Alberta-North Access Symposium
Grande Prairie, Alberta
4 May 2009
By
Ian Pringle and Sir John Daniel
Commonwealth of Learning
Ian Pringle is Education Specialist: Media and Sir John Daniel is President and Chief Executive Officer at the Commonwealth of Learning
Abstract
Thousands of local learning centres, using a variety of names and employing a range of media and technology, exist around the world. Their aim is to cater to community learning needs. But how can communities get themselves into the driving seat in order to set their own agendas for learning? We shall report on the experience of the Commonwealth of Learning in helping communities use local media to take charge of learning agendas linked to development goals in health, agriculture and other areas.
Introduction
It is a pleasure to be back in Northern Alberta again. I lived here, in St. Albert, from 1978 to 1980 during those early days when Athabasca University was based in Edmonton. During the time we were here the Province launched a tourism promotion called Travel Alberta. You were given a ‘passport’ which had pages for each region of the Province and the idea was to collect stamps for each section as you travelled. My family took this up with enthusiasm and I think we were the first family to visit all regions.
Another part of my experience that is relevant today is that in the late 1980s I was president of Laurentian University, which at that time served the whole vast expanse of North-Eastern Ontario through a campus in Sudbury and colleges in Hearst, North Bay and Sault Ste-Marie. During my time there I was involved in the establishment of Contact North/Contact Nord and I have watched with pride as it has developed very successfully over twenty years.
But the most relevant feature of my presence with you today is that I have teamed up with my Commonwealth of Learning colleague Ian Pringle to prepare this address. Ian joined us last year, bringing with him extensive experience of community media from working in Nepal, India and other Asian countries with UNESCO, as well as in Canada. I am delivering this address, but much of the thinking and experience draws on Ian’s work at COL and previously. We shall make five key points.
• First, there has been a huge expansion, all over the world, of points where people can access various information and communications technologies.
• Second, much of this expansion has been technology driven. The focus has been on expanding access to technology in the hope that this will contribute to development.
• Third, and the corollary of this approach, there has been too little attention paid to the content that the technology is used to communicate.
• Fourth, it is useful content that will actually get people to engage with the access centres and use the technology.
• Fifth, and finally, our work at the Commonwealth of Learning focuses on building capacity to make use of the centres. That means organisational development, emphasis on learning programmes, strategic partnerships and participatory content creation.
So that is our menu. Let me now take you through it.
The Expansion of Access Points
In the past decade or so there has been a dramatic expansion in community IT and media facilities around the globe. They go by various names: tele-centres, village knowledge centres, community access points, community radio, information kiosks, and community learning and education centres.
For example:
- India originally aimed high, intending to create a knowledge centre for every village – which in India means around 600,000 of them. They’ve now scaled that down to ‘only’ 100,000!
- Mozambique has been scaling up its network digital resource and community multimedia centres with a goal of having sixty or more spread throughout the country.
- In Jamaica, and in other countries in the Caribbean, the government is rolling out community access points with the aim of having them in every parish and town.
All this has now got beyond the stage of pilot or demonstration projects – ICT infrastructure is expanding and deepening, even in remote, rural and resource-poor areas. Many attempts are being made to scale up these developments and make them sustainable. One way of doing that is to offer some services for payment, as is done in Sri Lanka and the Indian state of Kerala.
All this is good and there are success stories, even if some have an element of exaggeration. Ambitious words like ‘information’, ‘knowledge’, ‘learning’, etc. are often part of the names of the centres. Nevertheless, we find that the vast majority of “ICT for development” and “ICT for education” initiatives have been technology-driven rather than people-oriented in their approach and thinking. They are well intentioned but too often miss the real ingredients: people, their needs and rights, and the content that links them together.
Sadly, developing areas of the world are littered with underutilised equipment and facilities that were created for rather then by or at least with local communities.
The example of Isabel: I
These photographs are from a remote island in the Solomon Islands in the Pacific. Isabel is a province of some 25,000 people. The administrative centre is a costly 40-minute flight or a half-day ship ride from the Solomon Islands’ capital, Honiara – depending on the weather. In the middle of this photo is a peninsula of land: “downtown” Tatamba, surrounded by a host of villages along the coast and inland; in total about 4-5000 people live in the area.
There is no mobile coverage, no landline telephony; electrical power comes from generators, with some limited solar power. There is maybe one ship a week; it’s an expensive 90-minute voyage by motorized canoe in good weather to the administrative centre at Buala and the only airstrip (which you might have noticed from the earlier photo) is grass and planes sometimes get stuck.
Technology: Part I
It is important to make the technology available in under-developed areas, including Tatamba. A big part of putting communities in the driver’s seat is making an appropriate vehicle available.
An interesting “low-tech” example from COL’s work is the suitcase radio, an innovation that came about through COL’s interaction with engineers in Manitoba (Rob Robbins at Wantok Enterprises). This is a remarkably simple unit – which costs less than $5,000 and is easily shipped and assembled.
The suitcase radio has empowered and enabled more than 300 hundred communities and local groups around the world to make use of affordable, appropriate information and communication tools – on their own terms. Examples are Jeffrey Town, a farming community with a large youth population and high unemployment in north-central Jamaica, and the Apac community radio and telecentre in remote and war-torn northern Uganda. There is also a suitcase radio in Tatamba, the village that we saw photographs of in the Solomon Islands.
The suitcase radio is a technology package that is easy to understand and learn to use. COL’s partners in Uganda and Jamaica use it for a very general sort of public education, including key issues like health, livelihoods, secondary schooling, etc. For communities like Apac or Jeffrey Town, even this basic sort of facility can be not only lifesaving but also a source of pleasure, pride and community empowerment. Radio builds on skills and cultural practices that most communities – especially those from oral traditions – already have: talking and listening, debating and discussing, singing and playing music.
COL’s own experience is shared by other groups like UNESCO and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and is also confirmed by research: local media carry unique and essential information and play important roles in communication and culture. In short: people value local content.
The important feature of the radio-in-a-suitcase technology is that it enables people to make and share content.
Technology: Part II
Technologies are important at both ends of the communication process. Having access to content by way of a radio set or a computer with an Internet connection is one element. In the case of radio the radio listening set – the access element – generally takes care of itself. In the case of the Internet, the focus in the past ten years has been overwhelmingly on trying to provide the access component: the computer set and the elusive internet connection.
At the other end of the information and communication process is the technology for creating and sharing relevant content. With the suitcase radio COL’s focus was to enable the creation of content. That is because in those places where local radio as a tool for development and education has worked; it has worked because people create meaningful and relevant content for themselves. When that is available people generally get hold of their own radio sets.
One of the problems with the newer ICTs in the context of development and education has been the focus on access and more specifically ‘access technologies’: computers, local area networks, internet connections, wifi, and so on. This has been accompanied by the assumption, implicit or explicit, that making international, global content available will justify making the technology accessible, and that its use will add value to the community.
Well it doesn’t justify it and it doesn’t add value. That is a key reason why the vast majority of technology centres remain underutilised.
There is very little in the new ICT world that compares to the suitcase radio – there is no “website-in-a-suitcase” or “internet-in-a-box”. Sadly, computers are generally promoted and used for access to content, like a radio receiver, not for creating and sharing content.
That really is too bad because computers are just as powerful – if not more powerful – for creating content as they are for accessing it.
However, even with radio, it is not always that simple and the lesson is often the same. What COL has discovered is that meaningful use of ICTs at the local level is as much about attitudes, knowledge and empowerment as it is about technical skills or technical facilities.
The example of Isabel: II
As I mentioned a moment ago, there is a suitcase radio unit in Tatamba. It was provided by UNDP as part of “participatory” development project. In fact, there are eight suitcase radios in Isabel, in communities spread out around the island.
Ian Pringle was in Tatamba recently. He was there 1) to find out more about why the FM radio station isn’t really being used very much for more than just music, and 2) to investigate, along with our government and NGO partners, how the use of these facilities for new non-formal open and distance learning programmes might be improved.
During an informal community meeting with some 40 or more community leaders and members, Ian asked the assembled group of islanders three questions:
1. How many of you have a radio or easy access to one? Nearly everyone raises their hands.
2. Who listens to the local Tatamba radio service when it’s available?
Again everybody raises their hand and there is a palpable rise in the level of enthusiasm as the hands go up.
What this demonstrates to us is that most people have some access – and more importantly that they value this access to local content, even if it’s only entertainment. They like the idea of having their own content. The problem in Tatamba, like the other FM radio stations in Isabel and like far too many media and technology centres around the world, is that they focus on technology and on access to content.
The response to the third question at the community meeting in Tatamba was telling:
3. How many people have been on the radio? How many of you have spoken or participated somehow, in any way, in your own local FM radio?
Compared to the first two questions the response was completely different. No one raised their hand – either because they have not in fact been on the radio, or because, in the case of the two or three people, a tiny percentage, who probably have been on the radio, they don’t feel confident or proud about their participation. Quite the opposite, they are hesitant and nervous.
COL’s experience tells us that local content – much like local solutions and indigenous knowledge – tends to be overshadowed by global solutions, especially those connected to the idea of the information society.
Content: Part I
The focus in Tatamba has never been on getting people involved, getting them to participate, getting them to create and share content. The project in Tatamba did what so many projects do: build a technology centre, set up a technology facility, procure technology, design technology systems, install technology, provide some basic technology – and give training to a handful of people at best.
What’s missing is the social side of media and technology: the content that matters to people; how they can create it; the value that they place on their local information and culture, and the enjoyment they get out of it.
What’s missing is training for identifying and creating content and doing so in easy-to-use formats that take advantage of what people are good at. It must build on what they already do: tell stories, take part in local customs, discuss ideas, teach their kids, get advice from the health centre, sing songs, play music and so on. Also missing are the changes in attitudes that come about when people have this type of participatory training. It generates feelings of confidence and empowerment. This is the foundation on which people can build to learn new ideas, new skills, and new knowledge.
It seems like an obvious concept but it is new and different. With the Australian and Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporations as their only examples of radio, the community never understood that their radio should be different, one that puts the community and its people first.
It is not just a smaller version of either the national broadcaster or commercial stations (which invariably seems to be called something like Power FM – as it is in Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands). It’s not a smaller version in technical terms; not in terms of programming; and certainly not in orientation. National broadcasters are generally concerned with the nation-state and so-called national identities; and they are strongly associated with authority. It is telling that the local name for All India Radio is Akash Vani, literally the “Voice from the sky”.
Somehow, the community was under the impression that the one or two people trained as technical operators would somehow make three or more hours of local radio content miraculously every day. They got the radio part – the technology part – but they didn’t get the participatory part. But without that there isn’t any real content, and without that there isn’t any really any meaningful engagement, learning or development.
What they didn’t understand when setting up in Tatamba is that community radio is not the voice from the sky but the voice from next door. It’s not surprising that it took ten years of Internet development and several paradigm shifts for user-generated content to become mainstreamed in the cyberspace of the Western world. In many ways, we’re now encouraging the same sort of process in places like Isabel with community media.
Community learning and non-formal ODL
Open and distance learning is best known in the context of formal education – correspondence, distance and eLearning that leads to university qualifications. But there is also a hugely important role for ODL in non-formal learning; learning about health, parenting, resolving conflict; about entrepreneurship, livelihoods and life skills.
COL’s Livelihoods and Health sector is focused on how to develop open and distance learning models, materials, capacities and partnerships to address precisely these areas. Non-formal open and distance learning is incredibly relevant for remote, rural and resource-poor communities because it is often the only way that learning can happen.
Local facilities, like the ones we see expanding so rapidly in many parts of the developing world, are vital parts of these new models and as we have said, access to technology is a prerequisite. It’s a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition for good things to happen.
We are fortunate that, even if they were often implemented in a misguided way, the majority of efforts to create technology access were well intentioned. This is shown by the revealing way in which these local facilities are usually called ‘community centres’, which implies that this is a common and a public facility – something with which the people in the locality can get involved.
How is COL realising this potential?
COL’s main areas of focus are to build the capacities of communities to create content and develop and deliver learning programmes on their own. For this it supports strategic “win-win” partnerships that strengthen the provision of “expert” knowledge and improve sustainability.
Also needed are innovation, new approaches and smart solutions.
1. Organisational development
One way that communities can help to set the agenda for their own learning is by participating in the organisation of community-based organisations and centres. Building capacity is about more than just technical or programmatic skills; it is also about organisational development and changing attitudes.
Last year, COL worked with a development communications group in Kenya to run a participatory process for a community media centre that runs Radio Mang'elete. The station had developed out a network of women’s groups that had identified the lack of appropriate and accessible information (including the use of local languages) as being the main barrier to improving local quality of life.
The process that COL sponsored brought together representatives from 66 women’s groups in the area to develop a new constitution for the organisation and elect a new governing council who subsequently set a strategy for the centre, including programme priorities for the station and policies concerning community participation and centre management. What is significant is that decision-making was done in highly participatory and representative manner. The community was engaged.
While the outcomes are important in and for Mang’elete, the organisational development process, with its activities and materials, is helping to inform and improve similar processes in neighbouring Tanzania and further away in India and Jamaica. For COL as an international organisation, this is equally if not more important. Much of our work involves the development of successful models that can be adapted to different parts of the Commonwealth.
2. Community Learning Programmes
One of COL’s challenges is harness to the collaborative power of education, development and media/ICT groups in creating content and what we call community learning programmes.
A good example is a programme called "Phukusi la Moyo," literally Bag of Life, developed in response to a need for education about maternal and child health in Malawi’s Mchinji district. The programme is a collaborative effort between a community-based maternal and child health project, the district hospital, and the Mudzi Wathu Community Radio station.
COL is facilitating the development process for the learning programme, which is centred on a weekly 30-minute radio show broadcast to the entire district. In March of this year, we supported a one-week design and content creation workshop, led by an educational media partner from the Malawian capital. The programme team brings together community educators, health experts and radio producers.
Over the course of the one-week workshop, the team completed the pilot, gathered most of the content for next two episodes, and did outlines for the next 15 shows. Next month, we will support a series of workshops for representatives of 200 local women’s groups. Three women from each group, 600 in total, will be trained in learner support and facilitation skills, becoming intermediaries in turn for some 6-8,000 women in the district to learn about maternal and child health.
The key elements of this approach are:
- The programme responds directly to a real, evident need.
- It takes a long-term approach: the design workshop focused on the design of the programme, not on an individual show or piece of content; it is envisioned that the programme will run for 3 years minimum.
- The “win-win” collaboration between local subject experts (in this case, the hospital and the community health project) and the media/ICT group (the community radio).
- Participation of the women: the programme made field recording and live interaction a priority.
- The off-air discussion groups that help move beyond messaging and pushing information towards engaged learning.
3. L3F (Lifelong Learning for Farmers)
A successful COL model that demonstrates the power of this approach is our Lifelong Learning for Farmers programme. It was developed in India but is now spreading across the Commonwealth.
The first step in development is to improve the livelihoods of the poorest people. COL is always seeking the most direct link possible between learning and livelihoods. The place to start is with the farmers in the rural areas. Lifelong Learning for Farmers is based on the premise we must find a way to give farmers easier access to information and knowledge that could help them improve their livelihoods.
In recent years many villages in India have been equipped with ICT kiosks as a result of government interventions or commercial initiatives. COL wondered whether these kiosks might help to carry useful information to the individual farmer.
The first principle we adopted was to mobilise the farmers, to get them to form an association and create a vision of development for their village. Our role is then to help them achieve that vision, which is their view of how their farming might yield better livelihoods. It might be acquiring better livestock, growing new crops, or simply improving the process of marketing their produce. That produces questions. They are often apparently simple questions.
The next step is to get the information providers to work together to answer these questions. In the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, for example, we helped to create a consortium of the local universities.
The ICT kiosks are then used to link the farmers to the consortium. We prefer commercial ICT kiosks because it makes the operation sustainable and creates another stakeholder, the kiosk operator, who has an interest in providing information of value that the farmers are prepared to pay for, such as very local weather forecasts.
The fourth key element is to involve the commercial banks. The banks felt that the L3 Farmers system gave them a better assurance of repayment of loans and so they became thoroughly involved, not just in making loans, but in getting other businesses involved to improve the marketing of the produce.
So, to give a concrete example, the farmers in a village near the town of Theni in Tamil Nadu formed an association and decided that improving dairy production was their best route to greater prosperity.
Their first key question to the information providers was ‘how do I tell a good milk cow from a poor milk cow?’ The specialists worked together and came up with a check list with diagrams which the women of the village, who have learned some web programming, made into an instructional sequence on the computer in the ICT kiosk.
The bank loaned money to the farmers to improve their dairy cows, some $US 200,000 so far, and also brought in a diary company from the nearby town, which agreed to buy a guaranteed quantity of milk and take it to market provided that the farmers agreed to meet certain quality standards.
The net result is a more prosperous and happy village; banks that are so pleased with the results that they are replicating the system in other villages without COL’s involvement, and ICT kiosk operators who are making a living too.
This is not conventional open and distance learning, but it is a successful way of improving the rural economy. It is technology assisted learning for development.
4. Participatory Content Creation
Returning briefly to Isabel in the Solomon Islands, the focus of COL’s involvement in the coming months and years will be on what our partners at Swinburne University and Queensland University of Technology have dubbed participatory content creation. Our long term goal is to help Isabel communities to establish a dynamic local learning network that harnesses the potential of the eight radio- and email-stations and the one distance-learning centre on the island.
Over the past two months we ran a development process for youth leaders and FM operators from Isabel in content-making approaches. The aim was less to impart technical skills than to get people to think differently about why and how content is created and, mostly importantly, who participates in making it, if not directly then in terms of deciding what formats are used, what sort of subjects will be covered, and to what purpose. In the first of two workshops, youth leaders identified subjects and themes most relevant to young people in their communities.
COL used the second workshop, led by Jerry Watkins of Swinburne University, in which operators actually made sample content on these themes, to evaluate the sort of training that communities themselves will need, training that will be delivered through on-site workshops in each community on the island in the coming year.
Our fundamental interest, one COL will be exploring in coming years with researchers at Swinburned and QUT along with local partners in Isabel and Solomon Islands, people first network and the Solomon Islands Development Trust is to see in what ways user-generated content contributes to the learning process.
Concluding thoughts
Let me now conclude by summarising all this.
In the face of some of the early failures of attempts to scale-up community-based facilities that provide public services like access to information and learning opportunities, there has been a tendency to retreat. That was because of poor community take-up or participation and the apparent lack of impact of the access facility in building knowledge and promoting development.
Critics of infrastructure and facility white elephants have often promoted content as the missing element but creating content has been an elusive goal. The difficulty of content creation has even led to a return to a simple focus on providing infrastructure in the policies of some agencies.
Our view is that technology and infrastructure – whether suitcase radios or computers – are only part of the solution. The focus of interventions does need to be on content, but not only on access to content. To assume that the global superstore of content will stimulate demand for communications in remote, rural and resource-poor areas of the world is a delusion. It won’t.
Content needs to be created, by local communities and with local communities. The key principles are engagement, participation and collaboration.
The success of many paid services – from bill payments through email and chatting with distant relatives to online shopping – essentially proves that there is local demand, though it is often not where people expect it. Communities and their circumstances, like people and their situations, are different.
On the side of learning and knowledge acquisition, COL and its partners’ focus is on encouraging, empowering and enabling communities to engage with technologies to create relevant content using the most appropriate media. In the process we all learn about information and learning needs and solutions.
On that basis, in places like Isabel, communities may then be in a position to develop learning programmes like the Bag of Life in Malawi or Lifelong Learning for Farmers in Tamil Nadu that really have an impact.
To end where we started, the huge proliferation of media, knowledge and learning centres in the developing world has one common element: all these centres aim to help communities. We have suggested how that aim can be achieved and we hope some of the experience we have shared from faraway places resonates with your experience at Alberta North.
Thank you.