred meters
of each other, without the need for expensive one time use
instrumentation.

It won't take much to upgrade the technology of consumer level devices
to achieve the specifications outlined above - but someone must get down
and fine-tune them, and someone else must work out t