1) I am Raj Dhanarajan, the President and CEO of the Commonwealth of Learning. Those who are not familiar with the Commonwealth of Learning may wish to take a few minutes to browse through our web site at http://www.col.org. At that site you will be directed to the Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning to be held between 1 and 5 March 1999, at Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital city of Brunei Darussalam. This virtual conference on Distance Education and Challenged Communities is one of a series of four leading up to our meeting in Brunei. Let me welcome you, once again, to the first. I am hopeful the debate and discussion generated will entice you also to participate in person Brunei, early next year.

2) To begin our discussion I will quote a statement from the 1995 Report of the Independent Commission on Population and the Quality of Life: "Literate people find it hard to grasp the full impact of illiteracy. In a world operating on written laws, rules, and instructions, being illiterate is a severe handicap when participating in decisions affecting life: it is tantamount to disability affecting every aspect of living. It confines job opportunities to the most menial and low-paid tasks. It means being unable to read instructions on a packet of seed, a tin of powdered milk, or an oral contraceptive. It means being unable to read newspapers, street signs, and warning signs. It means the inability to check legal rights, an inability to check if a title or deed is faulty. And it means being exposed to fraud and expropriation." [Caring for the Future: Report of the Independent Commission on Population and Quality of Life. OUP New York, 1996]

3) While the scourge of illiteracy is not the only issue confronting marginalised and deprived communities, it is in many ways central to almost all other challenges and deprivations. Around the world there may be as many as one billion individuals who are either completely or partially blind to the written word. There are millions of others who may have a basic education but require additional knowledge, skills and information to be both economically productive and socially participative in the affairs of their communities. While most of such deprivation is found in the low-income countries of the world the situation is by no means confined to these nations only. Pockets of knowledge deprivation, like pockets of poverty are found right across the globe. My purpose in bringing the above quote to you is twofold. They are:

• Promoters of distance education have constantly claimed that a good reason to establish "distance education" infrastructure and build "distance teaching" capacity is to take knowledge and training to the marginalised, isolated, underprivileged and the unreachable. There are a few isolated cases where such attempts have been made with a fair amount of success. One such case is the highly acclaimed Literacy Programme of the Allama Iqubal Open University of Pakistan. By and large, however, distance education continues to serve those who already "have" i.e. mostly the literate, male, middle class and urban dwellers rather than those who "have not" i.e. the illiterate, female, poor and rural communities.
• The reasons for distance education services not reaching those parts of our communities, which are mostly marginalised, have little to do with a lack of resources. It may be more to do with a lack of passion [in many instances] or a lack of knowledge of the challenges and opportunities [in others] to bring about the change. The distance education community is comfortable with its successes, working in familiar environments where success is achieved with relative ease. The development community, which has an equal responsibility in eradicating illiteracy, seems to be unaware of the benefits that distance education can bring to their purpose. The few who are aware seem to harbour a great level of scepticism about the effectiveness of innovations in educational delivery, perhaps memories of earlier failed attempts.

5) I know I am not being fair to the many excellent experimental initiatives that are taking place in one or another location [e.g. the radio programmes to enable better health for the child and the rock videos advocating dangers of promiscuity]. My frustration, however, has more to do with not transferring the experience of those experiments to large-scale application. In not doing so those of us in the distance education community may have failed to exploit the full potential of our "trade" and those in the development community may have, for one reason or another, failed to recognise the potential of distance education for purposes of development.

6) In mid 1996 I was invited to deliver the Ram Reddy Memorial Lecture [Face to Face with Distance Education:   http://www.col.org/speeches/Reddy96.htm] in New Delhi. The late Prof. Reddy was the founding Vice Chancellor of India’s National Open University; some 400,000 students are enrolled in that University and therefore it seemed the right place to inquire as to how well the University had served the needs of the following groups:

• The functionally illiterate
• The Physically challenged
• The long term Unemployed
• Women and girls
• Out of Work Youth
• Refugees and recent immigrants
• Minority groups

7) The response, as expected, was "not so well". Colleagues from India who are participating in this conference may have an update on this. Should a similar question be asked to a global audience would we get a different kind of a response? Colleagues who are participating in this virtual conference may also wish to make a comment on the above.

8) I am assuming that those of us who preach open and distance learning truly believe that education and training more than any other social service is the only way to equalise opportunities for all. If that is the case, then surely we have little choice but to use our skills and knowledge to reach the seven categories of humanity listed above in addition to the clients we already serve. Equally if those in the development community also have the same faith in education and training then they will be failing in their responsibility if they continue to ignore the potential benefits that distance education can bring to their needs.

9) More than at any other time before we have the skills to reach out to many and diverse groups of clients; we have the knowledge to inform, train, educate, assess and accredit [if this is important] in different contexts; we have the technologies [low, medium or high] to deliver. We need a will. The need is all the more critical when we consider the current moniker for today’s civilisation, namely the global knowledge-based economy. If we accept the moniker as even vaguely accurate, then we must also accept its implication for humanity: those who lack knowledge will be economically disadvantaged, perhaps in perpetuity. The development imperative is therefore self-evident: to provide the tools for individuals throughout the world to acquire the knowledge necessary to have economically productive and socially enriching lives as confident participants in a global society, not marginalised on-lookers seen too frequently as drains on society.

10) In this introductory note to our discussion I have refrained from going into detail; I have also refrained from describing cases. I would want you to contribute the detail and the cases. I would also wish you to enlarge the discussion to include among other things the role of the new information and communication technologies. I know there are many among us who get turned off at the mention of the tools refered to as Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). You may be justified in the position you take but there is pervasiveness about these new technologies. They are erasing borders effectively, they allow for effective information manipulation, they are able to reach far, they can lower the unit per capita cost of communication, and by and large seem to be the driving force behind both the "global" and the "knowledge-based" descriptors of our age. If applied with thought, extreme sensitivity and knowledge they also afford a means to extend access to education and training to the knowledge-poor, the un-reached, the isolated and those who have been ignored for too long. Against this perception of a role for technology, in taking education to marginalised communities, are questions that must also be asked about its relevance. Neil Postman in his book The End of Education [Vintage Books, New York, 1996] listed 10 principles that we may want to note in this context. These are:

• All technological change is a Faustian bargain. For every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage.
• The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means every new technology benefits some and harms others.
• Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Like language itself, a technology predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments and to subordinate others. Every technology has a philosophy, which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.
• A new technology usually makes war against an old technology. It competes with it for time attention, money, prestige and a "worldview"
• Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. A new technology does not merely add something; it changes everything.
• Because of the symbolic forms in which information is encoded, different technologies have different intellectual and emotional biases.
• Because of the accessibility and speed of their information, different technologies have different political biases.
• Because of their physical form, different technologies have different sensory biases.
• Because of the conditions in which we attend them different technologies have different social biases.
• Because of their technical and economic structure different technologies have different content biases.

11) I am not making judgements in one way or another on Neil Postman’s commentary. But it is a useful, in the context of our discussion; a counterpoint to bear in mind.

Finally on how I see this discussion flowing:

12) The intention is to allow maximum interactivity and a free-flow of ideas. You may wish to describe a case, challenge a point or a concept or further pursue an idea. To save space and time you may wish to hyperlink a point to text on a particular web site. Feel free to do so but can I seek you help? Not all participants will have full technological capacity, therefore where you find a point of utmost importance [to support a case or argument] why not capture it within your text rather than through a link. Because of my travel schedules I may miss one or two days of our discussion; let this not stop you from progressing with your own chats.

14) At the end of the conference I will make an attempt at summarising the highlights of this discussion, share it with you and take it to Brunei as our message.

Best wishes