ICT in education

So you have your problems getting your head around object oriented programming? Well, you're certainly not alone - many computer science students that start with OOP have similar difficulties when turning to languages like Java or C++. One of the reasons may be that between "learning languages" like logo and modern OOP based programming languages there simply remains a large paradigm "gap".

Now researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University have created Alice as a programming tool to help bridge that gap - and just like you've been creating two-dimensional drawings with logo, you are now adding another dimension and end up creating 3D animations instead.

The cool thing about Alice is that you don't have to be enrolled at CMU in order to try it out - all you have to do is visit their website and choose between Alice 2.0 (designed with high-school students in mind and available for Windows, Linux and MACOS 10.3 and 10.4)) or choose the Storytelling Alice (only available for Windows machines) to get going.

Using an innovative "drag and drop programming" method, the student immediately creates animations while not having to worry about programming syntax - and which in turn already introduces you to concepts and prgramming styles found in Java. Alice and Java are indeed so close to each other, that a transition at a later stage becomes an easy step - so you really have a more than just "fun" way of learning to program here, as you can get your head around the concept of OOP first and then deal with all the little intricate details, including the correct positioning of semicolons and what not, at a later stage.

Since Allice is available free of charge (distributed under the Alice License), all you need to do is download a roughly 116MB (122MB in the case of Storytelling Alice) large ZIP file to get going. Storytelling Alice also comes with a handy Storytelling Alice Guide (a roughly 2MB download), that gets you and/or your students going in an instant.

I've just found a very interesting article pertaining to a concept called Education 3.0. It deals mainly with the issue that these days we do have interesting 21st Century technology available to schools and teachers, yet somehow remain bound to (higher) education methods that date back to the 19th century - with all the hidden problems that go with that "Education 1.0" concept.

Derek Keats and J. Phillip Schmidt thus "venture into the unknown" here for most teachers (and probably also: most students), but the key question is clear: if everything else has kept evolving, why is it that we allow ourselves to adopt a very conservative "sit back and wait" stance when it comes to education?

In their quest, they compare the education "versions" with what has or is happening with the Web these days: "Web 2.0" tries to describe a certain change in the way the Web is being used these days, mainly due to the fact that more and more people are colaborating using tools like blogs, wikis, community and video portals and the like.

The African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) project is a collaborative effort among several African higher education institutions to support capacity building in Free and Open Source software engineering.

Watch a Google TechTalk by Prof Derek Keats, Executive Director, Information & Communication Services, The University of the Western Cape, Bellville (Cape Town), South Africa, introducing AVOIR:



It's pretty much what I have been advocating for quite some time: only open source software allows such form of wide scale colaborative effort, plus it is a viable alternative to investing large amounts of otherwise scarce money into the purchase of software licenses and instead put that money to better use.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative has just introduced a new XO donation program called "Give 1 Get 1" where interested buyers of the XO laptop can purchase two such laptops - and have one donated to a child in a developing country.

The program starts on 12th of November, interested individuals and companies can already register with their email adress today though. For the price of USD 399 you will then effectively purchase two laptops of which only one will be delivered to you. Alternatively you can already donate USD 200 now to purchase a new XO laptop that will immediately be delivered to a child in a developing country - and of course you can also donate multiples of that amount to donate more than just one PC.

The vision of the OLPC project is of course not to just deliver the necessary hardware - as Nicholas Negroponte bluntly puts it:

"It's an education project, not a laptop project.”

Plus it's not just some new "trendy" idea, it goes as far back as 40 years already, right back to the primordeal days of computing, when Wally Feurzeig, Daniel Bobrow, Richard Grant, Cynthia Solomon, and Seymour Papert introduce Logo, the first programming language written especially for children, recognising the need to teach computer usage to the next generation as early as possible in order to let them participate in todays world.

The first computers that got distributed to schoolchildren in a suburb of Dakar, Senegal, it was Seymour Papert and Nicolas Negroponte that got the sponsorship from the french government to introduce these children to Apple II computers at that time. Since then, things have obviously developed quite a bit, with lots of different associations providing similar initiatives over the years. In Namibia for example, the SchoolNet initiative is very busy providing Internet connectivity to schools especially in rural areas using Linux based systems.

This basically goes in line with the "One Server Per School" initiative that tries to do basically the same: connect schools to the Internet and as such give the OLPC project the necessary network infrastructure to which to connect.

Amazingly though, Namibia is still missing from the OLPC list of countries - and I sincerely wonder why: the original demand that any country wishing to participate orders in quantities of 250000 systems is being discussed as I sit back and marvel at the situation, and at the same time I think that if organisatzions like SchoolNet already exist in Namibia, they could become an extremely effective catalyst to change - one would just have to make their school servers "OLPC ready" (that is: able to connect to the OLPC mesh), and things could really start rolling.

So where is Namibia heading then? Or is it still looking for directions here?

Having just stumbled accross a nearly forgotten comment by a visitor on my site, which once again sent me investigating as to what SchoolNet.na was doing, it struck me as an idea to start with a little "feature series" regarding educational institutions in Namibia trying hard to bring information and communication technology (ICT) to the learners.

I will simply start with LearnLink, especially their LearnLink Project: NAMIBIA that saw Ed's Net see the day of light.

The DOAJ provides direct access to 2230 journals (at the time of writing), with 633 of such journals being searchable on an article level. At the time of writing 97152 articles are reachable directly through the DOAJ service.

The aim of the Directory of Open Access Journals is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals thereby promoting their increased usage and impact.

The Directory aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content.

In short a one stop shop for users to Open Access Journals - and that's any journal, not just those dealing with ICT: a quick browse reveals 41 journals on Animal science, 34 on Agriculture and 77 on Public Health for example. Highly up-to-date scientific information available to anyone at no cost.

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit organisation dedicated to research to develop a USD 100 laptop. The initiative was launched by Nicholas Negroponte at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland in January 2005.

That alone will probably not be newsworthy, but if you combine this with the fact that the World Economic Forum on Africa 2006 summit will be held from 31st of May to 1st of June 2006, bringing together heads of state, top ministers and senior business leaders of African companies and multinationals active in Africa, I'd say it's due time to once again bring the focus of attention to this highly inspiring initiative again.

Just when I thought that I'd have to give up my search for Namibian based resources for teachers and schools trying to bring education in Namibia to a higher level, a good friend of mine reminded me about ED^&NET, developed by the National Institute for Educational Development (NIED) - now why didn't _I think of that?

Quite frankly I forgot about this site - so a re-visit was more than overdue, which I did just today. ED^&NET vows to provide a gateway for teachers to professional development, resources and discussions concerning education in Namibia - or at least that was what the website initially aimed at achieving.

Practically I found a lot of things that didn't work or require some urgent attention.

Karoshi is a free and open source network management system for schools, that runs on top of the Linux operating system. With combined software it gives you a secure, reliable and stable platform. Along with a host of management tools, Karoshi provides a simple graphical interface that allows for quick installation, setup and maintenance of your network.

As such, it's a different approach to that of SchoolNet Namibia which essentially provides schools with "turn-key-solutions", which include anything from hardware down to software as well as Internet connection.

Between May 23-26 of this year (officially 24th-26th, but the first workshops already start on the 23rd as "pre-conference events"), the 1^st international conference on ICT for development, education and training will be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Venue will be the United Nations Conference Centre (UNCC) in Menelik II Ave.

As this conference is the very first of a series of annual conferences to be held in Africa, I was intriegued to find out more about it - especially as to when it may arrive in southern Africa, especially in Namibia or (as the usual alternative) in South Africa.

When it comes to books, you're always looking at a large investment in education: none of them comes cheap, all those dealing with history and science will have to be updated every once in a while, and you can have really interesting surprises what students can do to a book once you ask them to hand it back to you at the end of a term or schoolyear.

How about having instant access to 18000 books - at no cost? Enter the world of ebooks and learn how projects like the Project Gutenberg offer you just what you've been looking for - and then some.

Basis for most discussions regarding ICT usage in education in Namibia should probably be the official ICT policy:

ICT Policy for Education in Namibia

The policy itself obviously only provides a basic foundation on which to build the actual efforts that will bring ICT knowledge to students in Namibia. Organisations like SchoolNet Namibia are already busy devising their own progams on how to implement some of the provisions in this policy, but obviously their focus is more on providing the technical infrastructure than on providing full educational frameworks from which to operate.

We have heard the call: ICT experts, please help. Fine, we're listening - now where would you need help?

There seems to be no survey data as to what kind of requirements the schools in Namibia have regarding ICT - the only data available probably sits in some drawer in a ministry of our government yet doesn't have the chance to ever make it to the public.

The only chance would be to collect the "calls for help" as well as all the good, better and great ideas elsewhere - like on this blog as comments for example. Please make use of the comment function then - you can also post anonymously if you fear that your comments may trigger unwanted "action" from somewhere in government, but unless we get the ball rolling, we'll never be able to achieve any goal...

So: what's missing regarding ICT in Namibia?