Big Data and Literacy

In my last post I wanted to try to pin-point some ideas that seemed important to me in reference to the discussion going on at ETMOOC and with Mozilla around digital literacy and web literacy. It has been really engaging with some great discussions on these topics with people via ETMOOC, and through the Webmaker network, and via Twitter as well.

There is so much more I'd like to say on the topic of digital literacy and web literacy. I should maybe also mention that a book on the subject has recently been written by Mark Pegrum in Australia, who as a teacher to myself and others during teacher training college in 2009 was instrumental in opening up this world and the wider world of education to me. More information about his work can be found on his wikispaces here and his new book is here.

But for now, I feel I want to introduce another aspect to the discussion, which relates directly to what the web would look like if everyone was participating to build a better readable and writable web.

That aspect is data. I think your personal data is an important place to begin in literacy. The second lesson most illiterate adult learners discover, once they can write and read letters and sentences - is that those letters and words serve most often to be used somewhere to fill in a form. They are essential of course, because they give access to rights, privileges and freedom. It gives a person the capability and ability to find a postcode and to send a letter for example.

Although it isn't always that simple. That form might equally be used by the government of an oppressive regime to deny you those very same basic human rights and privileges as well. It is no wonder then that the young Eritrean adult learners in my refugee classes, seemed often to look at my exercises based on form filling in class with a slight degree of suspicion. They were well aware of where all this learning could lead them, despite my own idealistic intentions as they had witnessed how their own government had systematically used schooling and the education system as a means to oppress and dominate its citizens.

Although the fact that this has been going on and has been well documented by Human Rights Watch since 2009 seems not to feature highly in the press. It certainly seems to be of little interest to the UK, Australian, Canadian and Chinese mining companies who are rushing in to try and grab a piece of the profits from exporting Eritrea's largely untapped mineral wealth.

It has been selected to be the most repressive nation on earth by Reporters Without Borders and Human Rights Watch, with the highest number of journalists jailed per capita. Afewerki regime's has effectively turned the nation into a giant prison. It has become one of the top ten refugee producing countries in the world.

So I think as I had mentioned in looking at literacy before, the limits of discourse around it as a tool tend to also reflect the concerns of those who hold power over others. That may be due to the state's need to control its citizens, or due to a religious movement's need to control its faithful. So sudden periods of mass expansion of literacy have often been linked to turbulent revolutions in the past. Good examples of this might include the Protestant reformation or the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia in the early 20th century, who orchestrated at that time one of the most effective drives to expand basic literacy in the world.

In my post on digital literacy I also mentioned that it seemed to me that we need to bear in mind the context in which we are speaking of literacy today. In the current shift in economic terms towards human capital becoming the new currency it is less important that you be able to operate within the formal bureaucratic structure of the state, to use the right language to fill in forms and to lift yourself up to work in a white collar job.

You are not just the ward of some state anymore. It is quickly becoming clear that the networks themselves rather than the organs of the state have become the nodes of control and also the new commodity, and you are situated within them in one way or another. A worker's new value is to be flexible and to be able to learn all that they need to learn as they go, to serve more effectively as the intersection between ever expanding and powerful networks. This is also why we require a new form of 'literacy' for the digital world.

That is also why your data and your use of data as a 'digitally literate' person is important and why it is increasingly becoming evident that the state does not really hold its traditional monopoly over it any longer. In sum, information as Doug Laney the originator of the discipline of infonomics has clearly announced, has become an essential asset for companies, intangible as it may be. Big data in this discussion will continue to draw increasing attention as it focuses on opportunities to deploy information in transformative ways as Gartner's 2013 research agenda is seeking to realize.

The World Economic Forum recently summed up some of its thinking around the emergence of personal data as a new asset class in these terms on its website:

"Personal data is becoming a new economic “asset class”, a valuable resource for the 21st century that will touch all aspects of society... to unlock the full potential of personal data, a balanced ecosystem with increased trust between individuals, government and the private sector is necessary"

The key questions that have been brought to the discussion here by the World Economic Forum have been seeking implicitly to leverage personal data, and indeed information itself for economic growth. Some of the questions for example posed in their recent report, Rethinking Personal Data: Strengthening Trust are:

• Who owns personal data?
• How do we protect individual privacy?
• How should rules for usage be formed and what is the role of context in establishing permissions?
• How should organizations that use personal data be held accountable, both for securing data and for adhering to the agreed-upon rules?
• What is the role of regulators given the global flow of personal data?

And so logically a framework around digital literacies has implications for how emerging information-related skills and practices should be planned, considered and and acquired. It also has implications for how data will then be distributed, transformed, managed, consumed and produced by these new digital skill bearers and literates through such practices.

If you see what I am getting at here. If we are going to talk about web-literacy and digital literacies and about (re) making a better web, it is going to be essential that we do not lose sight of this in the background. The key principles that will serve as the anchor points for global digital governance of the future web will fundamentally change our understanding of web-literacy and digital literacy as well.

And if you think that this should be something that people should have a lot more say about, then I think you would not be wrong. The World Economic Forum however has kindly congregated a useful network of experts to conduct a methodologically sophisticated exercise to suggest a pathway for solutions to begin to be articulated, which is described in this short video clip about the topic here:

 
This all brings to my mind so many questions and considerations that I think I would not do much justice to here for now. I would point out though in the clip the prominence of data literacy in the thinking of our experts.

Of course I would absolutely appreciate it if people did have any feedback on this, and to share their ideas or to critique the ones I have put forward as well.

This post also I hope points forwards towards the next topic that will feature in the ETMOOC adventure next week which will be the wider Open Movement and Open Access, and Open Educational Resources.

I look forward to continuing the discussion then :)

Digital Literacy Exemplars, Resources and Curating Tools

This just a quick post to follow on from the ideas that I was running with before, with some little clips or exemplars and snippets. I will sort of summarise the ideas from my longer post on literacy and will add some little bits.

1. I think that models or theories of literacy such as transactional or functional literacy and others that are more transformational (eg such as conscientization or critical consciousness.) have had their place in different historical moments. I made out in my post that these can often be tied to political projects, or discourses around investments in education, access to information and the control of knowledge.

Exemplars: Critical thinkers like Freire, Giroux and many other key thinkers such as Dewey in education.

2. I think that often the more critical perspectives on literacy tend to stress that the educator or teacher plays a key or important role but value the more participatory, social and ethnographic aspects / process of literacy learning. They also tend to focus on the role that educators and education can play in reversing social inequalities.

Exemplar: Nichole Pinkard founder of Chicago's pioneering Digital Youth Network (DYN) in this video describing how her organization empowers young people with critical digital literacy skills that make them academically and professionally more competitive.

http://www.edutopia.org/nichole-pinkard-digital-literacy-video

3. I think that resistance and claiming space to create, build, participate in and 'tinker' with legitimated codes of public knowledge is the underlying and often disruptive movement from below which in the case of ideas about web-making for example, has deep roots in the tech world in the open movement and the structure of the web itself.

Exemplar: Joi Ito who was the Chairman of Creative Commons could be quoted:

" 'education' is something people do to you, whereas 'learning' is something you do for yourself,"

Here is more from Joi:  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/inform/inform31/Jol-Ito-Education.html 

4. But also obviously the technological structure of the web has altered the dynamics of economic production and consumption with a massive influence on other forms of production, (art, media, knowledge etc.) and interaction (social, linguistic, cultural etc.). This has implications on what it means to 'participate' and also on the how people see and experience participation. Specifically in schools this changes how different subjects might be taught and the kinds of skills and capabilities that are required by teachers and learners for the future.

Exemplars: Future Lab looks at development of digital literacy in subject teaching in schools in the UK.

http://www.slideshare.net/futurelabeducation/digital-literacy-and-digital-participation-futurelab-research-insights-day-29-04-10

Awareness, Play, Creativity, Repertoire are highlighted as important to building a conscious, critical approach to the use of digital technologies on the JISC e-learning blog

http://elearning.jiscinvolve.org/wp/category/developing-digital-literacies/

5.  I think that we could possibly say that literacy has gone from structuring a state-based hierarchy and consequently benefiting the individual in certain ways as a primarily the subject of the state and its economy to being a capacity benefiting the group or the network enabling the individual to operate within that network.

Exemplar:  Harold Jarche suggesting that learning is how work gets redesigned in the network era

http://www.jarche.com/2013/02/social-learning-is-how-work-gets-redesigned-in-the-network-era/

Given that we are talking about connected learning this seems to me a good opportunity to delve into some tools for sharing and curating resources on a subject or topic. They are used in the examples below to curate some resources on digital literacy. If you have not used some tools for curating content before these are some really useful ones to play with !

1. Scoop.it: (Social curating that is really effective)

http://www.scoop.it/t/edu-tech-for-development/p/3997113192/social-learning-is-how-work-gets-redesigned-in-the-network-era-harold-jarche

2. Slideshare: (still really handy I find)

http://www.slideshare.net/dajbelshaw/tedx-warwick-the-essential-elements-of-digital-literacies

3. Pearltrees: (I love this interface - it is awesome looking)

ltrees.com/t/digital-literacy/digital-literacies-exemplars/id5704056

Thanks for all the comments, it has been great to hear people's feedback and ideas!

T 

Mozilla's Webmaker Project is awesome!

In the last few months I have been following and listening to some amazing groups of people who are working at the Mozilla Foundation on the Webmaker project.. 

And before I continue, - I realise that I have never learnt the art of the short post. But in my defence I don't usually post up here that often, but at the moment that is partly because I am also working on an open education resources mapping project, but right now there is a lot to shout about going on in the world of Mozilla.

It is hard to describe this project without getting really excited as I am both engaged in literacy, languages and at the same time open education as well. The goal of this project is nothing less than, to quote Mozilla’s page breifly:

“To help millions of people move from using the web to making the web. As part of Mozilla’s non-profit mission, we want to help the world increase their understanding of the web, take greater control of their online lives, and create a more web literate planet.”

In a nutshell the potential is huge for learning and for changing how we use and understand the web. This is obvious when you actually see the amazing tools that have been created for it by Mozilla. Three big tools are developed already that are simply loads of fun and are also extremely accessible:

1. Thimble: https://thimble.webmaker.org/en-US/
2. Popcorn Maker: https://popcorn.webmaker.org/
3. And X Ray Googles over here: http://hackasaurus.org/en-US/goggles/

      And lots of cool things have been happening – not least in 2012 the launch of these tools at Mozfest in London which was simply epic J  - http://mozillafestival.org/

And while I was there I came across the fabulous Mozilla Open Badges initiative, and the gang at GoCodery working on Badge Bingo for the festival, which you might ask is what?

Well as part of this big project to change the how people see and experience the web, open badges are a key element.  For the sake of simplicity the badges team explain it like this:

“Learning today happens everywhere, not just in the classroom. But it's often difficult to get recognition for skills and achievements that happen outside of school. Mozilla's Open Badges project is working to solve that problem, making it easy for anyone to issue, earn and display badges across the web -- through a shared infrastructure that's free and open to all. The result: helping people of all ages learn and display 21st century skills, unlock career and educational opportunities, and find new life pathways. “

As a teacher I can see the need, and there is so much potential too. Particularly for teaching young people to become digitally literate and learn to code and use the web in a totally new way. You can go and try them out for yourself: http://openbadges.org/en-US/

The purpose of this post is to share and encourage people to get involved in this. There is information here for those who are keen to do this: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges

At this point there are some exciting conversations going on about localisation and about translation of tools like thimble which people can get involved in. For more info see here: https://l10n.mozilla.org/

But for those of you interested in ICT for development, I think also check out some of the groups and communities in countries that have already been working hard with the Mozilla gang to get involved:

http://womoz.org/

http://www.womoz.org/blog/meet-chit-thiri-maung-from-mozilla-myanmar/

https://thimble.webmaker.org/p/fh9j

As you can imagine the potential is there to do really good things that are really empowering socially as well. The development community is one community that can reach out to people in majority world non-English speaking countries who might want to get involved. That would include teachers, coders, literacy specialists, kids, community groups, after school groups, libraries and …well the list is endless.

The side of the project dealing with this part of the work is called Nemo. Which is here:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/NeMo

As the Nemo page says this is about taking the message of Mozilla to people irrespective of their place and language. reaching out to new kinds of people – students, educators, filmmakers, journalists, scientists, artists or it can be any reader who is a normal Internet user and who might care about their online life.

For those of you who are really also interested in the thinking going on behind this all educationally and what the Mozilla gang are doing to build a model for web-literacy you need go no further than check out +Doug Belshaw  on Google+ with his blog posts which are being distributed in a kind of crowdfunded way to make a book on the subject. 

If you are interested in checking out a summary of ideas so far then also go to his blog where a presentation is posted up here and to follow either subscribe or follow his musings on twitter on @dajbelshaw

Of course feel free to leave comments here about information in this blogpost, and go and check out more info on twitter @OpenBadges or search with these hashtags on twitter:

#webliteracy 

#webmaker

Tom

Beyond 2011: ITC and Literacy

This post will try to map out how ICT's in education, particularly in developing countries have moved forward in 2011. I will also try to take a look forward towards some events coming up in 2012 in these overlapping worlds and look at why areas such as adult education and literacy deserve more attention in the future.

If there was a technological zodiac, 2010 would have been the year of the I-pad and the Smartphone. In contrast 2011 would probably have been the year of social media. Bloggers and activists have had a crucial impact on events around the world and a host of businesses and social media start-ups have now started to grow teeth and get serious. Consider the Arab Spring or student uprisings all over Europe for example and the rise of companies like Group-On. For an overview of this (with stats and pictures) see Jeff bull's blog "10 Things You Must Know about the State of Social Media in 2011" or also David Olson's blog post "Top Ten Global Development Communications Stories of 2011" here.

A lot of new ideas are moving towards more mainstream business and education is one area for this. For example much has happened in the world of crowdsourcing including ideas for how it will impact on education. This article from Reuters in December 2011 explains how some new start-up companies are looking to make money by tapping teachers' hands-on experience for what works in the classroom. Crowdsourcing is likely to have an big impact on education, take for example this TED talk on crowdsourcing the development of a global human syllabus for learning online. For a general overview particularly of some of the involvement of the private sector in 2011 check out "How the Internet Revolutionised Education in 2011" here or this crowdsourcing industry infographic.

The crowdsourcing industry (or at least Enterprise Crowdsourcing) has blasted off and new global companies are tapping into social media and marketing. Many of these start-ups actually date back a few years now but are beginning to 'come of age' and crowdsourcing for one is becoming an industry whether people like it or not. This graph from Mark Swaeffer's blog shows that the market demand for crowd-sourced work quintupled in 2010 & almost quadrupled in 2011.

In 2011 commercial and public interest in mobile technology and in tablet devices has grown exponentially. This has also occured in the field of development and ICT and all kinds of applications for mobile technology for increasing the accountability of public services in developing countries are sprouting up. A recent example are services to check the authenticity of drugs at point of sale in Africa (see this article by the Economist "Mobile Services in Poor Countries - Not Just Talk" or also check out Roxanna Samii's blog here to follow discussions around some similar topics in ITC for Development). The Economist also has a 2012 update on how Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple will be fighting it out for market dominance in different areas of the rising smartphone and tablet market, with some insights into their use in developing countries.

Education is taking big steps into this world. Although innovations constantly set the pace in terms of what is possible, the advent and impact of new technology is now part of mainstream educational debates. Discussions about how and where technology is used in schools and outside of learning centres of all kinds are currently ongoing, for example with schools in Australia setting out policies on the use of Facebook for teachers. This kind of discussion and the impact of technology on pedagogy is on the tips of teacher's tongues in schools all over the world. For fascinating coverage of some of these issues and emerging practices in e-learning see Mark Pegrum's blog here and presentations here or his recent book 'From Blogs to Bombs'

Mobile learning has become big business and along with e-learning corporations, people are going beyond simply saying 'we need an app for that' to thinking about having a 'mobile learning strategy'. Academic courses on e-learning are popping up along with academic research and books on this topic. For example here is a review of 40 e-learning articles - the first of 15 chapters of a recent book looking at specific applications in health, language learning, speech therapy and higher and distance education in developed countries (see Stevens, D. and A. Kitchenham, An Analysis of Mobile Learning in Education, Business, and Medicine. Models for Interdisciplinary Mobile Learning: Delivering Information to Students, 2011.)

In October 2012 the 11th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning, mLearn will push further the theory and practice of learning and mobility in converging technological environments. For more information also see the website of The International Association for Mobile Learning (IAmLearn) which has a link to presentations and resources from over the last 10 years. Also for a wider academic glance at the field of ICT4DEV and education also check this special issue on ICT Education in Development in the Information Technology for Development Journal, Volume 16, Issue 3, from 2010 here.

It is not for nothing that mobile technology gets referred to as the 21st century fishing rod. International organisations and governments are catching up with businesses and individuals who are making possible what millions of teenagers with handheld computers or mobile phones already know is right in front of them. In 2011 the Indian Ministry for Human Resource Development announced the launch of a new low cost ($35) educational tablet: the Aakash. The government of Thailand is also introducing a similar tablet at secondary level. Governments have difficulty however, as these investments (for example read here about tablets in Thailand) are often quite controversial. Often the question that seems apparent with mobile technology is that now it has arrived - what do we do with it ?

International organisations are moving towards looking the implications of these changes on a global scale, even if for now there may be many fragmented discussions about what may be possible. More debates around ITC for development goals for education and educational debates that refuse to separate educational realities and technological ones are likely to be around the corner.

In the background these days you can imagine people asking themselves questions like; what percentage of the world should have internet access by 2020? Or in what sense can we talk about the right to access technology in the future? These topics have been addressed in the World Summit on the Information Society in 2003 and 2005. To check out where this is leading have a look at the WSIS Forum 2012 which will take place in May in Geneva or UNESCO's Edu Tech Debate and the UNESCO Information For All program. Also taking place soon if you wish to learn more about this is the Learning Without Frontiers event in London (Jan 25th and 26th) which is here.

One of the overarching questions is to what extent can we consider internet access and computer literacy as being the great knowledge divide of the future - and what does this mean for education and development in general? If it is any indication of how important these questions are becoming then check out the growth in the number of WSIS stocktaking members in 2011 below.

Technology is already changing how people live and impacting on social development. The potential opportunities, benefits and impact on education in developing countries is very wide. This includes everything from the creation of virtual universities to HIV public health campaigns via mobile text messages. However, because of this breadth, it is easy to spin off into discussions that are too broad and that do not address particular educational themes. So for now just consider one area that these technological changes may impact, which is adult literacy and literacy teaching in developing countries.

Why choose this focus? Well I think because both adult literacy and ICT for education suffer from either being overlooked or being sidelined as specialist areas far too often. Many will agree that the wide gap between the ICT haves and have-nots and the digital divide is an important issue and ICT access and literacy are both important forms of empowerment in a similar way that literacy is. But that is where the debate often tends to end, although adult literacy studies have great depth in terms of the background of theory and debate. In both areas however, too often it is only when they can no longer be overlooked that people start to pay attention to new ground breaking approaches or innovations.

What about the notion of 'basic education' and literacy in the future. As we approach 2015 and the targets set out in the Millennium Development Goals (MDG's) the objectives and indicators for adult literacy may start to look a bit out-of-date. Once we have reached targets set out for literacy defined as 'being able to write or read a sentence with understanding' in 2015 where will we be standing in terms of the brave new world of ICT literacy and access to information?

It is worth taking a step back at this point - approaches to adult literacy have a long history. The concept of literacy has been defined and redefined, and it is worth considering how both the meaning of 'literacy' and different approaches towards teaching it have changed over time. Ideas about literacy make an interesting perspective on how changes to how people work, interact and communicate impact on education. Looking at how multilateral organisations have constructed ideas and approaches to literacy in development discourse over the last 50 years gives some interesting insights into this. For more on this topic, here is my own attempt at a review of some of the challenges that UNESCO has faced in defining literacy since the 1950's as the peak body and leading global organisation responsible for advocacy around literacy and for setting these kinds of educational and intellectual standards. World Bank has also published this study of the history of literacy teaching approaches which is very informative and worthy of a read if you are interested in this area.

It seems to me at least that too often adult literacy has suffered from a sort of constant 'big elephant' syndrome, in fact the same might be said for ITC education in the past. To make a sweeping generalisation, you could say that all too often governments and international organisations have either failed to take realistic stances on adult literacy (and ITC in education) or have effectively come to exclude them altogether from the wider debate on education, even though both are fundamental areas that are involved (and may increasingly be involved)  in many forms of learning in all kind of situations. In order to correct this, for many years UNESCO has been the leading advocate on the international stage for literacy.

One fact contributing to this 'silent treatment' is that development goals have shifted their direct focus in relation to adult literacy since the 1990's for a number of reasons. Furthermore, adult literacy goals have tended to become simply inferred within other goals for education. The original Education For All goals proposed in Jomtiem in the 1990's referred to goals for basic education as including adult literacy. In 2000 adult literacy was included as a clear goal (Goal 4) although the target was rather arbitrarily to increase adult literacy by 50% by 2015. Although this highlighted the importance of adult literacy, it did not target efforts towards the most marginalised - a 50% increase in literacy in a region with 30% literacy levels may mean a small proportionate increase in literacy for some but not real empowerment in the grand scheme of things.

The focus since 2000 on 'basic education' has tended to overlook adult literacy. In much development discourse 'basic education' refers to 'primary and lower secondary education' (see the wiki entry) while adult literacy is often put in a side category. In moving from the Education For All (EFA) goals to the wider Millenium Development Goals (MDG's) in 2000, adult literacy goals have become less evident alongside the focus on access to primary education in the Millennium Development Goals (MDG 2).

Looking towards the future UNESCO initiated the UN Literacy Decade in 2003 which will end in 2012. In fact the draft UNLD proposal states:  “Literacy policies and programmes today require going beyond the limited view of literacy that has dominated in the past. Literacy for all requires a renewed vision of literacy….”. In 2005 UNESCO also launched the Literacy Initiative for Empowerment (LIFE) as a framework for achieving the Decade’s goals coordinated by The UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning. For more on this check the UNESCO website here and the recent news from the high level forum on Adult Literacy on the UIL site here. The presentations and discussion from this forum will also provide input for the second Global Report on Adult Learning and Education (GRALE) 2012 that will focus specifically on literacy to mark the end of the United Nations Literacy Decade. Now that this decade is ending, in 2012 raises the question of what will come next in terms of goals for literacy.. 

In the eyes of many other organisations, adult literacy has often continued to be set in the context and referred to or inferred as being essential for the attainment of the goals of poverty reduction and for the empowerment of women, and the reduction of child mortality and maternal mortality. Higher levels of literacy may have a wide range of cross-cutting benefits such as having an effect on reducing the birth rate and raising the age at which women tend to have children. But the problem with this view is that it tends to leave literacy in the background while it focuses on these wider outcomes for poverty reduction.

Why is this view in need of change? How important will it be in the future to be literate and be able to use the internet and on-line or mobile services for all kinds of public or transactional interactions? It may sound trite to suggest that many teenagers can now go longer without food than without Facebook, and I don't think should be completely dismissed. If the ability to use a mobile phone or a mobile device and to send messages by text and to be linked into networks connects you to essential services, key resources and people, then should it be considered an essential 21st century skill and part of being a literate person of the future? I think that at the end of this literacy decade there remains a lot to discuss.

UNESCO is finding new ways of bringing attention to this and of helping ideas to bloom in this area by partnering with Nokia and the Pearson Foundation to create the EFA Crowdsourcing Challenge. This challenge allows participants to submit innovative ideas on how mobile technology can strengthen literacy, entries are judged on their potential for social impact and real educational value and are put into a competition for a cash prize (if you wish to participate entries must be submitted by May 31, 2012). Some of the ideas that have received attention (see the link to the EFA Challenge for more info) include:

-  ReadWrite, by Simon Botes (South Africa), a mobile application that teaches users how to read and write in any language.

- Mobile Phone Assisted Reading and Augmented Reality-based Translation by Wu Dongyue (China), which uses Nokia’s mobile capabilities to scan a text, then have the program read the word aloud, so learners can link a text to a word.

- An educational game by John Doe (United Kingdom) which helps children learn words in a new language using a “treasure hunting” mobile application.

- “Test on Texts”, a mobile application for students which evaluates their knowledge via text questions and suggests content in an intuitive manner.

An identical UNESCO Crowdsourcing challenge for primary education is also on-line here. Also for some more information on similar stories about the use of mobile technology in South Africa also check out Steve Vosloo's blog here.

UNESCO in December 2011 importantly held an International Experts Meeting and Symposium on Mobile Learning. The presentations from this event are available here and the leaflet is here. This meeting seeks to some degree to bridge this gap in national and international policies that have been designed in the 'pre mobile' era and is an initial exploratory step towards achieving this.

In recent years there has been some real success with larger scale ideas to reinforce literacy learning from private enterprise and combinations of for-profit and non-for profit initiatives such as PlanetRead founded by Brij Kothari the Schwab Social Entrepreneur of the Year in 2009. This interview with him at Davos 2011 highlights one problem, as he states in the interview: too often governments are not open to some of these innovative ideas, which is why it took him ten years to convince the broadcasting companies in India to take Same Language Subtitling seriously.

These entrepreneurs are changing the opportunities for adult literacy learning and for mobile technology and ITC's in education. While the potential of such opportunities to bring about change by empowering and giving voice to the masses in social movements is probably high on the agenda of many governments (especially if access to the internet and mobile services is tightly controlled as it is in Myanmar or China), it is also likely to be high on the agenda of private enterprise. Entrepreneurs such as Brij Kothari lead the way, but international organisations working with governments play an important role as well.

Below is an overview of some of the themes in the area of ICT and education for UNESCO extracted from a presentation on the website of the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education (ITTE) in Moscow, which also lists some of the policy brief's that were published in 2010 and 2011. Although a policy brief on ICT and Literacy has been published, it tends not to focus on adult literacy or non-formal education - it is available here along with the other briefs as e-copies. The IITE website also has information about recent events such as an international conference on “Teacher Competencies in Knowledge Society: Policy, Pedagogy, Social Skills”  held on 1-2 December 2011 in Baku, Republic of Azerbaijan.

To facilitate policy dialogue, work on measuring change and developing indicators is a necessary step. It seems for this purpose that UNESCO IITE has put forward objective and outcomes with indicators in its 2008-2013 Mid-Term strategy here. For example UNESCO also carried out a project in 2002 -2003 on the development and use of indicators of ICT in education for the Baltic and CIS countries, and information about this is available on the UNESCO Bangkok site here. Furthermore the IITE will be holding an on-line Forum on Policy of ICT use in Education and a High-level Policy Meeting on ICTs in Education for CIS, Baltic States and the Africa region.

Adult education, or non-formal education together with literacy and mobile learning do appear as a central focus on other the regional websites such as the UNESCO Bangkok website here under the wing of UNESCO’s Asia-Pacific Programme of Education for All (APPEAL). In contrast the IITE's website tends to focus on how ICT's and social media can contribute to classroom practice (for example referring to ICT's for primary education).

The potential for ICT's to facilitate learning in new ways that can impact on adult and non-formal education could also be an area where NGO's and other organisations all over the world can help drive innovation. For example foundations such as the Shuttleworth Foundation provide great platforms to drive forward thinking in areas like this.

Other areas of formal education have received plenty of attention such as Higher Education. To see where some of these initiatives are leading see the Horizon Report which is published annually, from 2011 and the 2012 topics (mobile apps and tablets are two prominent topics - see here).

It seems to me that there is now a gap for a wider discussion about taking the lessons of past experiences to apply them to the present and the future of literacy teaching. This hopefully might include discussions about past models such as the REFLECT approach, or the kind of self-run small literacy groups that were popular in the 80's and 90's, with simple readers that worked around the idea of incorporating literacy learning into task based group activities. What would these models look like if they were brought into the 21st century using mobile technology?

With so much diversity in this field we might expect some totally new approaches using new technology. Some interesting examples of new practices might include the UNESCO mobile literacy project in Pakistan (the project of Ichiro Mayazama whose paper is here) or the text to teach project in the Philippines. For more information see the UNESCO report from 2005 on mobile learning and resources from the Bangkok office here.

Also for a retrospective on ICT for development, take a look back at what Richard Hawkins wrote about 2010 here for the World Bank. Rickard Hawkins has also taken a look at financing and international cooperation in this area by asking what role education should play in donor ICT strategies. Currently, the World Bank Group is consulting with external and internal stakeholders to refine and strengthen its ICT strategy. It is developing a new ICT Sector strategy that better incorporates ICT’s transformational power. It will include a cross-sectoral approach that focuses on three pillars: innovate, connect and transform.

The World Bank's senior ICT and Education Specialist, Michael Trucano also has a blog addressing these topics and has addressed literacy in fact in his post in October, mentioning points that I have highlighted here as well. Also back in 2010 he wrote an interesting post on 11 countries to watch in the future (here). Of these Korea has shown itself to be a leader in international cooperation and has attracted a lot of interest in where it is going with investments into ICT technology particularly within formal education and pre-primary education. The Korean Education Research Information Service (KERIS), recently published their initial report on global information communication technology (ICT) indicators in education.  This report, “Analysis Report of Global ICT4ED Readiness”, outlines a framework for analyzing ICT for education (ICT4ED). See the UNESCO Bangkok website here.

For many governments such as Korea, literacy at primary level in schools is likely to be the main focus especially considering the pressure to achieve results in tests like PISA and with increased investments into pre-primary education. Development experts at RTI and within organisations like USAID have correspondingly made the case for focusing on literacy at primary level and increasing the use of Early Grade Reading Assessments as an indicator to measure gaps in quality in education systems. This could be one application where tablet computers could be used in possibly cost effective ways. This idea has been explored here on the Edu Tech blog.

I have proposed however that we need to pay more attention to what is happening outside of schools and to find ways to draw attention and innovation towards literacy beyond the classroom walls. In some ways Richard Hawkins has also raised this issue in his blog post about the World Bank 2020 strategy released in 2011. One comment that stands out to me in his analysis is that the World Bank's systems approach may actually reinforce the barriers between formal and non-formal education that technology is so effectively dissolving. Richard Hawkins writes:

"the strategy highlights how technologies are transforming the world outside the formal schooling sector. It then goes on to suggest (I think) that we need to bring this world into education systems and schools. But: Perhaps the really transformative power of ICTs would be if they could help bring what is meant to occur within existing systems and schools into this wider world, and not vice versa?"

We may find ourselves referring to empowerment in the future through the use of ICT's, and increasingly referring to literacy as enabling the use of ICT's and vice versa. Evidently technology is having a greater impact in bringing education to those who cannot access it formally and in enabling literacy learning in new ways. But advocacy and support may also be necessary to get governments and organisations to recognise the key role that literacy and ICT literacy has.

In 2012 policy dialogue can support innovation and goal setting to address these issues and recognise the role ICT's can have both in formal and non-formal forms of education. Literacy is one area of focus for bridging this gap between government and enterprise, and it seems that foundations and international organisations can play an important role in enabling this and in helping ideas flouish. If we are going to try to bring concepts and approaches up-to-date this might also require reviewing the concepts, goals and ideas about literacy for the future. A wider discussion on the importance of literacy and technology in education might also benefit from looking at the failings and successes of strategies and approaches in the past.

These views and opinions are my own and are not representative of any organisations or other parties. I hope this might be useful to anyone thinking about getting involved in this area. I am putting together some of my own ideas around some different topics and will be using this blog to keep track of my personal reflections. So if you feel that this has been informative or helpful, please send it on to others and add references and comments in the section below this post.

And have a wonderful 2012 - with all the exciting things that it will bring!