Kinyua Martin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I am impressed by your conviction in regard to FOSS. I work for AMREF > for an e-learning project where we are upgrading the skills of nurses in > Kenya. We make use of open source applications for our helpdesk (gleam) > and word processing (open office). I attended the last conference in > Addis where Microsoft was a major sponsor. I believe they will still be > supporting the conference this year. This could have a bearing on their > choice of applications, that is, MS Word.
That is certainly something that can happen, but in the case of the eLearningAfrica 2007 conference, a representative of the organizers has written to me with an apology saying that "this was not intended", and that in fact they "accept all formats". I have therefore written my proposal and submitted it in OpenDocument text format (.odt) Since what I'm planning to talk about is IMO also of interest for discussion on this list, I'm appending a copy of my proposal text (in plain text format), below. Greetings, Norbert. Challenges for European-African economic eCooperation and eLearning in the field of computer software Abstract: In the Free Software and Open Source movements, eLearning for computer programming happens very effectively, but nevertheless because of economic and cultural challenges, this has not yet resulted in strong benefits for African economic development. I propose new software licenses and a strategy to make African-European economic eCooperation happen. eLearning can work very well for computer programming and software development. In fact much of GNU/Linux has been programmed by people who are today world-class programmers but who acquired most of their knowledge by a kind of eLearning via the internet. A main reason why eLearning works so well in this context is that instead of trying to transfer knowledge by means of a pre-arranged curriculum and lesson plan (in which students are not likely to be particularly interested), knowledge is transferred from teachers (experienced programmers) to students while the students work on programming tasks that they have chosen themselves. Nevertheless there are significant challenges that need to be overcome. I will describe what I feel are the two main challenges, calling these "the economic challenge" and "the cultural challenge". With "the economic challenge" I mean that the world economy, as it is currently organized, does not provide Africans who intend to remain in Africa (rather than moving to an industrial nation at the first opportunity) with appropriate rewards for becoming a competent software developer in the free software and open source movements: The software licenses which are used in these movements do not provide for making money flow from the companies which benefit from the programming work to the programmers who do the work, with the exception of those programmers who are hired by the companies as employees or consultants. The problem arises because most African national economies are so weak that it is very unlikely that among those businesses who would hire some of the authors of a free software program there would be one from an African programmer's own country. With "the cultural challenge" I mean the problem of communicating process knowledge which involves "knowing how to think" across cultural barriers. This is absolutely essential when the goal is to facilitate economic collaborations in which e.g. European businesses and African businesses are partnering with each other as equals, because in such partnerships there must be shared knowledge and a "meeting of the minds" concerning business processes. The main difficulties here are different from the problems of expressing such process knowledge in words and understanding such explanations, although that can also be quite challenging. Rather, the key questions are whether those people in industrial countries who have important process knowledge are truly interested in sharing their knowledge with developing countries, and whether that process knowledge can be adequately related to the cultural values of those who are intended to absorb this knowledge, so that the process knowledge which they are learning will not feel foreign but rather as something that can emotionally be their own. In collaboration with a Kenyan pastor I am working on finding a way to overcome this cultural challenge by constructing business processes so that they can not only compete successfully in the world economy, but so that in addition the business processes are fully in harmony with the teachings of Jesus and the overall message of the Bible. This creates a context in which it will not only be much easier to communicate and absorb process knowledge, but in which also European Christians will be happy to share their process knowledge and in which African Christians will be more open to accepting this process knowledge which resonates with their Christian culture. As a first result of my work in this area I will present a proposal for a pair of software licenses designed to faciliate a collaborative community similar to what is achived by "free software" / "open source" licenses (in such communities eLearning happens naturally), but which are in addition designed to implement the Biblical principle that workers should be rewarded for the work they do. -- Norbert Bollow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://Norbert.ch President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUG http://SIUG.ch _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@digitaldivide.net http://digitaldivide.net/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
