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As we face a new millennium our challenge is to design a better future, one with greater respect for nature and a more equal quality of life for all. Nature is less forgiving that we thought. We now know we must worry more about the consequences of exploiting nature. Also, both the heavy hand of government and the ‘invisible hand’ of market forces have failed to bring a decent quality of life to much of the world, including much of Latin America and much of Venezuela. Today every corner of the globe is faced with building a future based on a combination of local strengths and challenges from global forces. Nowhere is this story being acted with more force than today in Latin America. Few countries of the region are at greater risk than Venezuela, with its extreme dependence on oil exports. Venezuela knows it must pay more attention to sustainable development, both to strengthen its domestic economy and to reduce its vulnerability to global (oil price) forces. In the midst of all this Venezuela must develop both a domestic economy and government polices able to respond to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) initiative, new proposed IMF regulations to liberalize global capital flows, the Paris negotiations on the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), and global market forces. In the midst of these challenges the world stands at another doorway to a new age. We are faced with revolutionary advances in information and communication technology (ICT). Some who call for sustainable development and greater social justice are placing their hopes in an ‘Information Age’. They assign a leading role for a post-industrial knowledge economy. Others fear that the information age will further divide the world between a small group of the ‘haves" (the rich) and a growing group of the ‘have nots’ (the poor). There is a similar division of hope and fear over the role that information and communication technology (ICT) will play with regard to environmental problems and economics forces. This division of worry and hope includes concerns about the role of ICT in strengthening or weakening local communities and their participation in government policy. This worry is deepened by the fact that multinational corporations are pressing governments to base policy increasingly on market forces, with similar policies being supported by major international organizations. The challenge facing Venezuela is the same as the challenge for others. Where should it be going and how does it get there from here? These are, of course, questions for Venezuela to answer. What is clear however it that the cannot be answered without giving serious thought to the role to be played by the revolutionary advances in information and communication technology (ICT). The world is searching for images to describe this new ICT frontier. It was first used for data-processing and seen as the substitution of machines for human labor. With the arrival of computer networks we thought of it in terms of transportation: information highways and data pipelines. However, highways are not synonymous with progress. Pipelines can be used to drain domestic resources abroad, or foster external dependence and concentrate power. It all depends on how they are used. The challenge is to understand what ICTs mean for the choices we face,
and to blend that understanding with wisdom and a vision for the future.
This is not the time for a rush into technology driven solutions (or import
answers). It is first a time to ask the right questions.
Introduction: Our Plan Having asked what do ICTs mean for the choices we face, this paper looks at a series of ICT related topics in light of the links between distributed learning and civil society. It looks at information and communication technology as creating new electronic territories and considers the implications for the useful life of knowledge and skills. It explores the changing relationship between knowledge, skills and wisdom. It examines how the electronic venue links to governance and civil society through the obligation to inform, print-to-digital, and 4-way transparency. It considers some of the ideas surrounding access, computer literacy and knowledge workers, distributed learning, knowledge production, the uses of knowledge and learning in the electronic venue. It then looks at an approach to computers in the school and in community telecentres. And closes with some observations about ICT, learning, governance and civil society.
Is there a way of thinking about information and communication technologies that helps ask the right questions? There is. Our initial thinking about ICT focused on its contribution to efficiency and effectiveness, for communications and for information processing. This has lead politicians and others to link a whole range of ICT policies to "global competitiveness". This is a dangerous over simplification. While information and communication technologies are production inputs, just like oil and steel, and can be important for competitiveness, they are something more and to miss that something more is to lose in the long run. The important insight is to understand that the marriage of information and communication technologies has created new electronic territories or ‘electronic spaces’. These virtual territories operate as workspaces for individuals, organizations and communities. They are a new arena for the activities of civil society, the economy and governance. These spaces are as real for the affairs of the individual, the organization and the community in Venezuela as are Venezuela’s earth and oil. Some have argued that since these ‘spaces’ are virtual, they are not real. This is wrong. They are not literal, but they are real. They join with the territories of literal time and space to form a greater real ‘space’ Together the virtual and the literal define new territories in which to make our lives, build organizations, and create communities. Religion and the psyche are not literal, yet they are real as they impact on lives, organizations and communities. Electronic spaces are real in the same sense.
To understand what this means for learning, education and civil society it important to understand two points about the emerging information age and its accompanying knowledge economy. The first has to do with the changing role of knowledge and skills. In a world less subject to global forces, and technological change, the ‘half-life’ of knowledge and skills is long, frequently longer than the life-span of humans. [Note: We are using the term ‘half-life’ in a metaphoric sense, in reference to a period of time over which knowledge or a skill has lost half of its use value.] In the face of a long half-life skills can be passed on in informal ways. Also, much of the valuable knowledge of the community is informal (tacit) knowledge, known within the community but not recorded as formal knowledge. In the limit things are as they were and as they will be. Knowledge and skills are passed on within the family, the grouping or the community. Education is informal with little new knowledge or demand for new skills. As well, societies faced risks and uncertainty, so even static knowledge and skills have to be used with wisdom and judgement. In the long march from hunting and gathering, through the agricultural age, and into the industrial era, the demands of new technologies and of complex social structures required new approaches to knowledge and skills. For a number of reasons, knowledge, and the pursuit of knowledge, as well as skills and the pursuit of skills, became more formalized. As social structures and technologies became more complex one could no long know them by virtue of their proximity or informal apprenticeship. Children could not accompany their parents into the factory or the office. In any event, they were unlikely to live by the same knowledge and skills as did their parents. Formal education evolved so that people would learn about work and society before they could join the workforce, and in order to become ‘good citizens’. Gradually, as the pace of change quickened, the formal process of education included learning how to learn. The rapid development and deployment of ICT has meant a dramatic shortening for the half-life of knowledge and skills in the information age, as compared to their half-life in an industrial age. Knowledge and skills have become more important as inputs, and are more perishable. They must be refreshed on an almost continuous basis. Note: This does not necessarily mean that one has to learn more than was learned in a traditional setting. For example, the modern crop or dairy farmer is likely to know fewer plants, or animals, and less about them, than a traditional farmer or animal herder. Our response to the shorter half-life of knowledge and skills is to accelerate the pace of teaching and training. This in order to more quickly achieve levels of knowledge transfer and skills development. This has been the North American response to the shortage of information technology skills in light of the rapid expansion of information networks, and is being proposed as a solution to the apparent skills shortage in light of the Year 2000 problem in information systems. Workers with 40-50 weeks of intensive training are substituting for traditional graduates of two, three and four year college and university programs. This is a temporary solution to a temporary problem. The shorter half-life of knowledge and skills gives an increased importance to learning, not just as an activity but as a skill in itself. There is a subtle but important shift of emphasis here. Learning and the capacity to learn are the desired outcomes. Education and training are inputs. They are not outputs. The focus is on learning. Having learned is not enough. One must learn how to learn, and continue to learn. This is where the electronic territories as a workspace and social process arena come into the picture. At one level, for given knowledge and skills, the electronic venue is where part of real work will occur and part of the social process arena for the activities of governance and civil society. At an even more important level the electronic venue becomes central to the learning capacity of individuals, organizations and communities.
Knowledge and skills only work well when viewed in context and combined with wisdom. The faster knowledge changes the more important wisdom become in mixing the new with the old. Information highways, infrastructure, and knowledge networks accelerate the discovery and diffuse of new knowledge. This results in a tension between old knowledge and new knowledge, between old skills and new skills. It results in tensions between visions based on old realities and visions based on new realities. Wisdom and judgement are required here, to make good choices. New is not always better. Knowledge and expertise are sensitive to the context in which they are used. This is true in dealing with nature and with society, and for the interplay between the two. This calls for learning that involves more than specific knowledge and skills, more than learning how to learn about specific knowledge and skills. It requires an understanding of nature and society. It requires understanding the links between human and natural systems, and how they develop over time. There is a current popularity for market driven solutions. However,
only part of this conflict can be worked out in the market place. Market
forces tend to reduce complex systems to autonomous parts whose operations
depend on direct costs and benefits and not on costs and benefits experienced
across the complex system. There is no assurance and considerable doubt
that market forces alone will make the right decisions here. In larger
part these issues must be dealt with through the interplay of governance
and civil society, where the electronic venue has two roles to play.
The Electronic Venue, Governance and Civil Society To understand the link between the electronic venue, governance and civil society, we have to think a bit more about the electronic venue. Some understand it only as a communications device. Email is cheaper and quicker than fax machines or the post office. Others understand it as a storage site, a place to get things (internet) or put things (website). Beyond that however, people, organizations and communities are quickly understanding it as a place to do work, to conduct business, and to collaborate on tasks of mutual interest. Its strength is its ability to support these activities in a distributed asynchronous mode, across time and space. In these last two uses the electronic venue brings an expanded capacity to learning, an expanded openness and accountability for governance and an expanded scope for the activities of communities and the operations of civil society institutions. Later on we will explore the uses of the electronic workspace as a learning venue. Here we need to focus on the role of various organizations and institutions as sources of information for learning in the electronic venue.
Let us begin with government and an obligation to inform. This obligation to inform is not a legal requirement, it is a policy option. Much of the information that individuals, organizations and communities need to conduct their daily affairs, and need for their own learning, comes in part from the various levels of government. It ranges from existing through to proposed policies and programs. It includes information on regulations, obligations and rights. It has always been difficult and expensive for governments to make available public information of use to individuals, organizations and communities. Even when they want to. In general, neither high cost limited distribution nor low cost mass distribution has been effective. Costs hinder access and revenues seldom cover costs. The arrival of the internet and website technologies is changing the policy options and the economics of the provision of government information. A ‘print to digital first’ publishing strategy means that governments publish to the internet (a government website). Print versions are derived from the digital format. The terms of access, and for printing, are secondary policy issues. The Canadian government (STATCAN) has found that it is costs less to provide daily economic updates free on the internet than the costs of subsidies under previous high price low volume or low price high volume strategies. Using a different strategy the Ontario Provincial government in Canada has resorted to an online POOL (Province of Ontario On-Line) bookstore to sell its formal publications. Both levels of government are making increasing use of web sites for the diffusion of information on proposed and existing government policy. Intranets (access only within the organization), extranets (targeted at suppliers, customers, and clients), and the internet (for the public in general) give governments and private sector entities three venues in which to set policy on the obligation to inform, and a strategy of print to digital first. Such a strategy is clearly important for domestic development, and (for example) to build capacity to deal with initiatives such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The strategy brings a 4-way transparency to government and makes it more accountable. Within an intranet it is more transparent upward, along traditional lines of accountability. It is more transparent internally, with internal units better informed of each others activities. Within its extranet the government is more transparent downward to stakeholders. Lastly, within the internet the government is more transparent outward to whomever can make use of the information. It is important to note that government materials, current and available
on-line, are more than just information for decision makers. They are inputs
for on-going learning by individuals, organizations and communities, including
units within government itself. We will return to this learning function
later.
Access, Computer Literacy and Knowledge Workers The North America debates on computers in education have spent considerable energy in discussions about access to computers (and the internet), about teaching computer literacy skills, and about the need to train knowledge workers. This presentation did not start with these issues since although they are important, they are of a second order of importance. It is a truism that to understand how to use a computer one needs access to a computer. There are two levels of access: access to a computer; and computer access to the internet. In its extreme form this truism is taken by the President of the United States to argue for a computer on every desk in every school classroom, with every computer linked to the internet. Unfortunately, the reverse of the statement is not a truism. Access to a computer does not insure understanding the uses of a (networked) computer, especially its uses as a learning venue, as a workspace and as a social process arena. For much of the globe, as for Venezuela, the idea of a computer on the desk of every child is impossible. However, even in the richest of settings it is not a necessity. It is not a necessity for several reasons that have to do with the difference between learning to use the computer and using the computer to learn. The term computer literacy derives from the notions of literacy (reading/writing) and numeracy (basic math skills). It denotes the need for a basic skills set to be functional in society and in the job market. There are important differences however. First, unlike other skills, one can be functional on a computer across various skills levels. Unlike math, one can learn as one goes and pick up skills as one needs them. One must take care not to turn computer literacy into a narrow objective which hinders learning. . Computers are an excellent venue for learning-while-doing, for trial-and-error learning, and for systematic learning based on the logic of the task and the application. Lastly, adequate computer literacy skills do not require uninterrupted access to a computer. Many of the skills benefit from group collaboration and occasional access to a shared machine. One should also be cautious toward claims about the benefits of using computers to deliver computer based learning or training (CLB/CBT). There is a frequent confusion between two uses here. One is the use of computer based applications for individual training or learning. One must take care to justify such use on economic and pedagogical grounds in the case of primary and secondary education. It is often easier to justify in cases such as advanced and/or remedial skills training. The growing use is of computers, in the classroom and in the work pace, is in a distributed learning environment, where learning is distributed across one or more of time, space, venues, and media. In this case the learning objectives are assessed by the learner, the teacher and the trainer, as relevant. The result is an appropriate use of computers and computer networks as part of a distributed learning process. Another truism is that an information age and knowledge economy need knowledge workers. There is, however, considerable confusion as to what this means. In part it means producing more people with information technology skills. While the need to build and maintain informatics infrastructure is as obvious as the need to build and maintain roads and highways, this is only part of the story. Another part is the need is to strengthen research and development capacity, for producing new knowledge and adapting old knowledge. Part of the research and new knowledge is about the electronic venue as an arena for a wide range of social processes. We need knowledge workers who help us understand the limits of nature’s forgiveness, as we pursue sustainable development. We need knowledge workers to help understand how social forces, market forces, and public policy distribute the quality of life. Lastly, a big part of the story, given the short half-life for knowledge
and skills, is learning to become a life-long learner. Early predictions
in the information age were that one might change jobs half a dozen times
across one’s working life, using the electronic venue for computer-based
re-training and re-tooling. Now we think that the main uses of the electronic
venue for learning will be to remain current in one’s field, learning while
doing, with a slow drift in one’s actual job description.
Distributed Learning At the core information and communication technology are producing an electronic space - a workspace and virtual social process arena - in which we can do old and new things in new and different ways. It is a place to do real work and construct real organizations and communities. It is a social process space, and how it is used will transform Venezuela as it transforms the world. A virtual Venezuela will map itself across literal Venezuela. A virtual world will map itself across the literal world. The challenge for Venezuela, and for Latin America, is how to use this new (expanded) reality to pursue a vision of Venezuela’s future. This electronic space is a place to produce knowledge, to use knowledge in production, and to support learning. Its two key strengths are its capacity to sustain asynchronous process across time and space, and its capacities as a collaborative work venue. Let us look at each of these capacities as they apply to the three activities: knowledge production, knowledge use in production, and learning.
An information age and knowledge-economy produce a continuous demand for research and development, for the creation and diffusion of new knowledge. Some of this demand is market driven, with diffusion through the market. Some is driven by social forces, with diffusion through public policy and civil society mechanisms. What is new with the advent of ICT is a quantum leap in our ability to create effective networks of researchers, and online research materials, and to strengthen a team approach to all phases of research, from setting the research agenda, through peer monitoring, to the diffusion of results. Canada has a formal policy of creating research networks of centers of excellence and has done so across a number of fields. They predate the rapid growth of ICT but have used its capacities at every step of the way. The internet and its electronic venues have seen the creation of thousands and thousands of informal networks of individuals and institutions, united by common research interests. Venezuelan researchers are linked to groups abroad, with ex-patriot Venezuelan researchers abroad are linked to Venezuela. This produces two conflicting forces. Venezuelan researchers have access to colleagues and resources abroad, while becoming known abroad. It is too early to say whether this makes them more likely to stay, thanks to electronic links, or more eager to leave. Canadian experience suggests that a policy of formal research networks, supported by access to an adequate electronic venue, would reduce the lure of permanent moves to distant places. It is also worth nothing that there are strong forces in support of using the electronic venue for electronic publishing, in particular to strengthen the south-south sharing of knowledge. South-south knowledge diffusion through electronic publishing is an idea whose time has come. Lastly, formal networks and funded research institutions should be held
to an obligation to inform policy similar to that sketched out for the
government. Increased transparency would increase accountability and provide
additional resources for learning by others.
The Uses of Knowledge The most common notion of putting knowledge to use is as in input into a production process, which in turn produces an output. One usually thinks of proprietary knowledge which is ‘owned’ under patent or copyright or embedded in a worker’s skills. There are two other important forms of knowledge however. One is formal knowledge which is useful but not restricted by ownership or its owners. Within information technology itself, Linux and the Apache server software, are evidence of the ability of informal networks to carry out complex tasks. The recent release of the Netscape source code was based on the belief that informal networks could refine source code better and quicker than Netscape could itself. The other important form of knowledge is the informal (tacit) knowledge
resident in a community. Tacit knowledge usually only become obvious in
context, its use dependent on community involvement in a process.
Learning It is important, from the start, to recognize that learning in the electronic venue is about more than using the electronic workspace as a delivery and testing vehicle for education and training. It is about asynchronous learning in a distributed learning space and it is about collaborative learning as part of a virtual groups. Contrast two terms, distance education and distributed learning. Distance education originally mean that the student was physically remote and at some distance from the source of instruction. With the growth of the electronic venue is was recognized that time and not distance may be the binding constraint on the student’s ability (or interest) in attending literal class meetings. Distance can be across time and space Distance education tends to sees the electronic venue as a delivery
and testing device, with content and process closely tied to a curricular
objectives. A distributed learning view sees the electronic venue as a
distributed learning space, with the learning process distributed across
space, time, venues and media. Learning may be more widely, or more narrowly,
focused than curricular based learning. It also offers more scope for collaboration,
something frequently prohibited in traditional distance education.
Computers Schools and Community Telecentres Having rejected the idea of a computer on every desk as both impractical and unnecessary it should come as no surprise that our views of computers in the school is very similar to our views of computers in a community telecentre. In both cases we argue for some access to electronic networks to create a distributed learning environment and to strengthen the possibilities for collaborative learning. This access can range from searching online web sites at the high end down to store and forward email. It can include the use of web-to-email gateways, the transfer of email by floppy disk, and access to web sites archived on CD-ROM. For communities with significant access to computers, computers in schools can be mainly for school use, with those in community telecentres used to support individual, group and community learning. For communities with limited access to computers, school computers should be thought of as community access computers resident in schools. Community telecentre computers should be thought of as school access computers resident in the telecentre. Of course, in both cases blocks of time will be set aside for school use of school computers and community use of telecentre computers. However, school computers should be used for distributed learning by students, and not just curricular learning. Telecentre computers should be used for distributed learning by the community and not just for skills training. In both cases learners should learn how to carry out asynchronous collaborative work within the electronic venue.
As part of learning to learn, and to work, in the electronic workspace, students, individuals and groups in the community, should work with online materials from local, national, and international sources. Such materials should be relevant for the issues of policy and governance to groups, the community and individuals at the local level. Government policies in support of the obligation to inform and ‘print-to-digital-first’ can facilitate this process. The end results will be learning to learn while learning knowledge and skills which strengthen the capacity of individuals, groups and communities to participate in the process of governance. As part of learning to learn, and to work, in the electronic workspace members of the community should be assisted in learning how to use the electronic venue to build and strengthen the local institutions of civil society and how to strengthen networks of civil society organizations. Together these efforts will strengthen Venezuela as a society of learners, and strengthen their participation in governance and civil society in Venezuela, and strengthen Venezuela’s capacity for sustainable development. |
