Social Action and IT

Making Links Conference
11th - 13th November 2008
Melbourne University, ICT Building, 111 Barry Street, Carlton, Victoria, Australia

Making Links is a conference that seeks to engage interested people, organisations and groups working at the intersection of social action and IT - including community workers, educators, trainers, not-for-profit organisations, school teachers, environmental campaigners and activists.



The Conference seeks to:

• Bring the community sector together to access resources, training and services, and to share ideas, skills and creative applications of technology;
• Explore the possibilities ICTs generate for communities whose voices have been marginalized and excluded from the mainstream;
• Showcase innovative, grass roots ICT initiatives in community cultural development, outreach, and e-learning;
• Build and develop networks amongst workers and activists interested in how ICT can be used to support social justice.

The conference, which started in 2004, is organised by a steering committee composed of representatives from a range of not-for-profit organisations.

Electing a US President

Given the recent worldwide interest in the Presidential elections in the USA, this explanation of "Electing a US President in Plain English" by Lee LeFever of CommonCraft is timely.





Seems like a complicated and unfair way to conduct an election, but I guess I'm not a politician.

I recommend visiting the CommonCraft site to see all the other explanatory videos available.

Community Media for Learning

From WikiEducator

The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) "Media for Learning" programme aims to make media to be an effective part of the larger Open and Distance Learning process, especially at the community level and particularly in relation to COL's mandate to enable learning for development.

Learning about what? Whatever a community's needs and priorities are. For some this means health issues, like HIV/AIDS, malaria or diabetes. For others, it means supplementing secondary school education in English, math and science.

How do communities learn using media? By engaging with media to design innovative programmes to address specific needs, e.g. improving agricultural practices, and linking to groups, both in the community and externally, to access useful and appropriate knowledge sources.

What does COL focus on in this area?

1. Building the capacities of media; and
2. Supporting the establishment and growth of knowledge and learning networks.

Some of COL's initiatives include:

1. Developing effective learning programmes; Good practice: Community Radio Madanpokhara; Recent activity: Jet FM in Jeffrey Town
2. Strengthening organisation: community ownership and participation, policies, sustainability planning; Upcoming activity: Radio Mang'elete
3. Smart technology choices
4. Open sourcing community media; Good practice: KRUU FM

For more details go to: http://www.wikieducator.org/Media_for_Learning

Web 2.0 for Agricultural Development

Here is an eight minute Business Africa/CTA video production documenting actual cases on the use of Web 2.0 applications in the development sector, specifically among farmers in Africa.

Business Africa is produced by People Television and broadcast on a network of more than 45 African and 5 european partner channels.

CTA is an ACP-EU institution working in the field of information for development. It was set up in 1984 with the task of improving the flow of information among stakeholders in agricultural and rural development in African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries. Its work focuses on three key areas:

• providing information products and services (e.g., publications, question-and-answer services and database services)
• promoting the integrated use of communication channels, old and new, to improve the flow of information (e.g., e-communities, web portals, seminars, and study visits)
• building ACP capacity in information and communication management (ICM), mainly through training and partnerships with ACP bodies
  

ICT4D Research Grants

The Strengthening ICT4D Research Capacity in Asia (SIRCA) Programme is pleased to announce a call for grant proposals.

The SIRCA Programme seeks to identify future research leaders and to facilitate their development through the support of research grants. The awards are intended to ensure capacities to conduct research in the area of Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICT4D or ICTD) are built in Asia. This applies particularly to emerging researchers based in Asia who are relatively new to ICTD research and interested in undertaking theoretically-based and methodologically rigorous research. Additionally, these applicants would benefit from concerted capacity building exercises including a mentorship arrangement. In particular, the program promotes broad-based high-quality multidisciplinary research in ICT development, e-services, new media use and social impact, and policy for the benefit and advancement of individuals, organizations, nation and society.

PROPOSAL GUIDELINES

• Applicants must register online at www.ntu.edu.sg/sci/sirc/sirca with their name, project title, email address and country of research by 29th September 2008.
• Applicants are free to choose relevant topics within the overall ICTD discipline.
• Proposals must be received via email by 13th October 2008. Send email submissions to sirca@ntu.edu.sg with “SIRCA Proposal” in the subject line of your message. Attachments must be in MS Word, MS Excel or PDF and should be labelled with your name (for example: Jane_Doe_Info_Sheet.doc or .docx or .pdf).

Visit the following web pages for additional information about the programme and the call for proposals:

SIRCA Brochure

SIRCA Research Grant Proposal Guidelines

SIRCA Programme Secretariat
Email: sirca@ ntu.edu.sg
Website: www.ntu.edu.sg/sci/sirc/sirca

More Open Educational Resources from UKOU

You may wonder why I keep blogging about the UK Open University? Well - my first experience of distance education was as a Tutor with them when they first started in the early 1970's. They were leaders then and they are leaders again with their OpenLearn (Open Educational Resource repository), which has seen over 2 million people take advantage of free education since it was launched in October 2006.

Latest study units

• The incredible shrinking chip
• Funding elite sports
• Improving aerobic fitness
• Business organisations and their environments: Culture
• Project management
• Company law in context
• Getting started with SPSS
• Real functions and graphs
• Mathematical language
• Campaigns and organisations
• Introduction to international development management
• Creativity, community and ICT
• Healthcare technology management

Top five units

This month's five most popular OpenLearn units are:

• Start writing fiction
• Writing what you know
• What is good writing?
• The importance of interpersonal skills
• Espacios publicos

Make Internet TV

The website "Make Internet TV" provides a guide with step-by-step instructions for shooting, editing, and publishing online videos that can be watched and subscribed to by millions of people.

Here is a video introduction by Dean Jansen:

Make Internet TV: Introduction

Very soon, this site will feature short videos from experienced internet video publishers. If you're interested in sharing your expertise, visit the Make Internet TV (MITV) wiki and find out how.

Learning maths and science online in Africa

Educational content is an issue with which many African countries still struggle, so Intel’s approach to preparing Ghanaian science students for the digital age seems quite promising. The objective of www.skoool.com.gh is to provide a rich and integrated platform for science and math education.

Topics generally seen as being very “dry” are delivered in a rather playful manner. An interactive football match, for example, serves to illustrate math topics like types of angles. On the methodological side, the main features of skoool are interactive simulations, exam-centre study notes, exam guides for maths and integrated science as well as study and revision tips.

In conjunction with its participation in the third eLearning Africa Conference, held in Accra, and in line with its Intel World Ahead Program, Intel launched the localised Ghanaian version of its worldwide digital education content platform www.skoool.com. The site – www.skoool.com.gh – is being run in collaboration with the Ghanaian Ministry of Education, Science and Sports (MOESS) and the Ministry of Communication (MOC). The interactive teaching platform conforms to the action points taken at the conference. All content developed for the site will be based on identified areas of difficulty in various subjects. The learning resources are similar in each country in which it operates but are populated with local content.

In the course of the official launch ceremony at the Kofi Annan Centre, Accra, Ms. Elizabeth Ohene, Minister for State in charge of Tertiary Education, said that the Ghanaian government was focusing primarily on science and technology to accelerate the pace of technological advancement, with www.skoool.com.gh also complementing the government’s efforts to drive ICT in the country. Dr Benjamin Aggrey Ntim, Ghana’s Communication Minister, asked the heads of the schools to encourage their students to use the resource to develop their skills in the areas of mathematics and science.

The platform www.skoool.com.gh aids students with curriculum-focused multi-media learning and research, offers open-ended learning tools to help students explore wider concepts and provides valuable exam focused resources to help students prepare effectively for state exams standards. The parent platform, skoool.com, has been active in Africa since 2006, starting with a platform in South Africa. The first release of skoool Nigeria supported the successful Classmate PC proof of concept and deployment during 2007. The online version of skoool Nigeria will be launched in 2008.

ICT for Social Change

"One laptop per child" - It was the ambition of Kevin Rudd during the last election in Australia and it is the plan being realised by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT. The only way Professor Negroponte can realise his dream is by having cheap laptops, costing $100, or eventually, less. How is this done? And what difference do these computers make in the villages of Africa, South America and Asia? Professor Negroponte, founder of the Media Lab at MIT and author of the bestseller Being Digital, talks to an audience in Boston, Massachusetts in "One laptop per child" on ABC Radio National, presented by Robyn Williams.

ICTs bring Ugandans together

Father Joseph Okumu on the use of Inveneo ICTs and BOSCO systems to bring Ugandans together.

A Portal to Media Literacy

Presented at the University of Manitoba June 17th 2008, by Kansas State University Professor Michael Wesch.
Url: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4yApagnr0s

Taken from:
http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com/...
Recently Dr. Wesch spoke at the University of Manitoba where he explained the the basis of this video in a talk entitled, "Michael Wesch and the Future of Education." I found it fascinating! He describes how he so naturally incorporates emerging technologies into his courses from the smallest seminar type class to the largest lecture theatre filled class.

More importantly he not only talks about the technologies but how he encourages extraordinary participation and collaboration from his students by engaging them in meaningful learning activities.

Although the video is 66 minutes long...pour a coffee, iced tea or glass of wine and enjoy this dynamic presentation from a master teacher."

(You should probably watch A Vision of Students Today first.)



Taken from:
http://umanitoba.ca/ist/production/...
Dubbed “the explainer” by popular geek publication Wired because of his viral YouTube video that summarizes Web 2.0 in under five minutes, cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch brought his Web 2.0 wisdom to the University of Manitoba on June 17 (see video above).

During his presentation, the Kansas State University professor breaks down his attempts to integrate Facebook, Netvibes, Diigo, Google Apps, Jott, Twitter, and other emerging technologies to create an education portal of the future.

“It’s basically an ongoing experiment to create a portal for me and my students to work online,” he explains. “We tried every social media application you can think of. Some worked, some didn’t.”