In ICT, change is the only constant thing, everything else is always the same but with little or no semblance at all from yesterdays, last month’s let alone yesteryear’s appearance and capabilities. If at all they appear the same, look closely for the differences are in the similarities and the constants of change have caused the changes in similarities to the extent that what appears the same is in truth different. In ICT, trends are differently the same!
After the presentation of the paper describing the basic design of the Internet and TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) in September 1973 by Kahn and Vinton Cerf, the speed of progress towards the Internet as we know it today appeared to accelerate at an alarming rate. In 1975 packet radio networks were tested in San Francisco. TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) was incorporated in distributions of Berkeley Unix by Bill Joy at the request of DARPA, creating great collaboration in the academic scientific research community. In 1977 Theorynet was created to link researchers via commercial networks like Telenet by Larry Landweber of the University of Wisconsin. In order to help manage the DARPA Internet program as well as act as a sounding board for DARPA’s plans and ideas, the Internet Configuration Board (ICCB) was established, obviously by DARPA in 1979. In the same period, Landweber met with university researchers, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and DARPA to explore the creation of a “computer science research network” which was named CSNET. 1979 was to be an eventful year with the creation of USENET, a “poor man’s ARPANET,” by Tom Truscott, Jim Ellis and Steve Belovin, to share information via e-mail and message boards between Duke University and the University of North Carolina, using dial-up telephone lines and the UUCP protocols in the Berkeley UNIX distributions. The following year, the US Department of Defense adopted the TCP/IP protocol suite as a standard. 1982 marked the tipping point with all hosts connected to ARPANET being required to convert to the new TCP/IP protocols by January 1, 1983 with the interconnected TCP/IP networks being generally known as the Internet. The progress did not end in 1983, but has been an on-going process with the turn of each year edging us closer to a better Internet accessible by all. It should be noted that from the beginning, the intended purpose of Internet was to facilitate research and not commerce or the generation of profits. In fact until 1991, commercial enterprise on Internet was strictly prohibited. Other notable events related to the Internet have taken place and continue to take place and these notes are rather inconclusive and cannot be exhaustive as change and progression are imminent.
As with all creations of man, there should be a case for and a case against this generally necessary evil. Was the end product what was envisioned and is it without consequence? It goes without say that Internet has brought with it more good than evil and its benefits far outweigh its demerits but what are the merits and demerits for truly, the Internet can create havoc, destruction and its misuse can be very fatal.
Advantages
Communication:
In this area, Internet has excelled beyond expectations though innovations are going on to make it faster, more reliable and cost effective. With the convergence of Internet and computers, the world has become “smaller” to the end that one can traverse across the globe in a matter of minutes if not seconds. With embedded technologies such as e-mail, people situated miles away, can communicate almost instantaneously. Major advances have been made in other embedded technologies such as instant messengers and more recently voice over internet protocol technologies with products such as G-talk and Skype making big waves on the scene. With the help of such services, it has become very easy to establish a kind of global friendship where you can share your thoughts, can explore other cultures of different ethnicity or even conduct business with someone who is geographically far away from you.
Information
Information is probably the biggest advantage Internet is offering. The Internet is a virtual treasure trove of information. Any kind of information on any topic under the sun is available on the Internet. The search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN are at your service on the Internet. You can almost find any type of data on almost any kind of subject that you are looking for. There is a huge amount of information available on the internet for just about every subject known to man, ranging from government law and services, trade fairs and conferences, market information, new ideas and technical support, the list is endless. Education and research are the most assisted spheres with major changes and future focus’s showing that emerging trends are that the long established forms have been greatly affected in favor of Internet and computer assisted research and learning. The medical domain has also been affected as almost every coming day, researches on medical issues become much easier to locate. Numerous web sites available on the net are offering loads of information for people to research diseases and talk to doctors online at sites such as, America’s Doctor. It comes as no surprise that during 1998 over 20 million people reported going online to retrieve health information.
Entertainment
Entertainment is another popular raison d'être why many people prefer to surf the Internet. In fact, media of internet has become quite successful in trapping multifaceted entertainment factor. Downloading movies, music, games, visiting chat rooms or just surfing the Web are some of the uses people have discovered. There are numerous games that may be downloaded from the Internet for free. The industry of online gaming has had dramatic and phenomenal attention by game lovers. Chat rooms are popular because users can meet new and interesting people. In fact, the Internet has been successfully used by people to find friends or lifelong partners. When people surf the Web, there are numerous things that can be found. Music, hobbies, news and more can be found and shared on the Internet.
Services
Many services are now provided on the internet such as online banking, job seeking, purchasing tickets for your favorite movies, guidance services on array of topics engulfing the every aspect of life, and hotel and or airline reservations. Often these services are not available off-line and can cost you more.
E-Commerce
Ecommerce is the concept used for any type of commercial maneuvering, or business deals that involves the transfer of information across the globe via Internet. It has become a phenomenon associated with any kind of shopping, almost anything. You name it and Ecommerce with its giant tentacles engulfing every single product and service will make it available at your door steps. It has got a real amazing and wide range of products from household needs, technology to entertainment.
Disadvantages
Theft of Personal information
If you use the Internet, you may be facing grave danger as your personal information such as name, address, credit card number etc. can be accessed by other culprits to make your problems worse.
Spamming:
Spamming refers to sending unwanted e-mails in bulk, which provide no purpose and needlessly obstruct the entire system. Such illegal activities can be very frustrating for you, and so instead of just ignoring it, you should make an effort to try and stop these activities so that using the Internet can become that much safer. An example could be that of pop-ups which appear when you visit some sites saying that you have won in a competition that you did not participate in.
Virus threat
Virus is nothing but a program which disrupts the normal functioning of your computer systems. Computers attached to internet are more prone to virus attacks and they can end up crashing your whole hard disk, causing you considerable headache.
Pornography:
This is perhaps the biggest threat related to your children’s healthy mental life. A very serious issue concerning the Internet. There are thousands of pornographic sites on the Internet that can be easily found and can be a detrimental factor to letting children use the Internet without adequate supervision and controls put in place. For the mature user, this more often than not has a negative impact on social behavior and the mental wellbeing of the user as addiction is commonly rife.
Addictive:
All things if done to excess can end up proving disadvantageous. The Internet is a very addictive tool as there is so much information, products and services on offer. Its underlying web technology, which means that it more or less does not have a beginning and a defined end, hence one can navigate from one website to another where they are redirected to yet another website until one spirals into a rat race. The convergence of chat rooms and instant messaging as well as voice over internet technologies, are other areas that can prove to be quite obsessive with some users spending as much as 16 hours a day in chat rooms. This then unfortunately has a negative impact on productivity.
“Our present century may not be quite as perilous for the human race as an ice age in the aftermath of a super-volcano eruption, but the next few decades will pose enormous hurdles that go beyond the climate crisis. The end of the fossil-fuel era, the fragility of the global food web, growing population density, and the spread of pandemics, as well as the emergence of radically transformative bio- and nano technologies—each of these threatens us with broad disruption or even devastation. And as good as our brains have become at planning ahead, we’re still biased toward looking for near-term, simple threats. Subtle, long-term risks, particularly those involving complex, global processes, remain devilishly hard for us to manage.
But here’s an optimistic scenario for you: if the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: by getting smarter. But this time, we don’t have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost our intelligence. We can do it ourselves.”
With enough minds, all tomorrows are visible!
“Wherefore seeing we also are encompassed with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” Hebrews 12 verse 1.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
The big web!
Beginning as a tool for a select group of engineers and scientists associated with academia or government and evolving rapidly into the World Wide Web open to anyone with a computer and a telephone connection, the Internet has transformed the way we conduct research, communicate, and make purchases ranging from groceries and airline tickets to the latest books and music or clothing and furniture. The Internet evolved over time into what it is today, but origins of the Internet began as a US government-funded network intended to provide a non-localized, redundant means of communication between military, scientific, educational and government entities, should a nuclear strike occur. Ideas for the Internet developed contemporaneously in many cases. How we got from there to here on the information highway, is the story of a host of individuals and breakthrough thinking.
What is your greatest fear? How can you conquer your fear?
One of the greatest challenges that man faces is clarity of thought in the face of adversity. The greatest fear of any African I know is death. We are dead in comparison to the progress of the progressive world yet when it comes to “death” (the separation of soul and body) we seem to struggle at all costs to “live”. It doesn’t matter if we can or cannot justify our existence or “living” we just fight and fight hard to be said to be “alive”. Maybe we should take solace in the fact that we are not the only ones afraid of “death” for to a less extent the “mighty” of the earth also fear death especially by “nuclear strike” to the extent that sleepless nights were spent in research culminating in something that we (the sleeping ones on account of the darkness of the continent), are also now benefitting from our dreaded cause. Oh, I got it all wrong, they still wanted to communicate even when faced with death from nuclear toxic exposure so their fear was not death but the lack of communication. Communicate – military, scientific, educational and government entities. The point is simple and the question is loud, what is your and yes our greatest fear and how do we intend to conquer that fear? Amazingly, the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the rest of Africa take out Egypt and South Africa does not equal a tenth of the GDP of many a country in the “developed world” and yet we are not afraid, not at all! Just to be precise, it is less, far less than that of “small” Belgium.
Forget the usual rubbish let me deep strait into the cherry pie or nhopi if you like. The Internet has revolutionized the computer and communications world like nothing before. The invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer set the stage for this unprecedented integration of capabilities. The Internet is at once a world-wide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for geographic location, time, color or creed. The Internet represents one of the most successful examples of the benefits of sustained investment and commitment to research and team effort in the development of information infrastructure. Beginning with the early research in packet switching, the US government, industry and academia have been partners in evolving and deploying this exciting new technology. Today, terms like "takashingavanhuwe@musiyamwa.co.zw" and "http://www.donorseekers.com" trip lightly off the tongue of the random person on the street. Due to its robustness and by no means a mistake, the Internet is also referred to as the World Wide Web hence the www you type into the address bar to move from site to site. The Internet in its current form, is a widespread information infrastructure, the initial prototype of what is often called the National (or Global or Galactic) Information Infrastructure with literally no beginning or end. Its history is complex and involves many aspects - technological, organizational, and community related. And its influence reaches not only to the technical fields of computer communications but throughout society as we move toward increasing use of online tools to accomplish electronic commerce, information acquisition, and community operations.
Sometimes I really hate history, the part where none of my own appear anywhere near the important sections. The part I really hate the most is when all the important people, our heroes, are all dead people and there is no living hero on account of no mention of the living ones when we honor our heroes. The story of the Internet is such a one that cannot be complete without technical jargon being thrown in and a special mention of the milestones and important names being made mention of. Some of the first instance of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in August 1962 (as the first head of a computer research program within the information processing office at ARPA - Advanced Research Projects Agency which changed its name to DARPA – Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1971) conceptualizing his "Galactic Network". These were preceded by the January 1960 paper titled Man-Computer Symbiosis where he pioneered the call for a global network, in essence he foresaw a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site. He convinced his successors at DARPA, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, of the importance of this networking concept. Leonard Kleinrock (also of MIT) was instrumental in the Internet formative years having published his first paper and book on the Packet Switching Theory in July 1961 and 1964 respectively. Kleinrock convinced Roberts of the theoretical feasibility of communications using packets rather than circuits, which was a major milestone towards computer networking. The other key milestone was to make the computers “talk together”. In 1965 Roberts with the assistance of Thomas Merrill, connected the TX-2 computer in Mass to the Q-32 in California using a low speed dial-up telephone line creating the first wide-area network ever built. The result of this experiment brought out the inadequacy of the circuit switched network and the realization that the time-shared computers could work well together, running programs and retrieving data as necessary on the remote machine. Kleinrock's conviction of the need for packet switching was confirmed to counter the problem of wasted capacity inside assorted disparate networks.
Roberts published a plan for the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) in 1967 having developed the computer concept for a year at ARPA. At the conference where he presented the paper, there was also a paper on a packet network concept from the UK by Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury. Scantlebury upraised Roberts of their research work at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Middlesex, England, as well as that of Paul Baran and others at the RAND Corporation. The RAND group wrote a paper on packet switching networks for secure voice in the military in 1964, principally authored by Paul Baran, for the Pentagon called On Distributed Communications Networks. It happened that the work at MIT (1961-1967), at RAND (1962-1965), and at NPL (1964-1967) had all proceeded in parallel without any of the researchers knowing about the other work thereby solidifying the cause for packet switching technology as the foundation on which the Internet would be built. Donald Davies, of the National Physical Laboratory coined the term packet switching to describe the lab’s experimental data transmission with the proposed line speed to be used in the ARPANET design being upgraded from 2.4 kbps to 50 kbps. Just to bring us up to speed, packet switching is a network communications method that groups all transmitted data, irrespective of content, type, or structure into suitably-sized blocks, called packets. The network over which packets are transmitted is a shared network which routes each packet independently from all others and allocates transmission resources as needed. The principal goals of packet switching are to optimize utilization of available link capacity and to increase the robustness of communication. Early networks used for the command and control of nuclear forces were message switched, not packet-switched, although current strategic military networks are, indeed, packet-switching and connectionless. Message switching was the precursor of packet switching, where messages were routed in their entirety, one hop at a time. Message switching systems are nowadays mostly implemented over packet-switched or circuit-switched data networks. Baran's research had approached packet switching from studies of decentralization to avoid combat damage compromising the entire network.
In August 1968, after Roberts and the DARPA affiliated researchers had refined the overall structure and specifications for the ARPANET, an RFQ (request for quote) was floated by DARPA for the development of one of the key components, the packet switches called Interface Message Processors (IMP's), and was subsequently won in December 1968 by a group headed by Frank Heart at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN). As the BBN team worked on the IMP's with Bob Kahn playing a major role in the overall ARPANET architectural design, the network topology and economics were designed and optimized by Roberts working with Howard Frank and his team at Network Analysis Corporation, and the network measurement system was prepared at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) by Kleinrock's team. Due to Kleinrock's early development of packet switching theory and his focus on analysis, design and measurement, his Network Measurement Center at UCLA was selected to be the first node on the ARPANET in 1969 when BBN installed the first IMP at UCLA and the first host computer was connected. The first ARPANET link was established between the UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) and the Stanford Research Institute on the 29th of October 1969. By December 5, 1969, a 4-node network had been created by adding the University of Utah and the University of California, Santa Barbara. By 1981, the number of hosts had grown to 213, with a new host being added approximately every twenty days. ARPANET became the technical core of what would become the Internet, and a primary tool in developing the technologies used. ARPANET development was centered around the Request for Comments (RFC) process, still used today for proposing as well as distributing Internet Protocols and Systems. Doug Engelbart's project on "Augmentation of Human Intellect" (which included NLS (oN-Line System), an early hypertext system) at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) provided a second node. SRI supported the Network Information Center, led by Elizabeth (Jake) Feinler and including functions such as maintaining tables of host name to address mapping as well as a directory of the RFC's. One month later, when SRI was connected to the ARPANET, the first host-to-host message was sent from Kleinrock's laboratory to SRI. Two more nodes were added at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) and University of Utah. These last two nodes incorporated application visualization projects, with Glen Culler and Burton Fried at UCSB investigating methods for display of mathematical functions using storage displays to deal with the problem of refresh over the net, and Robert Taylor and Ivan Sutherland at Utah investigating methods of 3-D representations over the net. Thus, by the end of 1969, four host computers were connected together into the initial ARPANET, and the budding Internet was off the ground. Even at this early stage, it should be noted that the networking research incorporated both work on the underlying network and work on how to utilize the network. This tradition continues to this day.
Computers were added quickly to the ARPANET during the following years, and work proceeded on completing a functionally complete Host-to-Host protocol and other network software. In December 1970 the Network Working Group (NWG) working under S. Crocker finished the initial ARPANET Host-to-Host protocol, called the Network Control Protocol (NCP). As the ARPANET sites completed implementing NCP during the period 1971-1972, the network users finally could begin to develop applications. In October 1972 Kahn organized a large, very successful demonstration of the ARPANET at the International Computer Communication Conference (ICCC) by linking 40 machines and a Terminal Interface Processor. This was the first public demonstration of this new network technology to the public. It was also in 1972 that the initial "hot" application, electronic mail, was introduced. In March 1973 Ray Tomlinson at BBN wrote the basic email message send and read software, motivated by the need of the ARPANET developers for an easy coordination mechanism. In sending the first message to himself to test it out, he uses the @ sign—the first time it appears in an e-mail address. In July, Roberts expanded its utility by writing the first email utility program to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages. In September 1973, Kahn and Vinton Cerf, an electrical engineer and head of the International Network Working Group, present a paper at the University of Sussex in England describing the basic design of the Internet and an open-architecture network, later known as TCP (transmission control protocol), that will allow networks to communicate with each other. The paper is published as "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection" in IEEE Transactions on Communications. From there email took off as the largest network application for over a decade. This was a harbinger of the kind of activity we see on the World Wide Web today, namely, the enormous growth of all kinds of "people-to-people" traffic which we tend to take for granted.
“Our present century may not be quite as perilous for the human race as an ice age in the aftermath of a super-volcano eruption, but the next few decades will pose enormous hurdles that go beyond the climate crisis. The end of the fossil-fuel era, the fragility of the global food web, growing population density, and the spread of pandemics, as well as the emergence of radically transformative bio- and nano technologies—each of these threatens us with broad disruption or even devastation. And as good as our brains have become at planning ahead, we’re still biased toward looking for near-term, simple threats. Subtle, long-term risks, particularly those involving complex, global processes, remain devilishly hard for us to manage.
But here’s an optimistic scenario for you: if the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: by getting smarter. But this time, we don’t have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost our intelligence. We can do it ourselves.”
With enough minds, all tomorrows are visible!
“Wherefore seeing we also are encompassed with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” Hebrews 12 verse 1.
What is your greatest fear? How can you conquer your fear?
One of the greatest challenges that man faces is clarity of thought in the face of adversity. The greatest fear of any African I know is death. We are dead in comparison to the progress of the progressive world yet when it comes to “death” (the separation of soul and body) we seem to struggle at all costs to “live”. It doesn’t matter if we can or cannot justify our existence or “living” we just fight and fight hard to be said to be “alive”. Maybe we should take solace in the fact that we are not the only ones afraid of “death” for to a less extent the “mighty” of the earth also fear death especially by “nuclear strike” to the extent that sleepless nights were spent in research culminating in something that we (the sleeping ones on account of the darkness of the continent), are also now benefitting from our dreaded cause. Oh, I got it all wrong, they still wanted to communicate even when faced with death from nuclear toxic exposure so their fear was not death but the lack of communication. Communicate – military, scientific, educational and government entities. The point is simple and the question is loud, what is your and yes our greatest fear and how do we intend to conquer that fear? Amazingly, the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the rest of Africa take out Egypt and South Africa does not equal a tenth of the GDP of many a country in the “developed world” and yet we are not afraid, not at all! Just to be precise, it is less, far less than that of “small” Belgium.
Forget the usual rubbish let me deep strait into the cherry pie or nhopi if you like. The Internet has revolutionized the computer and communications world like nothing before. The invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer set the stage for this unprecedented integration of capabilities. The Internet is at once a world-wide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for geographic location, time, color or creed. The Internet represents one of the most successful examples of the benefits of sustained investment and commitment to research and team effort in the development of information infrastructure. Beginning with the early research in packet switching, the US government, industry and academia have been partners in evolving and deploying this exciting new technology. Today, terms like "takashingavanhuwe@musiyamwa.co.zw" and "http://www.donorseekers.com" trip lightly off the tongue of the random person on the street. Due to its robustness and by no means a mistake, the Internet is also referred to as the World Wide Web hence the www you type into the address bar to move from site to site. The Internet in its current form, is a widespread information infrastructure, the initial prototype of what is often called the National (or Global or Galactic) Information Infrastructure with literally no beginning or end. Its history is complex and involves many aspects - technological, organizational, and community related. And its influence reaches not only to the technical fields of computer communications but throughout society as we move toward increasing use of online tools to accomplish electronic commerce, information acquisition, and community operations.
Sometimes I really hate history, the part where none of my own appear anywhere near the important sections. The part I really hate the most is when all the important people, our heroes, are all dead people and there is no living hero on account of no mention of the living ones when we honor our heroes. The story of the Internet is such a one that cannot be complete without technical jargon being thrown in and a special mention of the milestones and important names being made mention of. Some of the first instance of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in August 1962 (as the first head of a computer research program within the information processing office at ARPA - Advanced Research Projects Agency which changed its name to DARPA – Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1971) conceptualizing his "Galactic Network". These were preceded by the January 1960 paper titled Man-Computer Symbiosis where he pioneered the call for a global network, in essence he foresaw a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site. He convinced his successors at DARPA, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, of the importance of this networking concept. Leonard Kleinrock (also of MIT) was instrumental in the Internet formative years having published his first paper and book on the Packet Switching Theory in July 1961 and 1964 respectively. Kleinrock convinced Roberts of the theoretical feasibility of communications using packets rather than circuits, which was a major milestone towards computer networking. The other key milestone was to make the computers “talk together”. In 1965 Roberts with the assistance of Thomas Merrill, connected the TX-2 computer in Mass to the Q-32 in California using a low speed dial-up telephone line creating the first wide-area network ever built. The result of this experiment brought out the inadequacy of the circuit switched network and the realization that the time-shared computers could work well together, running programs and retrieving data as necessary on the remote machine. Kleinrock's conviction of the need for packet switching was confirmed to counter the problem of wasted capacity inside assorted disparate networks.
Roberts published a plan for the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) in 1967 having developed the computer concept for a year at ARPA. At the conference where he presented the paper, there was also a paper on a packet network concept from the UK by Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury. Scantlebury upraised Roberts of their research work at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Middlesex, England, as well as that of Paul Baran and others at the RAND Corporation. The RAND group wrote a paper on packet switching networks for secure voice in the military in 1964, principally authored by Paul Baran, for the Pentagon called On Distributed Communications Networks. It happened that the work at MIT (1961-1967), at RAND (1962-1965), and at NPL (1964-1967) had all proceeded in parallel without any of the researchers knowing about the other work thereby solidifying the cause for packet switching technology as the foundation on which the Internet would be built. Donald Davies, of the National Physical Laboratory coined the term packet switching to describe the lab’s experimental data transmission with the proposed line speed to be used in the ARPANET design being upgraded from 2.4 kbps to 50 kbps. Just to bring us up to speed, packet switching is a network communications method that groups all transmitted data, irrespective of content, type, or structure into suitably-sized blocks, called packets. The network over which packets are transmitted is a shared network which routes each packet independently from all others and allocates transmission resources as needed. The principal goals of packet switching are to optimize utilization of available link capacity and to increase the robustness of communication. Early networks used for the command and control of nuclear forces were message switched, not packet-switched, although current strategic military networks are, indeed, packet-switching and connectionless. Message switching was the precursor of packet switching, where messages were routed in their entirety, one hop at a time. Message switching systems are nowadays mostly implemented over packet-switched or circuit-switched data networks. Baran's research had approached packet switching from studies of decentralization to avoid combat damage compromising the entire network.
In August 1968, after Roberts and the DARPA affiliated researchers had refined the overall structure and specifications for the ARPANET, an RFQ (request for quote) was floated by DARPA for the development of one of the key components, the packet switches called Interface Message Processors (IMP's), and was subsequently won in December 1968 by a group headed by Frank Heart at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN). As the BBN team worked on the IMP's with Bob Kahn playing a major role in the overall ARPANET architectural design, the network topology and economics were designed and optimized by Roberts working with Howard Frank and his team at Network Analysis Corporation, and the network measurement system was prepared at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) by Kleinrock's team. Due to Kleinrock's early development of packet switching theory and his focus on analysis, design and measurement, his Network Measurement Center at UCLA was selected to be the first node on the ARPANET in 1969 when BBN installed the first IMP at UCLA and the first host computer was connected. The first ARPANET link was established between the UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) and the Stanford Research Institute on the 29th of October 1969. By December 5, 1969, a 4-node network had been created by adding the University of Utah and the University of California, Santa Barbara. By 1981, the number of hosts had grown to 213, with a new host being added approximately every twenty days. ARPANET became the technical core of what would become the Internet, and a primary tool in developing the technologies used. ARPANET development was centered around the Request for Comments (RFC) process, still used today for proposing as well as distributing Internet Protocols and Systems. Doug Engelbart's project on "Augmentation of Human Intellect" (which included NLS (oN-Line System), an early hypertext system) at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) provided a second node. SRI supported the Network Information Center, led by Elizabeth (Jake) Feinler and including functions such as maintaining tables of host name to address mapping as well as a directory of the RFC's. One month later, when SRI was connected to the ARPANET, the first host-to-host message was sent from Kleinrock's laboratory to SRI. Two more nodes were added at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) and University of Utah. These last two nodes incorporated application visualization projects, with Glen Culler and Burton Fried at UCSB investigating methods for display of mathematical functions using storage displays to deal with the problem of refresh over the net, and Robert Taylor and Ivan Sutherland at Utah investigating methods of 3-D representations over the net. Thus, by the end of 1969, four host computers were connected together into the initial ARPANET, and the budding Internet was off the ground. Even at this early stage, it should be noted that the networking research incorporated both work on the underlying network and work on how to utilize the network. This tradition continues to this day.
Computers were added quickly to the ARPANET during the following years, and work proceeded on completing a functionally complete Host-to-Host protocol and other network software. In December 1970 the Network Working Group (NWG) working under S. Crocker finished the initial ARPANET Host-to-Host protocol, called the Network Control Protocol (NCP). As the ARPANET sites completed implementing NCP during the period 1971-1972, the network users finally could begin to develop applications. In October 1972 Kahn organized a large, very successful demonstration of the ARPANET at the International Computer Communication Conference (ICCC) by linking 40 machines and a Terminal Interface Processor. This was the first public demonstration of this new network technology to the public. It was also in 1972 that the initial "hot" application, electronic mail, was introduced. In March 1973 Ray Tomlinson at BBN wrote the basic email message send and read software, motivated by the need of the ARPANET developers for an easy coordination mechanism. In sending the first message to himself to test it out, he uses the @ sign—the first time it appears in an e-mail address. In July, Roberts expanded its utility by writing the first email utility program to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages. In September 1973, Kahn and Vinton Cerf, an electrical engineer and head of the International Network Working Group, present a paper at the University of Sussex in England describing the basic design of the Internet and an open-architecture network, later known as TCP (transmission control protocol), that will allow networks to communicate with each other. The paper is published as "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection" in IEEE Transactions on Communications. From there email took off as the largest network application for over a decade. This was a harbinger of the kind of activity we see on the World Wide Web today, namely, the enormous growth of all kinds of "people-to-people" traffic which we tend to take for granted.
“Our present century may not be quite as perilous for the human race as an ice age in the aftermath of a super-volcano eruption, but the next few decades will pose enormous hurdles that go beyond the climate crisis. The end of the fossil-fuel era, the fragility of the global food web, growing population density, and the spread of pandemics, as well as the emergence of radically transformative bio- and nano technologies—each of these threatens us with broad disruption or even devastation. And as good as our brains have become at planning ahead, we’re still biased toward looking for near-term, simple threats. Subtle, long-term risks, particularly those involving complex, global processes, remain devilishly hard for us to manage.
But here’s an optimistic scenario for you: if the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: by getting smarter. But this time, we don’t have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost our intelligence. We can do it ourselves.”
With enough minds, all tomorrows are visible!
“Wherefore seeing we also are encompassed with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” Hebrews 12 verse 1.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
E-education – creating the atmosphere!
“One of the many challenges facing developing countries today is preparing their societies and governments for globalization and the information and communication revolution. Policy-makers, business executives, NGO activists, academics, and ordinary citizens are increasingly concerned with the need to make their societies competitive in the emergent information economy.”
Is there life after the examinations? Where does education begin and end? Is there relevance in our type of education? Have we done a good job of maintaining our inherited education system or do we need to look within for change? Is it time for change or the time has long expired? Will the change be sustainable? Will the revamped system of education still give us an edge over our peers, progression or retrogression, which way will we go? Is there something wrong with our education system in the first place such that it warrants change? Is the state of education what it was or is it yet what it shall be?
It truly is a shame when the elite and well to do of a country shun their local examinations’ bodies for foreign ones. Is it fair that the disparity between the “elite” schools and the “other” schools continues to widen with the “elite” ones incorporating ICTs in “their” curricular? Unfortunately you can’t blame anyone just because nobody will listen, so if you can afford it, better to ship your children to foreign lands or “elite” schools for further education rather than be part of a “sub standard process”. Don’t you think if the process of shunning our poor systems for foreign ones continues, one day we will have to send our children to nursery schools abroad because we will have let our systems run down to the ground. Slowly but surely we all watched the drama unfold before us, but how long will we continue with the culture of taking our children to these “good” schools, running them down and moving them to better ones which we will run down yet again? We allowed our universities to deteriorate, then our high schools, then our primary schools and now the rot is with our examination bodies, the final blow to an ailing body. Let’s all agree that our system of education, yes culminating in our examinations, is not in the best shape and state. If we are to talk about creating the atmosphere for E-education we cannot simply ignore the shambles that is our education system. It’s high time that someone spoke about it!
Where education is concerned, two countries seem to dominate the world, namely England or is it Great Britain and the United States of America. These two countries have modeled education to the rest of the world but what exactly is the difference between what they offer? I guess if you want to analyze a process carefully, the best basis point would be to look at the result of that process. A simple summarized layman’s observation would be that the British system (at least the one we inherited) creates an examination centered student with little application knowledge as compared to the American system which seems to develop the student’s application skills on learnt material. Simply put the former system creates head knowledge while the later creates applied knowledge. The focus on the British system is on testing for examination purposes whilst the American system of education creates a student who is ready for life after the examination, which really is where school begins (the life examination if you so wish). How much of what does a chap who has just attained 15 points at “A” Level know that can be applied to Industry and Commerce? Whether Cambridge or Zimsec or whatever other African syndicate, all they are after attaining a good pass mark, is an open book waiting to be written into by the hands of experience found in Industry and Commerce, or they go further to our Universities full of Professors who have never been employed in Industry and Commerce hence all they have is more and more theoretical knowledge.
How does all this relate to ICTs you are now asking? Well if you don’t see it yet then that’s exactly what I am talking about, learning, unlearning and relearning. We have to create an atmosphere for E-education, but even that has to have a base. Is the current foundation of education strong enough to support another elevation of education or yet another storey to make the structure more habitable? In fostering the right atmosphere for E-education to take root, we need to focus on Educational content, the environment, infrastructure, examinations as well as the link between academia and industry & commerce. The mix cannot be any better defined.
Educational Content
What is it that our students learn when they are at school, college or at home? Where does learning really begin and end? Can we confine learning to a particular space and time? Does distance play a role in the learning process? It is a foregone conclusion that our curriculum needs to be revisited. How can generations and generations learn of the same material as if time is stagnant? Knowledge is doubling every year so how can we afford to teach and learn the same thing over and over again. When people began learning, if ever there is such a thing, an argument as to the shape of the earth is said to have factored in, that argument is now a closed case everyone knows the world is round even the atheist. That’s the progression of knowledge. I wonder what else has changed. What our students learn at school will also determine their homework, think about working at home. Imagine an auditor from one of the mainline auditing firms, the ones that you meet by the “combies” with laptops looking sleek and all, what impediments they would have in executing their work if the only time they interacted with a computer was at the office? So guess what, the laptop looks as good on them as they look on it doing their work at home. Lest we lose focus, our educational content has to change so that it becomes relevant to real life scenarios. I truly wonder if anyone will be in the know of long division in a couple of years from now, what with the introduction of the calculator version of mathematics coming on board, maybe there will be a grade 7 calculator version of maths in the not so distant future. In the African context we seem to do a lot of finishing, like “finishing school” (kupedza chikoro) hence for us learning begins and ends somewhere, that culture has to change. There is a cost to buying the future. Our educational content has to be harmonized with real life such that the learning process does not end at 1 or 3 o’clock when the school bell rings and the student is released from “class”. How can you test the whole country using the same basis when their environments are totally different? One has to travel 20 kilometers to school another has to go to school hungry on bare feet, while another gets to school and sleeps on account of having had an overly rich breakfast. The process lacks fairness if one’s life is to be judged on account of examinations written from totally different backgrounds. At another school 20 students share one textbook at another there is one book for half a child and so forth. Pay attention. Which school teaches real life skills like Motor Mechanics, let alone the art of washing cars? Is it that O’Level or A’Level students cannot grasp the concepts involved? We tend to teach sports and a bit of music like marimba and the like. Not bad at all if you have a strong arts ethos but not good if musicians are the poorest people around and sports people are not adequately rewarded at professional level. Why create a river to feed the dead sea?
Environment
Once upon a time, back in the days of the learned Professor’s student activism tenure at the U of Z, the SU was a heaven on earth. Students would go and dine in deed till they tired and dropped. Unfortunately gone are the days, I can’t wish for the virgin days of my mother can I? ICTs do not function in a vacuum. I wonder how one would react if they found a computer at the center of first street, fully functioning and surfing away unconnected to any power source with no one there. That would be a Zombie affair wouldn’t it, a ghost issue in sooth. We have called for the scrapping of duties and taxes on ICTs, they are not a luxury and never will be a luxury. Unless we begin to appreciate that we have to foster a right spirit and environment for education and ICTs, then we will always wonder why all these things sanctions included continue to hit us (my line of reasoning being that we have inflicted more sanctions on ourselves than anybody else can ever do to us). Environments are created, maintained or destroyed so we rightly or so, choose what we want. Unfortunately this subject cannot be discussed without going into deep waters, but as you know I am not a deep water person let me continue in my shallowness.
Infrastructure
“O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth…” read O foolish Africans who hath bewitched you that ye should not perceive the way of the future? One wise president so it fit to donate computers to schools in the hope that his example would be followed by all and sundry as a pointer to the importance of ICT, but hey no one took heed, private sector, public sector neither industry nor commerce. What lack of sight or is it foresight. The first whistle has been blown signaling the beginning of the greatest ball game of all times and no one moves! What a shame. We need to begin to make ICTs common or at least available in all schools. One voice spoke on ICT infrastructure and e-education in Africa as such “a country’s educational technology infrastructure sits on top of the national telecommunications and information infrastructure. Before any ICT-based programme is launched, policymakers and planners must carefully consider the following:
• In the first place, are appropriate rooms or buildings available to house the technology? In
countries where there are many old school buildings, extensive retrofitting to ensure proper
electrical wiring, heating/cooling and ventilation, and safety and security would be needed.
• Another basic requirement is the availability of electricity and telephony. In developing countries large areas are still without a reliable supply of electricity and the nearest telephones are miles away. Experience in some countries in Africa point to wireless technologies (such as VSAT or Very Small Aperture Terminal) as possible levers for leapfrogging. Although this is currently an extremely costly approach, other developing countries with very poor telecommunications infrastructure should study this option.
• Policymakers should also look at the ubiquity of different types of ICT in the country in general, and in the educational system (at all levels) in particular. For instance, a basic requirement for computer-based or online learning is access to computers in schools, communities, and households, as well as affordable Internet service.
In general, ICT use in education should follow use in society, not lead it. Education programs that use cutting-edge technologies rarely achieve long term success:
It is cheaper, and easier, to introduce a form of technology into education, and keep it working,
where education is riding on the back of large-scale developments by governments or the private
sector. Television works for education when it follows rather than precedes television for
entertainment; computers in schools can be maintained once commercial and private use has
expanded to the point where there is an established service industry.” True food for thought hey!
Examinations
There is no point whatsoever of learning with the various mixes or models using ICTs and then sit for an examination that does not encompass ICTs. The content as well as the method of examination needs to give if E-education is to gain momentum. If only the education practitioners would sit down (with a little consultation from ICT gurus of course) to try and marry education with ICTs forming the bedrock of a new education system that’s E-education, progress would be achieved. Maybe the fear or challenge lies in learning, unlearning and relearning. You have certain players who will tell you that “we have been playing this game using these rules for so long, how can you, a child born yesterday, tell us to rethink, re-invent, and evolve”? The only history they identify with is that of yesterday not of tomorrow! Maybe tomorrow is way too complex for them forgive their blinkers. We can’t overemphasize the need to rethink our examination structures, but again examinations culminate from the content learnt in the progress of education hence, once the content is up to scratch examinations should follow suit, that is if there is less intervention from destructive hands which have created the current shambles now obtaining within our own system.
Link Academia and Industry
I was literary rushing to get here. Over the years maybe due to “text book” Economics and other large human factors, academia and Industry have continued to drift apart. First to suffer was the apprenticeship programme as well as the attachment programme which would see either students being taken on board within an organization to train on the job, in a specialized area or being attached in a gap year to an organization in order to gain some experience or a feel of how it would be like to function in a real life setup. Industry has almost always been a pain in all the wrong places with demands of years of experience which more often than not are unlikely to have been achieved by a recent graduate fresh from the four square. Ain’t it a bit foolish to demand 3 or 4 years experience and say you are not discriminating against a recent graduate? Whatever the answer is, it boggles the mind. Industry needs to woe (kupfimba) the education sector in more ways than one such that the education sector produces the best graduate and incumbent for jobs within Industry and Commerce. The outcry for brain drain is dramatized, how can you expect to continue having the best workers when you are not churning the best graduates in their numbers? Fortunately or unfortunately industry and commerce doesn’t seem to be creating more employment for the various graduates who are already out there, so it seems. If there is a brain drain, then doesn’t it also follow that the caliber of the graduates is unsuitable for what the industry wants or is “work experience” the impediment? To what extent is outflow matching inflow in the job pool? Who determines which vocation is on demand? What is Industry doing to make sure that relevant skills are retained? What and how much contribution is being made by Industry and Commerce towards right skilling (the education of the relevant people to meet available jobs)? If Industry and Commerce truly understands the importance of ICTs why is there so little meaningful contribution towards Academia? It seems as though Industry and Commerce has just gone numb. You cry Economy, but where do all the computers that you don’t use anymore end? What use would they be say to a school in Dotito, Maranda, or somewhere at the backside of the country? Your garbage would make someone’s day hey! Change someone’s life forever. What happened to your brick cellphone wouldn’t that be adequate for someone’s learning process? Why do you think that one day you can give someone a candy factory when you have never parted with a single mint? Let’s go back to basics, teaspoon giving back to the ocean and see what happens, tremendous ripple effect.
“The Emerging Trends
The trend in the market would show that on-line education is fast catching up. As per a report by UNESCO, there are approximately 80 million students enrolled in higher education programmes world-wide in 1999, of which 6,150,000 are on-line. Australia alone enrolled 690,000 students in higher education courses. In the US, which is coming up as a big base for on-line education, 710,000 students were enrolled in distance learning last year. By 2002 this number is estimated to touch 2.2 million. According to IDC, a whopping 90 percent of the on-line learning market is still untapped. The University of Southern Queensland in Australia claims that 75 percent of its 20,000 students are studying through distance education that involves some form of electronic delivery. Further, according to the Campus Computing Project, 30 percent of US colleges and universities plan to incorporate the Internet into their distance learning initiatives.”
What has since happened to those figures, heaven only knows?
“Wherefore seeing we also are encompassed with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” Hebrews 12 verse 1.
Is there life after the examinations? Where does education begin and end? Is there relevance in our type of education? Have we done a good job of maintaining our inherited education system or do we need to look within for change? Is it time for change or the time has long expired? Will the change be sustainable? Will the revamped system of education still give us an edge over our peers, progression or retrogression, which way will we go? Is there something wrong with our education system in the first place such that it warrants change? Is the state of education what it was or is it yet what it shall be?
It truly is a shame when the elite and well to do of a country shun their local examinations’ bodies for foreign ones. Is it fair that the disparity between the “elite” schools and the “other” schools continues to widen with the “elite” ones incorporating ICTs in “their” curricular? Unfortunately you can’t blame anyone just because nobody will listen, so if you can afford it, better to ship your children to foreign lands or “elite” schools for further education rather than be part of a “sub standard process”. Don’t you think if the process of shunning our poor systems for foreign ones continues, one day we will have to send our children to nursery schools abroad because we will have let our systems run down to the ground. Slowly but surely we all watched the drama unfold before us, but how long will we continue with the culture of taking our children to these “good” schools, running them down and moving them to better ones which we will run down yet again? We allowed our universities to deteriorate, then our high schools, then our primary schools and now the rot is with our examination bodies, the final blow to an ailing body. Let’s all agree that our system of education, yes culminating in our examinations, is not in the best shape and state. If we are to talk about creating the atmosphere for E-education we cannot simply ignore the shambles that is our education system. It’s high time that someone spoke about it!
Where education is concerned, two countries seem to dominate the world, namely England or is it Great Britain and the United States of America. These two countries have modeled education to the rest of the world but what exactly is the difference between what they offer? I guess if you want to analyze a process carefully, the best basis point would be to look at the result of that process. A simple summarized layman’s observation would be that the British system (at least the one we inherited) creates an examination centered student with little application knowledge as compared to the American system which seems to develop the student’s application skills on learnt material. Simply put the former system creates head knowledge while the later creates applied knowledge. The focus on the British system is on testing for examination purposes whilst the American system of education creates a student who is ready for life after the examination, which really is where school begins (the life examination if you so wish). How much of what does a chap who has just attained 15 points at “A” Level know that can be applied to Industry and Commerce? Whether Cambridge or Zimsec or whatever other African syndicate, all they are after attaining a good pass mark, is an open book waiting to be written into by the hands of experience found in Industry and Commerce, or they go further to our Universities full of Professors who have never been employed in Industry and Commerce hence all they have is more and more theoretical knowledge.
How does all this relate to ICTs you are now asking? Well if you don’t see it yet then that’s exactly what I am talking about, learning, unlearning and relearning. We have to create an atmosphere for E-education, but even that has to have a base. Is the current foundation of education strong enough to support another elevation of education or yet another storey to make the structure more habitable? In fostering the right atmosphere for E-education to take root, we need to focus on Educational content, the environment, infrastructure, examinations as well as the link between academia and industry & commerce. The mix cannot be any better defined.
Educational Content
What is it that our students learn when they are at school, college or at home? Where does learning really begin and end? Can we confine learning to a particular space and time? Does distance play a role in the learning process? It is a foregone conclusion that our curriculum needs to be revisited. How can generations and generations learn of the same material as if time is stagnant? Knowledge is doubling every year so how can we afford to teach and learn the same thing over and over again. When people began learning, if ever there is such a thing, an argument as to the shape of the earth is said to have factored in, that argument is now a closed case everyone knows the world is round even the atheist. That’s the progression of knowledge. I wonder what else has changed. What our students learn at school will also determine their homework, think about working at home. Imagine an auditor from one of the mainline auditing firms, the ones that you meet by the “combies” with laptops looking sleek and all, what impediments they would have in executing their work if the only time they interacted with a computer was at the office? So guess what, the laptop looks as good on them as they look on it doing their work at home. Lest we lose focus, our educational content has to change so that it becomes relevant to real life scenarios. I truly wonder if anyone will be in the know of long division in a couple of years from now, what with the introduction of the calculator version of mathematics coming on board, maybe there will be a grade 7 calculator version of maths in the not so distant future. In the African context we seem to do a lot of finishing, like “finishing school” (kupedza chikoro) hence for us learning begins and ends somewhere, that culture has to change. There is a cost to buying the future. Our educational content has to be harmonized with real life such that the learning process does not end at 1 or 3 o’clock when the school bell rings and the student is released from “class”. How can you test the whole country using the same basis when their environments are totally different? One has to travel 20 kilometers to school another has to go to school hungry on bare feet, while another gets to school and sleeps on account of having had an overly rich breakfast. The process lacks fairness if one’s life is to be judged on account of examinations written from totally different backgrounds. At another school 20 students share one textbook at another there is one book for half a child and so forth. Pay attention. Which school teaches real life skills like Motor Mechanics, let alone the art of washing cars? Is it that O’Level or A’Level students cannot grasp the concepts involved? We tend to teach sports and a bit of music like marimba and the like. Not bad at all if you have a strong arts ethos but not good if musicians are the poorest people around and sports people are not adequately rewarded at professional level. Why create a river to feed the dead sea?
Environment
Once upon a time, back in the days of the learned Professor’s student activism tenure at the U of Z, the SU was a heaven on earth. Students would go and dine in deed till they tired and dropped. Unfortunately gone are the days, I can’t wish for the virgin days of my mother can I? ICTs do not function in a vacuum. I wonder how one would react if they found a computer at the center of first street, fully functioning and surfing away unconnected to any power source with no one there. That would be a Zombie affair wouldn’t it, a ghost issue in sooth. We have called for the scrapping of duties and taxes on ICTs, they are not a luxury and never will be a luxury. Unless we begin to appreciate that we have to foster a right spirit and environment for education and ICTs, then we will always wonder why all these things sanctions included continue to hit us (my line of reasoning being that we have inflicted more sanctions on ourselves than anybody else can ever do to us). Environments are created, maintained or destroyed so we rightly or so, choose what we want. Unfortunately this subject cannot be discussed without going into deep waters, but as you know I am not a deep water person let me continue in my shallowness.
Infrastructure
“O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth…” read O foolish Africans who hath bewitched you that ye should not perceive the way of the future? One wise president so it fit to donate computers to schools in the hope that his example would be followed by all and sundry as a pointer to the importance of ICT, but hey no one took heed, private sector, public sector neither industry nor commerce. What lack of sight or is it foresight. The first whistle has been blown signaling the beginning of the greatest ball game of all times and no one moves! What a shame. We need to begin to make ICTs common or at least available in all schools. One voice spoke on ICT infrastructure and e-education in Africa as such “a country’s educational technology infrastructure sits on top of the national telecommunications and information infrastructure. Before any ICT-based programme is launched, policymakers and planners must carefully consider the following:
• In the first place, are appropriate rooms or buildings available to house the technology? In
countries where there are many old school buildings, extensive retrofitting to ensure proper
electrical wiring, heating/cooling and ventilation, and safety and security would be needed.
• Another basic requirement is the availability of electricity and telephony. In developing countries large areas are still without a reliable supply of electricity and the nearest telephones are miles away. Experience in some countries in Africa point to wireless technologies (such as VSAT or Very Small Aperture Terminal) as possible levers for leapfrogging. Although this is currently an extremely costly approach, other developing countries with very poor telecommunications infrastructure should study this option.
• Policymakers should also look at the ubiquity of different types of ICT in the country in general, and in the educational system (at all levels) in particular. For instance, a basic requirement for computer-based or online learning is access to computers in schools, communities, and households, as well as affordable Internet service.
In general, ICT use in education should follow use in society, not lead it. Education programs that use cutting-edge technologies rarely achieve long term success:
It is cheaper, and easier, to introduce a form of technology into education, and keep it working,
where education is riding on the back of large-scale developments by governments or the private
sector. Television works for education when it follows rather than precedes television for
entertainment; computers in schools can be maintained once commercial and private use has
expanded to the point where there is an established service industry.” True food for thought hey!
Examinations
There is no point whatsoever of learning with the various mixes or models using ICTs and then sit for an examination that does not encompass ICTs. The content as well as the method of examination needs to give if E-education is to gain momentum. If only the education practitioners would sit down (with a little consultation from ICT gurus of course) to try and marry education with ICTs forming the bedrock of a new education system that’s E-education, progress would be achieved. Maybe the fear or challenge lies in learning, unlearning and relearning. You have certain players who will tell you that “we have been playing this game using these rules for so long, how can you, a child born yesterday, tell us to rethink, re-invent, and evolve”? The only history they identify with is that of yesterday not of tomorrow! Maybe tomorrow is way too complex for them forgive their blinkers. We can’t overemphasize the need to rethink our examination structures, but again examinations culminate from the content learnt in the progress of education hence, once the content is up to scratch examinations should follow suit, that is if there is less intervention from destructive hands which have created the current shambles now obtaining within our own system.
Link Academia and Industry
I was literary rushing to get here. Over the years maybe due to “text book” Economics and other large human factors, academia and Industry have continued to drift apart. First to suffer was the apprenticeship programme as well as the attachment programme which would see either students being taken on board within an organization to train on the job, in a specialized area or being attached in a gap year to an organization in order to gain some experience or a feel of how it would be like to function in a real life setup. Industry has almost always been a pain in all the wrong places with demands of years of experience which more often than not are unlikely to have been achieved by a recent graduate fresh from the four square. Ain’t it a bit foolish to demand 3 or 4 years experience and say you are not discriminating against a recent graduate? Whatever the answer is, it boggles the mind. Industry needs to woe (kupfimba) the education sector in more ways than one such that the education sector produces the best graduate and incumbent for jobs within Industry and Commerce. The outcry for brain drain is dramatized, how can you expect to continue having the best workers when you are not churning the best graduates in their numbers? Fortunately or unfortunately industry and commerce doesn’t seem to be creating more employment for the various graduates who are already out there, so it seems. If there is a brain drain, then doesn’t it also follow that the caliber of the graduates is unsuitable for what the industry wants or is “work experience” the impediment? To what extent is outflow matching inflow in the job pool? Who determines which vocation is on demand? What is Industry doing to make sure that relevant skills are retained? What and how much contribution is being made by Industry and Commerce towards right skilling (the education of the relevant people to meet available jobs)? If Industry and Commerce truly understands the importance of ICTs why is there so little meaningful contribution towards Academia? It seems as though Industry and Commerce has just gone numb. You cry Economy, but where do all the computers that you don’t use anymore end? What use would they be say to a school in Dotito, Maranda, or somewhere at the backside of the country? Your garbage would make someone’s day hey! Change someone’s life forever. What happened to your brick cellphone wouldn’t that be adequate for someone’s learning process? Why do you think that one day you can give someone a candy factory when you have never parted with a single mint? Let’s go back to basics, teaspoon giving back to the ocean and see what happens, tremendous ripple effect.
“The Emerging Trends
The trend in the market would show that on-line education is fast catching up. As per a report by UNESCO, there are approximately 80 million students enrolled in higher education programmes world-wide in 1999, of which 6,150,000 are on-line. Australia alone enrolled 690,000 students in higher education courses. In the US, which is coming up as a big base for on-line education, 710,000 students were enrolled in distance learning last year. By 2002 this number is estimated to touch 2.2 million. According to IDC, a whopping 90 percent of the on-line learning market is still untapped. The University of Southern Queensland in Australia claims that 75 percent of its 20,000 students are studying through distance education that involves some form of electronic delivery. Further, according to the Campus Computing Project, 30 percent of US colleges and universities plan to incorporate the Internet into their distance learning initiatives.”
What has since happened to those figures, heaven only knows?
“Wherefore seeing we also are encompassed with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” Hebrews 12 verse 1.
Friday, June 12, 2009
E-education – embrace the future!
“Globalization and technological change—processes that have accelerated in tandem over the past fifteen years—have created a new global economy “powered by technology, fueled by information and driven by knowledge.”1 The emergence of this new global economy has serious implications for the nature and purpose of educational institutions. As the half-life of information continues to shrink and access to information continues to grow exponentially, schools cannot remain mere venues for the transmission of a prescribed set of information from teacher to student over a fixed period of time. Rather, schools must promote “learning to learn,” : i.e., the acquisition of knowledge and skills that make possible continuous learning over the lifetime.2 “The illiterate of the 21st century,” according to futurist Alvin Toffler, “will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.””
Why are we where we are? Are we going somewhere, if so where are we going? Do we have a place in the world and a share in the world order, if so what is our place and our share? Who are we and what makes us who we are? Do we have an agenda, if so what is our agenda? Do we have permanent interests or permanent friends? What defines our ethos - interests or friends? Are we really as educated as we think we are? Is our education relevant and to whom, ourselves, our neighbors or the Diaspora? What value do we place on ourselves, do we have a price, what is that price and is it high enough and truly what we are worth? Why do others innovate whilst we cry, how long will we keep on doing the same thing and expecting different results? In our quest for education have we truly become any wiser than when we first began?
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have become one of the cornerstones of modern society. Truly “developed” and “progressive” as well as “developing” countries, now understand the importance of ICTs and are mastering the basic skills and concepts as part of the core of education. There is dire need for organizations – both public and private, as well as practitioners and other players in the education sector to increasingly embrace ICT in aiding educational improvement and reform. Concerns over educational relevance and quality coexist with the imperative of expanding educational opportunities to those made most vulnerable by globalization - developing countries in general; low-income groups, girls and women, and low-skilled workers in particular. Global changes also put pressure on all groups to constantly acquire and apply new skills. The International Labour Organization defines the requirements for education and training in the new global economy simply as “Basic Education for All”, “Core Work Skills for All” and “Lifelong Learning for All”.
It is quite unfortunate in deed that though Africa is the cradle of ancient civilization, it now seats safely in the back seat of all things educational. Maybe the current state lies in the definition of Africa’s education in its self “Ancient” and “Civilization” or “Education” implying old and redundant. How else can you explain the fact that our universities are still, in this day and age, churning out some graduates who have no appreciation whatsoever of a computer. Well, maybe the simple reason why “our” so called educated people still find themselves employed overseas, howbeit in mostly, menial jobs, is because to the undiscerning eye a degree is still a degree or maybe the employers seem to figure it out that if you at least have a first degree you can be converted to “something” on the job – as you go by. The greatest misfortune lies not in the fact that the west, north and whoever, after our great insistence and great fighting in deed, allowed us grudgingly, to learn and get intoxicated with their highly addictive education and systems of learning, but in the reality that our brains and thinking ended after our final examinations. How else can you explain the fact that all we have changed in this country is our the name of our examination body and not the content of education material and the way of disseminating such content? Forget our African His story which is as a matter of no mistake whose story as in who is His in History? Ours collectively or a result of someone’s mischief? Which African His has written our story? Maybe “my English” is too shallow but how else can you explain the fact that our people “finish”, “complete” “their” education. Does it ever get “completed”, “finished” in light of the fact that after the examination is sat for and passed or failed, there is the application of the various concepts learnt in real life scenarios or rather there has to be the application of concepts learnt which process should not end till death? One has to learn, unlearn and relearn until going back to face the creator or kuruma churu (bite the molehill – denoting getting buried period) for the atheist. If you truly can’t re-invent the wheel, does it also imply that you can’t just add a spoke to the wheel or maybe just polish the wheel? I truly believe that our problem lies in the spoon feeding type of education that we received mainly in the late 70s to the 80s through to the 90s. We seem to have landlocked ways of thinking as much as most countries in our continent are landlocked with pockets or islands of beneficial cognitive exercise here and there.
Ask the teachers or let’s give them a better name, educational practitioners what they do when they are on “strike”, “go slow” or “drive by” which ever name you give it? I don’t have the answer don’t mind me. Don’t think I hate this type of practitioner, the opposite is so true, I love, respect and honor them with a passion, I am mostly a by-product of one too many a practitioner having gone through “my primary and secondary education” like most of us out there, with one particular practitioner who I met at Trust Academy in 2008 having left an indelible mark in my illustrious life as a gallant son of ICT. Thanks to mukoma Steven Maduveko my eyes will be forever open, having gone under the knife in your diploma “surgery” or class if you will. Don’t you make me apologetic now because I feel like getting to some serious issues here and now! If the world is revolving, going through a metamorphosis of sorts, what then is the place of Education in that new paradigm? Isn’t it obvious that Education will always be the bedrock of all things futuristic, but in what form, shape or size will that Education be forged? Enter ICT with its bag full of learning innovations termed E-learning, Blended Learning, Open or Distance Learning and Lerner-Centered Environment. Unfortunately, even if I want to or not, I sometimes have to find myself dwelling on definitions which can be a pain especially where pen and paper limit you.
E-Learning – electronic learning or e-learning is a general term referring to computer aided learning. It is commonly associated with Advanced Learning Technology (ALT), which deals with both the technologies and associated methodologies in learning using networked and/or multi-media technologies. It is also known as on-line learning with Distance Education being the basis of its development. It overcomes timing, attendance and travel difficulties and can be “on demand” (as and when the student is ready or is willing).
Blended Learning – is a combination of multiple approaches to learning and as such is usually used to define a combination of different delivery methods to deliver a particular course. These methods may include a mixture of self-paced learning and online classrooms.
Open or Distance Learning – my fellow kinsmen would be akin to a type of education with many seniors having gone through education in the unsightly comfort or discomfort of a jail cell and also having been introduced to study packs through the Rapid Results College. This type of education (for the comfort of the younger generations) in its current form, is where students work on their own and communicate with faculty and other students via e-mail, electronic forums, videoconferencing, chat rooms, instant messaging and other forms of computer-based communication thereby forming the difference between the ancient and the “current”, forming a ‘new normal’ Open or Distance Learning with the old being mainly paper and environment dependent. Most Distance learning programs include a computer based training (CBT) system as well as communication tools to produce a virtual classroom. Due to the fact that the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) are accessible from virtually all computer platforms, they serve as the foundation for many distance learning systems.
Learner-centered Environment – the National Research Council of the United States of America defines learner centered environments as those that “pay careful attention to the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and beliefs that learners bring with them to the classroom”. The impetus for learner-centeredness derives from a theory of learning called constructivism, which views learning as a process in which individuals “construct” meaning based on prior knowledge and experience. Experience enables individuals to build mental models or schemas, which in turn provide meaning and organization to subsequent experience. Thus knowledge is not “out there”, independent of the learner and which the learner passively receives; rather, knowledge is created through an active process in which the learner transforms information, constructs hypothesis, and makes decisions using his/her mental models. A form of constructivism called social constructivism also emphasizes the role of the teacher, parents, peers and other community members in helping learners to master concepts that they would not be able to understand on their own. For social constructivists, learning must be active, contextual and social. It is best done in a group setting with the teacher as facilitator or guide.
Now that we find ourselves on the same page let’s talk education proper. If education has taken a new paradigm shift what of the teachers sorry practitioners? We are truly living in interesting times ladies and gentlemen. I wonder how your 4 year old kid will relate to a learning experience in which they go to nursery school and the tutor turns on a 42” LCD TV (that’s 42 inch Liquid Crystal Display television set for those who have just joined us - dummy) and begins to take the class through a color co-ordination tutorial by watching Sesame Street via Satellite Television of course. He (let me be a male chauvinistic pig for once) will quickly identify with it having watched another offering at home on pay per view (lest I do some marketing for DSTV) and the learning process will be more than mind blowing. How about your form 3 Ms Pretty watching Animals of The Serengeti on the Geography Channel at school yes at school illustrating Wild Life patterns in a Geography or Biology class? The experience will be more lively having toured the “Whatever Game Park” during the school holidays, imagine the relevance. How about a good looking education practitioner, wearing something commonly associated with the trendiest “current” fashion delivering a “fresh” lecture using Microsoft Powerpoint beamed onto some wall by a state of the art projector, wouldn’t you feel proud to be associated with such a process? But hey, the reality is too “far from the madding crowd” we still have skimmers who now know what topic comes after what topic even in their sleep, they don’t even use skim books anymore they know all of it by head, heart and soul. The unfortunate part of it all is that with the death of a great teacher dies his work. They are sadly remembered for “educating the nation” while they remain at the same place until death do them part from the confines of the four square. How can they teach and not learn? Learn a new way of teaching that one day chalk will break never to be unbroken again, broken forever. The world is progressing and quickly towards a new way, a new pen and paper, a new chalk and blackboard.
A good friend of mine told me the other day how they were studying for their ACCA exams with a person who is physically situated in South Korea over an internet website called www.passacca.net in a chat room. Isn’t that amazing, a person across the world converging with a person in Zimbabwe at the same time transferring information in real time (chiriporipochko). With the amount of exposure that we have acquired as Africans, what is it that stops us from developing content on our weather, climate, wildlife, economics, maybe politics, you name it, for use in classrooms across the world for a fee of course? Why is it that when it comes to television programs on Africa’s deadliest snakes you still see a white face behind the camera from across the big pond telling you how poisonous your snakes are yet literary millions of Africans have succumbed to slow and painful deaths under the venom of the African black mamba’s kith and kin. I thought that was education, relevant education not the Pythagoras Theorem which some of us have been subjected to with still little or no understanding having been achieved though we “finished our O’Levels and our A’Levels” having recorded “good” grades in Mathematics which has more than half its content being irrelevant in real life scenarios after a pass has been attained. At least I met a Puffadder once on my way from school one day and surely I ran as fast as my legs could carry me though it was meters and meters away from me and going in totally the opposite direction from me, well I had heard that it releases poison from the rear section hence my “run”. So justice done, teach about snakes at school period, African snakes for that matter and I won’t write about Education. The greatest fraud of all is that at Teacher-Training Institutions, the would be practitioners’ learning curricular does not introduce them to ICTs hence leading downstream to teachers who are well trained and so good in class, so good in deed that they can’t even think about evolving their skill into something that is computer based let alone ICT based with its broad form. Unfortunately such infrastructure doesn’t even exist, where it exists, the lack of electricity has reared its ugly head, hence Africa bleeds, swears, mourns, curses, spits, kicks and dies slowly with a few donors burying its last remains.
I wonder what else we are going to export after tobacco has been totally banned like what they are trying to do to our asbestos. I truly wonder what next after gold has totally become an undesired metal with the current trend it has since taken where it is no longer the basis of Economic or national Monetary Value with both “developed” and “developing” nations randomly printing money un-backed by gold reserves. Will diamonds save us, how will we wash away the blood since wherever they are they are known to cause the spillage of blood hence the term blood diamonds? Maybe coal will do the trick but won’t someone think of a renewable type of coal maybe white coal for a change? We’ve got to find uranium and find it fast and cause a war between the west and the east or the north and the north maybe that’s a better idea. Shamefully we find ourselves in the Biblical Gideon position where none but ourselves can save us from our future. We need to innovate. Shift our thinking, our systems. We unfortunately choose not to see further than the door of the classroom that our strength lies not only within the four square but also outside the foursquare. We have spoken of brain drain but forgotten to speak about potential drain. The potential drain of our Education practitioners, which if structured into centers and pockets of real new world education can become an Export Processing Zone churning Education material for the region, the continent and the world as well as graduates with a different skill to be exported to add value to the rest of the world with relevant skills with those retained being value adders to our local context. The road lies winding ahead of us people of the “dark continent”, whether it is time to turn on the light or not lies in no one other than ourselves, lets strengthen our feeble arms and put our hands to the plough.
“ICTs greatly facilitate the acquisition and absorption of knowledge, offering developing countries unprecedented opportunities to enhance educational systems, improve policy formulation and execution, and widen the range of opportunities for business and the poor. One
of the greatest hardships endured by the poor, and by many others who live in the poorest countries, is their sense of isolation. The new communications technologies promise to reduce
that sense of isolation, and to open access to knowledge in ways unimaginable not long ago.”
“Wherefore seeing we also are encompassed with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” Hebrews 12 verse 1.
Why are we where we are? Are we going somewhere, if so where are we going? Do we have a place in the world and a share in the world order, if so what is our place and our share? Who are we and what makes us who we are? Do we have an agenda, if so what is our agenda? Do we have permanent interests or permanent friends? What defines our ethos - interests or friends? Are we really as educated as we think we are? Is our education relevant and to whom, ourselves, our neighbors or the Diaspora? What value do we place on ourselves, do we have a price, what is that price and is it high enough and truly what we are worth? Why do others innovate whilst we cry, how long will we keep on doing the same thing and expecting different results? In our quest for education have we truly become any wiser than when we first began?
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have become one of the cornerstones of modern society. Truly “developed” and “progressive” as well as “developing” countries, now understand the importance of ICTs and are mastering the basic skills and concepts as part of the core of education. There is dire need for organizations – both public and private, as well as practitioners and other players in the education sector to increasingly embrace ICT in aiding educational improvement and reform. Concerns over educational relevance and quality coexist with the imperative of expanding educational opportunities to those made most vulnerable by globalization - developing countries in general; low-income groups, girls and women, and low-skilled workers in particular. Global changes also put pressure on all groups to constantly acquire and apply new skills. The International Labour Organization defines the requirements for education and training in the new global economy simply as “Basic Education for All”, “Core Work Skills for All” and “Lifelong Learning for All”.
It is quite unfortunate in deed that though Africa is the cradle of ancient civilization, it now seats safely in the back seat of all things educational. Maybe the current state lies in the definition of Africa’s education in its self “Ancient” and “Civilization” or “Education” implying old and redundant. How else can you explain the fact that our universities are still, in this day and age, churning out some graduates who have no appreciation whatsoever of a computer. Well, maybe the simple reason why “our” so called educated people still find themselves employed overseas, howbeit in mostly, menial jobs, is because to the undiscerning eye a degree is still a degree or maybe the employers seem to figure it out that if you at least have a first degree you can be converted to “something” on the job – as you go by. The greatest misfortune lies not in the fact that the west, north and whoever, after our great insistence and great fighting in deed, allowed us grudgingly, to learn and get intoxicated with their highly addictive education and systems of learning, but in the reality that our brains and thinking ended after our final examinations. How else can you explain the fact that all we have changed in this country is our the name of our examination body and not the content of education material and the way of disseminating such content? Forget our African His story which is as a matter of no mistake whose story as in who is His in History? Ours collectively or a result of someone’s mischief? Which African His has written our story? Maybe “my English” is too shallow but how else can you explain the fact that our people “finish”, “complete” “their” education. Does it ever get “completed”, “finished” in light of the fact that after the examination is sat for and passed or failed, there is the application of the various concepts learnt in real life scenarios or rather there has to be the application of concepts learnt which process should not end till death? One has to learn, unlearn and relearn until going back to face the creator or kuruma churu (bite the molehill – denoting getting buried period) for the atheist. If you truly can’t re-invent the wheel, does it also imply that you can’t just add a spoke to the wheel or maybe just polish the wheel? I truly believe that our problem lies in the spoon feeding type of education that we received mainly in the late 70s to the 80s through to the 90s. We seem to have landlocked ways of thinking as much as most countries in our continent are landlocked with pockets or islands of beneficial cognitive exercise here and there.
Ask the teachers or let’s give them a better name, educational practitioners what they do when they are on “strike”, “go slow” or “drive by” which ever name you give it? I don’t have the answer don’t mind me. Don’t think I hate this type of practitioner, the opposite is so true, I love, respect and honor them with a passion, I am mostly a by-product of one too many a practitioner having gone through “my primary and secondary education” like most of us out there, with one particular practitioner who I met at Trust Academy in 2008 having left an indelible mark in my illustrious life as a gallant son of ICT. Thanks to mukoma Steven Maduveko my eyes will be forever open, having gone under the knife in your diploma “surgery” or class if you will. Don’t you make me apologetic now because I feel like getting to some serious issues here and now! If the world is revolving, going through a metamorphosis of sorts, what then is the place of Education in that new paradigm? Isn’t it obvious that Education will always be the bedrock of all things futuristic, but in what form, shape or size will that Education be forged? Enter ICT with its bag full of learning innovations termed E-learning, Blended Learning, Open or Distance Learning and Lerner-Centered Environment. Unfortunately, even if I want to or not, I sometimes have to find myself dwelling on definitions which can be a pain especially where pen and paper limit you.
E-Learning – electronic learning or e-learning is a general term referring to computer aided learning. It is commonly associated with Advanced Learning Technology (ALT), which deals with both the technologies and associated methodologies in learning using networked and/or multi-media technologies. It is also known as on-line learning with Distance Education being the basis of its development. It overcomes timing, attendance and travel difficulties and can be “on demand” (as and when the student is ready or is willing).
Blended Learning – is a combination of multiple approaches to learning and as such is usually used to define a combination of different delivery methods to deliver a particular course. These methods may include a mixture of self-paced learning and online classrooms.
Open or Distance Learning – my fellow kinsmen would be akin to a type of education with many seniors having gone through education in the unsightly comfort or discomfort of a jail cell and also having been introduced to study packs through the Rapid Results College. This type of education (for the comfort of the younger generations) in its current form, is where students work on their own and communicate with faculty and other students via e-mail, electronic forums, videoconferencing, chat rooms, instant messaging and other forms of computer-based communication thereby forming the difference between the ancient and the “current”, forming a ‘new normal’ Open or Distance Learning with the old being mainly paper and environment dependent. Most Distance learning programs include a computer based training (CBT) system as well as communication tools to produce a virtual classroom. Due to the fact that the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) are accessible from virtually all computer platforms, they serve as the foundation for many distance learning systems.
Learner-centered Environment – the National Research Council of the United States of America defines learner centered environments as those that “pay careful attention to the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and beliefs that learners bring with them to the classroom”. The impetus for learner-centeredness derives from a theory of learning called constructivism, which views learning as a process in which individuals “construct” meaning based on prior knowledge and experience. Experience enables individuals to build mental models or schemas, which in turn provide meaning and organization to subsequent experience. Thus knowledge is not “out there”, independent of the learner and which the learner passively receives; rather, knowledge is created through an active process in which the learner transforms information, constructs hypothesis, and makes decisions using his/her mental models. A form of constructivism called social constructivism also emphasizes the role of the teacher, parents, peers and other community members in helping learners to master concepts that they would not be able to understand on their own. For social constructivists, learning must be active, contextual and social. It is best done in a group setting with the teacher as facilitator or guide.
Now that we find ourselves on the same page let’s talk education proper. If education has taken a new paradigm shift what of the teachers sorry practitioners? We are truly living in interesting times ladies and gentlemen. I wonder how your 4 year old kid will relate to a learning experience in which they go to nursery school and the tutor turns on a 42” LCD TV (that’s 42 inch Liquid Crystal Display television set for those who have just joined us - dummy) and begins to take the class through a color co-ordination tutorial by watching Sesame Street via Satellite Television of course. He (let me be a male chauvinistic pig for once) will quickly identify with it having watched another offering at home on pay per view (lest I do some marketing for DSTV) and the learning process will be more than mind blowing. How about your form 3 Ms Pretty watching Animals of The Serengeti on the Geography Channel at school yes at school illustrating Wild Life patterns in a Geography or Biology class? The experience will be more lively having toured the “Whatever Game Park” during the school holidays, imagine the relevance. How about a good looking education practitioner, wearing something commonly associated with the trendiest “current” fashion delivering a “fresh” lecture using Microsoft Powerpoint beamed onto some wall by a state of the art projector, wouldn’t you feel proud to be associated with such a process? But hey, the reality is too “far from the madding crowd” we still have skimmers who now know what topic comes after what topic even in their sleep, they don’t even use skim books anymore they know all of it by head, heart and soul. The unfortunate part of it all is that with the death of a great teacher dies his work. They are sadly remembered for “educating the nation” while they remain at the same place until death do them part from the confines of the four square. How can they teach and not learn? Learn a new way of teaching that one day chalk will break never to be unbroken again, broken forever. The world is progressing and quickly towards a new way, a new pen and paper, a new chalk and blackboard.
A good friend of mine told me the other day how they were studying for their ACCA exams with a person who is physically situated in South Korea over an internet website called www.passacca.net in a chat room. Isn’t that amazing, a person across the world converging with a person in Zimbabwe at the same time transferring information in real time (chiriporipochko). With the amount of exposure that we have acquired as Africans, what is it that stops us from developing content on our weather, climate, wildlife, economics, maybe politics, you name it, for use in classrooms across the world for a fee of course? Why is it that when it comes to television programs on Africa’s deadliest snakes you still see a white face behind the camera from across the big pond telling you how poisonous your snakes are yet literary millions of Africans have succumbed to slow and painful deaths under the venom of the African black mamba’s kith and kin. I thought that was education, relevant education not the Pythagoras Theorem which some of us have been subjected to with still little or no understanding having been achieved though we “finished our O’Levels and our A’Levels” having recorded “good” grades in Mathematics which has more than half its content being irrelevant in real life scenarios after a pass has been attained. At least I met a Puffadder once on my way from school one day and surely I ran as fast as my legs could carry me though it was meters and meters away from me and going in totally the opposite direction from me, well I had heard that it releases poison from the rear section hence my “run”. So justice done, teach about snakes at school period, African snakes for that matter and I won’t write about Education. The greatest fraud of all is that at Teacher-Training Institutions, the would be practitioners’ learning curricular does not introduce them to ICTs hence leading downstream to teachers who are well trained and so good in class, so good in deed that they can’t even think about evolving their skill into something that is computer based let alone ICT based with its broad form. Unfortunately such infrastructure doesn’t even exist, where it exists, the lack of electricity has reared its ugly head, hence Africa bleeds, swears, mourns, curses, spits, kicks and dies slowly with a few donors burying its last remains.
I wonder what else we are going to export after tobacco has been totally banned like what they are trying to do to our asbestos. I truly wonder what next after gold has totally become an undesired metal with the current trend it has since taken where it is no longer the basis of Economic or national Monetary Value with both “developed” and “developing” nations randomly printing money un-backed by gold reserves. Will diamonds save us, how will we wash away the blood since wherever they are they are known to cause the spillage of blood hence the term blood diamonds? Maybe coal will do the trick but won’t someone think of a renewable type of coal maybe white coal for a change? We’ve got to find uranium and find it fast and cause a war between the west and the east or the north and the north maybe that’s a better idea. Shamefully we find ourselves in the Biblical Gideon position where none but ourselves can save us from our future. We need to innovate. Shift our thinking, our systems. We unfortunately choose not to see further than the door of the classroom that our strength lies not only within the four square but also outside the foursquare. We have spoken of brain drain but forgotten to speak about potential drain. The potential drain of our Education practitioners, which if structured into centers and pockets of real new world education can become an Export Processing Zone churning Education material for the region, the continent and the world as well as graduates with a different skill to be exported to add value to the rest of the world with relevant skills with those retained being value adders to our local context. The road lies winding ahead of us people of the “dark continent”, whether it is time to turn on the light or not lies in no one other than ourselves, lets strengthen our feeble arms and put our hands to the plough.
“ICTs greatly facilitate the acquisition and absorption of knowledge, offering developing countries unprecedented opportunities to enhance educational systems, improve policy formulation and execution, and widen the range of opportunities for business and the poor. One
of the greatest hardships endured by the poor, and by many others who live in the poorest countries, is their sense of isolation. The new communications technologies promise to reduce
that sense of isolation, and to open access to knowledge in ways unimaginable not long ago.”
“Wherefore seeing we also are encompassed with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” Hebrews 12 verse 1.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Networked Readiness – how long will the stars keep shining?
“In today’s information-driven economy, no country can hope to continuously outperform its competitors. ‘Staying on top’ is a never-ending job, which requires quick adaptation, innovativeness and the ability to identify and adopt best practices ‘on the fly’. As competition becomes truly global, advanced economies realize that their present and future strategies need to focus on their only potential source of longer-term comparative advantage, namely knowledge. The acquisition, building and sharing of knowledge across national economies has hence become the focus of some of the most ambitious and forward-looking strategies among OECD countries over the last decade. In such strategies, knowledge is the core of an organic set of mechanisms, which eventually allows societies to grow harmoniously and innovatively. For such a model to function, however, a certain number of prerequisites must be present, which include the institutions, the infrastructure, and the incentives without which knowledge cannot be built, transmitted or shared. Education systems, information networks, innovation policies are some examples of such prerequisites. By measuring their density and performance, one can obtain a rather telling picture of how ready a particular national economy is to face the challenges of the emerging global information and knowledge economy, often referred to as ‘e-readiness’. ”
In the Biblical story of Jacob and Esau found in Genesis, is the mind boggling story of the fates of two twin brothers. One was endowed with the vision to be greater than the other from birth, and the other had no respect whatsoever for greatness and ambition such that he sold his birthright for a plate of soup and beans. Some scholars have gone to analyze the story and come up with the explanation that Esau can only equate or be the progenitor of the African race with little or no ambition at all of ever achieving anything of significance to the rest of the world. How else can you explain our lack of progress in as far as the world is concerned? All you need to look at to see what we embody and espouse is our visions or lack of them. One country not too far away from where I stand has a vision “Our vision is that …will be an industrialized state by 2030, with a significant improvement in the essential quality of life of all … ‘citizens’.” Well, I don’t know how you think and what you think but this vision is as broad as it is wide what is significant improvement, how do you quantify it once you have attained it and what is essential quality of life? When did industrialization begin and how old it will be in the year 2030, don’t forget that we are now in yet another age the Information Age. If we were not busy getting industrialized when others were, what were we up to. Maybe it pays to join them if we can’t beat them but what use is it joining them when the meeting has been adjourned and all resolutions have been passed and the Amen of the meeting has been said.
What should Africa do that it already has not done to join the stars in shining and to deem their light, is the ‘dark continent’ providing the shining stars with the most conducive environment to beam their light. More often than not the solution lies in the detail. Let’s just take a quick look at the contrasting ICT Policy issues according to one source between the “Developing World” and the “Developed World”-:
The Developing World
• Alleviating Poverty
• Health
• Education
• The Cost of Telephone Calls
• The Banking System
• Physical Logistics
The Developed World
• Electronic Commerce
• Universal Service
• Electronic Gambling
• Technology Neutral Taxation
• Privacy of the Individual
I wonder if we are truly poor and how poor we are that at every turn we have to put our poverty first before our wide noses? I am more than convinced that poverty is a state of the mind and as such we are as poor as our lack of thinking, I mean really engaging our minds to solve problems systematically once and for future generations. Is it really possible for health to be for all and for education to be for all? I thought even our Lord Jesus Christ said it clearly “do not give the bread of the children to the dogs”. Meaning in every situation there are the children and there are dogs. It is common sense that when you have two or more options to trade you in turn have competition and costs are lowered as each player tries to cut costs and find innovative ways of lowering down prices, hence it is an insult in deed to have a situation where a monopoly exists and there is talk of costs being atrocious. The Banking System is the major culprit in our lack of progress. All the efforts are a simple photocopy of Western, European and ‘other’ systems of banking which unfortunately do not necessarily apply to the African continent. You would have thought that the truly indigenous banks would offer unique services to the local people but alas their requirements for trade especially financing are just as stringent as the exotic banks. The sticky point that exposes their lack of uniqueness is the issue of collateral. How do you contextualize collateral to suite the African market where people believed until recently in owning houses in the rural areas as opposed to urban areas also attributably due to colonialism? Apart from fixed assets (chief among which are houses) it is a common fact that it is easier in the African context, to own your dream car than your dream house, so can a house be the only form of collateral acceptable to access a loan? It boggles the mind. Don’t also forget that the banks are also heavily incapacitated due to a myriad of problems beyond their control including failed government policies as well as the generally harsh African economic conditions. We are far from the manufacturers and most of the African countries are land locked hence physical logistics play a nasty trick on us. What a shame all of us should have been some islands in the middle of the seas for us to function better.
In contrast, the “Developed World” has a focus on progressive issues which seem to signify that what troubles us is not an issue to them. The devils we face daily were conquered generations ago for them and they need not lift a finger to fight those wars anymore. Their focus is truly on making life easier and getting things done faster, how else would you explain their fascination with electronic commerce? I wonder what they call Universal Service, it most certainly doesn’t apply in the African context, universal who? To what extent does it benefit me, the community, the nation, and the ‘Diaspora’? When you have reached the apex of self aggrandizement only then can you think about Electronic Gambling, the height of extravagance. How else can you describe it? Think of this idea as the “Levels of Abstraction” and it clearly dawns on you that our Vision(s) are way too small. Talk of Technology Neutral Taxation, you would think the heavily squeezed and “developing” among the nations would advocate for more lenient technology taxes or zero taxes, but well they seem to be ‘doing just fine’ making enough money for governments of the day and killing the future heritage of nations. Laugh about the Privacy of the Individual, how private can one be when he lives in an open society? By the way nothing is private in Africa what with u-buntu.
The question is ‘How long will the stars keep shining’. The answer is just as simple, for as long as Africa does not turn on the lights or awaken to a new dawn, a new morning, a new day, a new era, a new dispensation, a paradigm shift in the world order. Everybody else has had their fair share of the glory and it seems as though the world is now waiting on Africa to shine. Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee. When you are following from behind you have literally no pressure to perform, all you have to do is to bring yourself together, gather your strength and with all your might lash out with one burst of energy, your all and sundry and give it your best short. If we have good, sound policies and we lack follow through, then we know the problem is half solved, all we need to do is to follow through with every little resources we have and not doubt ourselves in the process. The reasons why we falter are not too many to fathom we lack insight into the dynamics of ICT usage but with the right attitude we can overcome that. I am deeply concerned about our lack of a cumulative tradition of research, but again how can it become cumulative when we are culturally stingy with information. If the family next door has stumbled on a “good” method of preserving seed for the next season they will never ever let that secret live the confines of their hut lest the whole village copies the method and they lose the number one spot of Best Village Farmer. There is no coordination of initiatives were we are concerned we seem to live by the adage ‘each man for himself and GOD for us all’ how else can we not have systems already in place to cater for regional integration where imports, exports and the like are concerned. Our worst evil is to continue to allow our policies and yes ICT Policies to be Donor-Driven. What a shame, so we don’t place importance on our own issues to the extent that all initiatives have to involve donors in one form or the other? By the way where do these donors come from? Who then is the master, the beggar or the giver and can we compete with the master? It’s a pity indeed how we chase these guys from the local village court (padare) and invite them into the king’s yard to implement what they suggested to the king in the same place days before.
“Excelling in tomorrow’s global knowledge economy will mean competing with India’s legions of engineers, Estonia’s inventiveness, or Qatar’s vision : what could prevent Nordic countries from being successful at it ?”
No mention of Africa there! What a cause for concern.
“Wherefore seeing we also are encompassed with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” Hebrews 12 verse 1.
In the Biblical story of Jacob and Esau found in Genesis, is the mind boggling story of the fates of two twin brothers. One was endowed with the vision to be greater than the other from birth, and the other had no respect whatsoever for greatness and ambition such that he sold his birthright for a plate of soup and beans. Some scholars have gone to analyze the story and come up with the explanation that Esau can only equate or be the progenitor of the African race with little or no ambition at all of ever achieving anything of significance to the rest of the world. How else can you explain our lack of progress in as far as the world is concerned? All you need to look at to see what we embody and espouse is our visions or lack of them. One country not too far away from where I stand has a vision “Our vision is that …will be an industrialized state by 2030, with a significant improvement in the essential quality of life of all … ‘citizens’.” Well, I don’t know how you think and what you think but this vision is as broad as it is wide what is significant improvement, how do you quantify it once you have attained it and what is essential quality of life? When did industrialization begin and how old it will be in the year 2030, don’t forget that we are now in yet another age the Information Age. If we were not busy getting industrialized when others were, what were we up to. Maybe it pays to join them if we can’t beat them but what use is it joining them when the meeting has been adjourned and all resolutions have been passed and the Amen of the meeting has been said.
What should Africa do that it already has not done to join the stars in shining and to deem their light, is the ‘dark continent’ providing the shining stars with the most conducive environment to beam their light. More often than not the solution lies in the detail. Let’s just take a quick look at the contrasting ICT Policy issues according to one source between the “Developing World” and the “Developed World”-:
The Developing World
• Alleviating Poverty
• Health
• Education
• The Cost of Telephone Calls
• The Banking System
• Physical Logistics
The Developed World
• Electronic Commerce
• Universal Service
• Electronic Gambling
• Technology Neutral Taxation
• Privacy of the Individual
I wonder if we are truly poor and how poor we are that at every turn we have to put our poverty first before our wide noses? I am more than convinced that poverty is a state of the mind and as such we are as poor as our lack of thinking, I mean really engaging our minds to solve problems systematically once and for future generations. Is it really possible for health to be for all and for education to be for all? I thought even our Lord Jesus Christ said it clearly “do not give the bread of the children to the dogs”. Meaning in every situation there are the children and there are dogs. It is common sense that when you have two or more options to trade you in turn have competition and costs are lowered as each player tries to cut costs and find innovative ways of lowering down prices, hence it is an insult in deed to have a situation where a monopoly exists and there is talk of costs being atrocious. The Banking System is the major culprit in our lack of progress. All the efforts are a simple photocopy of Western, European and ‘other’ systems of banking which unfortunately do not necessarily apply to the African continent. You would have thought that the truly indigenous banks would offer unique services to the local people but alas their requirements for trade especially financing are just as stringent as the exotic banks. The sticky point that exposes their lack of uniqueness is the issue of collateral. How do you contextualize collateral to suite the African market where people believed until recently in owning houses in the rural areas as opposed to urban areas also attributably due to colonialism? Apart from fixed assets (chief among which are houses) it is a common fact that it is easier in the African context, to own your dream car than your dream house, so can a house be the only form of collateral acceptable to access a loan? It boggles the mind. Don’t also forget that the banks are also heavily incapacitated due to a myriad of problems beyond their control including failed government policies as well as the generally harsh African economic conditions. We are far from the manufacturers and most of the African countries are land locked hence physical logistics play a nasty trick on us. What a shame all of us should have been some islands in the middle of the seas for us to function better.
In contrast, the “Developed World” has a focus on progressive issues which seem to signify that what troubles us is not an issue to them. The devils we face daily were conquered generations ago for them and they need not lift a finger to fight those wars anymore. Their focus is truly on making life easier and getting things done faster, how else would you explain their fascination with electronic commerce? I wonder what they call Universal Service, it most certainly doesn’t apply in the African context, universal who? To what extent does it benefit me, the community, the nation, and the ‘Diaspora’? When you have reached the apex of self aggrandizement only then can you think about Electronic Gambling, the height of extravagance. How else can you describe it? Think of this idea as the “Levels of Abstraction” and it clearly dawns on you that our Vision(s) are way too small. Talk of Technology Neutral Taxation, you would think the heavily squeezed and “developing” among the nations would advocate for more lenient technology taxes or zero taxes, but well they seem to be ‘doing just fine’ making enough money for governments of the day and killing the future heritage of nations. Laugh about the Privacy of the Individual, how private can one be when he lives in an open society? By the way nothing is private in Africa what with u-buntu.
The question is ‘How long will the stars keep shining’. The answer is just as simple, for as long as Africa does not turn on the lights or awaken to a new dawn, a new morning, a new day, a new era, a new dispensation, a paradigm shift in the world order. Everybody else has had their fair share of the glory and it seems as though the world is now waiting on Africa to shine. Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee. When you are following from behind you have literally no pressure to perform, all you have to do is to bring yourself together, gather your strength and with all your might lash out with one burst of energy, your all and sundry and give it your best short. If we have good, sound policies and we lack follow through, then we know the problem is half solved, all we need to do is to follow through with every little resources we have and not doubt ourselves in the process. The reasons why we falter are not too many to fathom we lack insight into the dynamics of ICT usage but with the right attitude we can overcome that. I am deeply concerned about our lack of a cumulative tradition of research, but again how can it become cumulative when we are culturally stingy with information. If the family next door has stumbled on a “good” method of preserving seed for the next season they will never ever let that secret live the confines of their hut lest the whole village copies the method and they lose the number one spot of Best Village Farmer. There is no coordination of initiatives were we are concerned we seem to live by the adage ‘each man for himself and GOD for us all’ how else can we not have systems already in place to cater for regional integration where imports, exports and the like are concerned. Our worst evil is to continue to allow our policies and yes ICT Policies to be Donor-Driven. What a shame, so we don’t place importance on our own issues to the extent that all initiatives have to involve donors in one form or the other? By the way where do these donors come from? Who then is the master, the beggar or the giver and can we compete with the master? It’s a pity indeed how we chase these guys from the local village court (padare) and invite them into the king’s yard to implement what they suggested to the king in the same place days before.
“Excelling in tomorrow’s global knowledge economy will mean competing with India’s legions of engineers, Estonia’s inventiveness, or Qatar’s vision : what could prevent Nordic countries from being successful at it ?”
No mention of Africa there! What a cause for concern.
“Wherefore seeing we also are encompassed with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” Hebrews 12 verse 1.
Monday, June 1, 2009
A Perspective on Africa’s Networked Readiness
“‘Sustainable development’ implies that economic activity should be designed to create wealth for the use of present and future generations. If natural resources cannot be developed and exploited to create wealth for the nation, the result may be poverty and deprivation. Crisis management soon takes over from sustainable economic development. So far, experience in Sub-Saharan Africa for the past 20 years would indicate that almost all the countries in this region have suffered negative growth; that is, the economies of Sub-Saharan Africa are in a state of decline and the development of the rich natural resources has come to a virtual standstill. The Sub-Saharan region has turned into a region of "beggar nations" in the midst of plentiful natural resources. In this regard, the least harnessed resources of this beautiful continent include minerals and energy.”
If we are so rich why are we so poor? If we are so educated why are we so foolish? If all are created equal and all have 5 common senses why are members of the lighter race progressing and those of the darker color retrogressing and are thus unequal? If Africa accounts for 22% of the land mass, and has the highest record of mineral deposits in the world, why is it a perpetual beggar? If our culture is so good why does it seem to pull us down? If we are so democratic why are there so many conflicts and wars in our camp? If our history is so rich why doesn’t it speak for itself? Why is it that the only history we speak about is of the past, what about the future, what will future generations inherit but debt? Why are we independent but not free, free but not independent? What, who and why do we need someone to define who we are, are we so barbaric that we do not even know who we are? Why is all that we know to be a true account of who we are spoken from a foreign mouth? Can’t we speak for ourselves or develop benchmarks to measure ourselves? “Will future generations bless us, curse us or forget us?”
Bringing to the fore the centrality of innovation and technological readiness for national and international competitiveness, the World Economic Forum has undertaken since 2002, in cooperation with INSEAD (a graduate business school and research institution founded in 1957), a research project aimed at outlining the factors enabling countries to fully leverage ICT in daily activities in order to effectively boost growth and prosperity. One of the key deliverables of this project has been the Global Information Technology Report (GITR) series, published annually since 2001 and currently in its seventh edition. Featured in the GITR series, The Networked Readiness Index (NRI), establishes an international framework by which the performance in networked readiness of a large number of economies can be assessed and benchmarked against one another over time. By so doing, relative competitive advantages and areas of weakness can be identified for each country, offering a unique platform to governments and civil society to prioritize policies and initiatives toward enhanced ICT penetration and leverage. The GITR series has successfully contributed to raising general awareness of the close link between ICT prowess and continued growth and prosperity, and has evolved into one of the world’s most respected international assessments of countries’ capacity to leverage technology for increased competitiveness. With aims of furthering the understanding of ICT-enabling factors and benchmarking countries’ networked readiness, extending coverage to 134 countries (both “developed” and “developing” economies worldwide) the Report, the GITR for 2007 – 2008 was published. In that Report, Zimbabwe factored in the last 3 countries together with Timor-Leste and Chad, two other “African” countries. Tunisia officially the Republic of Tunisia a country located in North Africa was a breath of fresh air ranked at number 38 being the only African country ranked in the top 50 countries or economies.
What is wrong with us? Take notice “the framework aims at assessing the different degrees to which countries around the world leverage ICT for enhanced growth and competitiveness” , and Africa is still lagging behind! Who needs to “enhance growth” let alone “competitiveness” now more than ever if it’s not the African continent? I would have thought that off the cameras and somewhere in secret we would be working so hard to bolster our position, secretly and quietly, but alas we are doing the opposite. I would have thought that after having seen how we were left behind in the Industrial Revolution we would not be left behind in the Information Revolution but alas, the opposite is true, the gap continues to widen. How do you compete when you have mastered the art of begging at every turn oh Africa! ‘Life is unfair so get over it’, we cannot continue to wait for things to happen, instead we need to cause things to happen, we can’t continue to live by the tragic cliché that “good things come to those who wait” and seem to work so hard in public. After all the gurus of the Information Age worked so hard in private only coming into the public arena when all the money there is to make was safely banked and competition was on how to spend it and which Aid organization to spend it on. Africa has been “independent” cumulatively for at least 50 years with a sizeable number of Northern countries obtaining “independence” in and around the year 1960 with others coming on board in the mid 70’s but the dream of “freedom” yes “freedom” to stand on our own and chat our own course has been illusive very illusive indeed. How can we be free when all standards that were set up to judge our progress are not our own? We unfortunately for now, are relegated to followers of progress but the speed of execution will decide our fate as in being leaders of progress, innovators of the next age. If we are to grow up we cannot continue to trip and fall on our own underwear. We need to rally at one central point, unfortunately that point is not the illusive United States of Africa but in the creation of growth points – Technological Growth Points. Apart from creating national Technology Growth Points we need to engage from the smallest cell to the biggest formation such that Africa resonates with one voice for the adoption and diffusion of technology. We need to desist from consuming our seed and making sure that our seed is planted in good time so as to ensure a good harvest. Let us desist for once from looking outwardly to what the world can do for us but what we can do for the world, what we can receive from the world but how and what we can give to the world. Why do we keep on expecting “someone” to pay the price for our ticket to success as if that “someone” owes us for every breath they take? Sorry to say the world did not do any worse for us than we were already doing for ourselves, look no further than the Darfur conflict and see the truth our brothers perish as we expect the West, East and so forth to come to mediate. Talk about the genocide in Rwanda, what a shame.
In examining ourselves we need to focus on three pillars which unfortunately already stand as benchmarks by which we are adjudged whether fairly or unfairly I shan’t tell namely The Environment, Multistakeholder Effort and ICT Usage.
1.Environment
A precursor to benefitting fully from the opportunities offered by ICT, is the demand for the presence and establishment of a friendly and conducive environment for ICT development. The appropriate business environment, regulatory framework, and infrastructure must be in place for stakeholders to use and leverage ICT for development. ICT development does not happen in a vacuum, but happens in an enabling environment. Worst case scenario, who would think about buying a computer when “machetes are the hottest property on the market to smartly slice your brother’s throat and to cleanse the land from wide nosed neighbors or roaches as they would say”? Surely GOD forgive us for our errors of omission and commission.
- Market environment
By now all and sundry followers of this column would understand that in deed there can be no meaningful progress in today’s age with the exclusion of ICTs, but why do governments in Africa continue to appear as if they are punishing business for importing and utilizing ICT by continuously levying heavy taxes and duties at points of entry? Surely no known country in Africa, for now at least, is recorded as manufacturing ICTs thus rendering Africa a net importer of ICTs. Maybe it is due to our confusion that ICTs are luxury products with special mention being given to mobile phones which hail in most parts of Africa as fashion statements and not for their true worth. The absence of Capital sources (chiefly venture capital) is a thorn in the flesh to enterprising natives of the land, hence the unfortunate reality being that anyone who dare be great has to look West, East or elsewhere for funding. I’m reminded of the “spider web” theory but even the spider takes time to meticulously weave its web which time seems to be running out and fast on Africa. The degree of business sophistication, and the innovation potential, together with the ease (or is it dis-ease) of doing business compounded by the lack of freedom in information exchange as well as the related accessibility of digital content (where it is present), pose as major threats to the growth of ICT in the beloved continent.
- Political & Regulatory Environment
In Africa is where you find typical test cases of “the Spirit willing and the body being weak”. From the top echelons of governance seems to resonate with the bold belief in the cause for ICTs but somewhere in the execution is where the gold coin is lost. We need effective law-making bodies, drafting real laws relating to ICT with judicial independence being observed to enforce those laws impartially and to preside over disputes justly. The thorny issue of Intellectual Property Protection cannot be ignored in order to reward innovation and creativity. I wonder what would happen if Bill Gates’ and yes Microsoft Corporation’s “backdoor” to the Windows Operating System was open to all, how much disaster would occur and what challenges “hackers” would pose on the world. Property rights cannot be overemphasized here. One major challenge observed over time and through the breadth and width of Africa is the issue of quality of competition in the Internet Service Provider (ISP) sector. Do we continue to look inwardly for players in the sector or open up the sector to foreign players with benefits and disadvantages accruing on both sides of the coin? How do you rationalize the sector, do you choose to wear the spectacles of the user or the contact lenses of the local capitalist ISP with barley enough capital but is homegrown or an international consortium ISP with enough capital to lay undersea cables connecting and linking you to the rest of the world but at what cost to you. In short do you sell your birthright for a plate of stew and lentils like Esau or “die” of hunger as he presumed he would have, had he not sold his birthright? We need to be cunning and calculative for sometimes two is greater than one, and we are greater than the sum of our individual parts.
- Infrastructure Environment
I don’t know which Africa you hail from but from where I hail the disregard for infrastructure, especially fixed telephone lines is grandiose. With the presence of only one fixed telephone operator, who is undoubtedly heavily incapacitated, you would think the general populace would be grateful for the existence of fixed telephone lines and would hold them in high esteem, but not so, a good number of such lines has been vandalized. How then do you progress as a people when you destroy your own infrastructure intended for your own good. Just compare the level of foolishness, how much will say a hundred or two meters of telephone cable will cost in comparison to the benefits of having a reliable, cost effective (I said I would not use the word cheap ever again) and efficient fixed telephone system. So why do we have vandals doing their nasty on our infrastructure sometimes while we wait by and spur them on? We need to up the quality of scientific research institutions and create a conducive environment in our Education domain for ICT penetration and curricular. Obviously we cannot afford not to have secure internet servers or else our sovereignty will be lost let alone compromised. One burning issue here would be that of Electricity Production. I really wonder why a continent so rich in natural resources would have blackouts. These should never be allowed to exist what with all the coal deposits, the gases, the oil deposits and the various sources of water energy abounding, not to mention wind and solar. Just to throw in a quick win, I wonder if all the blackouts and load shedding which we have been subjected to in Zimbabwe have really brought any benefit. What would happen if we sincerely rotated the load shedding or blackout for just one month to everyone I say everyone such that cumulatively out of a possible 12 months we would have one month of total blackout with the savings going towards research and development of alternative sources of energy like wind and or solar. The rationale being that we would save on the import of power. I wonder how many times a year our generators at Hwange or is it Kariba break down in a year and what they are costing us in terms of maintenance. Isn’t it time to look for a lasting solution, who will we import from next, seeing that our major suppliers will one day be under pressure to serve their own domestic markets due to increased demand if this is not already obtaining. Apologies are in order for wondering into a danger zone by the way I am not an electrical engineer so let me just focus on my core competence here.
2.Multistakeholder effort
Success stories show that networked economies foster a joint effort between multiple stakeholders which are the government, businesses and civil society. There is need for governments to take the lead in giving impetus to ICT penetration and innovation by giving it pole position in national agenda and enabling the establishment of the relevant infrastructures.
- Individual readiness
A nation can only be as ready for any undertaking as its citizens are. Critical mass is achieved when appropriate human skills for ICT usage are in place, ICTs are accessible and affordable for both businesses and citizens, and government prioritizes ICT in its daily activities and organization. The bedrock of individual readiness is founded on the quality of education with a bias towards Mathematics and Science, internet access in schools, residential telephone connection charges, high speed broadband and the cost of mobile telephone calls.
- Business readiness
To be able to compete internationally African businesses need to consistently train staff as well as participate in Research and Development (R&D) as well as to foster a closely neat relationship with academia. Our absence of continuity plans is a major drawback with little if anything is done for future generations. The quantity and quality of ICT suppliers in the economy, coupled with the affordability of ICTs as well as the levels of imports serve to lubricate businesses towards ICT Readiness. It is not a coincidence that telephone connection charges as well as monthly telephone charges can create an enabling environment for Business Readiness or can be a deterrent factor to the same.
- Government readiness
Governments are appointed by the people for the people and are a true reflection of the people just as the people are a true reflection of the government. It has been said that people get the government they deserve. Put across more simply governments are a mirror image of the people and reflect the state of a people. Put in perspective there is need for government to prioritize on the agenda, a clear vision to promote the use of ICTs and their diffusion. There has to be clear cut policies on government procurement of ICT products seeing as the local government has to be seen to support local business as opposed to foreign players. In order to market and to push forward the agenda on E-culture, governments need to seriously engage in E-Governance with all national (or at least those that concern the general public and that do not compromise national security) sources of data, being accessible to the general public.
3.ICT Usage
We need to take stock of the actual usage by the three main stakeholders of the networked readiness framework, providing insight on the efficiency and productivity gains linked to ICT.
- Individual usage
On the individual level areas of consideration would be aligned to internet users, internet bandwidth, broadband internet, personal computers and yes mobile telephone subscribers.
- Business usage
Issues that come to the fore are availability of new telephone lines, extent to which business uses the internet, the creation or presence of capacity to innovate, to abstract perspectives like firm-level technology absorption and the prevalence of foreign technology licensing.
- Government usage
Measurables here would be government success in promoting the cause for ICT, availability of up to date government online services, to the presence of ICT in government offices and departments.
“We are at an extraordinary period of history. It is a time of crisis and unprecedented
uncertainty, even fear; but it is also a time of opportunity for change and profound
transformation. Now, more than ever, we are aware of how globalization has increased our interconnectedness and how global cooperation is absolutely essential. How we, as a
community of global leaders, proceed in the succeeding months will change the
course of history.”
“Wherefore seeing we also are encompassed with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” Hebrews 12 verse 1.
If we are so rich why are we so poor? If we are so educated why are we so foolish? If all are created equal and all have 5 common senses why are members of the lighter race progressing and those of the darker color retrogressing and are thus unequal? If Africa accounts for 22% of the land mass, and has the highest record of mineral deposits in the world, why is it a perpetual beggar? If our culture is so good why does it seem to pull us down? If we are so democratic why are there so many conflicts and wars in our camp? If our history is so rich why doesn’t it speak for itself? Why is it that the only history we speak about is of the past, what about the future, what will future generations inherit but debt? Why are we independent but not free, free but not independent? What, who and why do we need someone to define who we are, are we so barbaric that we do not even know who we are? Why is all that we know to be a true account of who we are spoken from a foreign mouth? Can’t we speak for ourselves or develop benchmarks to measure ourselves? “Will future generations bless us, curse us or forget us?”
Bringing to the fore the centrality of innovation and technological readiness for national and international competitiveness, the World Economic Forum has undertaken since 2002, in cooperation with INSEAD (a graduate business school and research institution founded in 1957), a research project aimed at outlining the factors enabling countries to fully leverage ICT in daily activities in order to effectively boost growth and prosperity. One of the key deliverables of this project has been the Global Information Technology Report (GITR) series, published annually since 2001 and currently in its seventh edition. Featured in the GITR series, The Networked Readiness Index (NRI), establishes an international framework by which the performance in networked readiness of a large number of economies can be assessed and benchmarked against one another over time. By so doing, relative competitive advantages and areas of weakness can be identified for each country, offering a unique platform to governments and civil society to prioritize policies and initiatives toward enhanced ICT penetration and leverage. The GITR series has successfully contributed to raising general awareness of the close link between ICT prowess and continued growth and prosperity, and has evolved into one of the world’s most respected international assessments of countries’ capacity to leverage technology for increased competitiveness. With aims of furthering the understanding of ICT-enabling factors and benchmarking countries’ networked readiness, extending coverage to 134 countries (both “developed” and “developing” economies worldwide) the Report, the GITR for 2007 – 2008 was published. In that Report, Zimbabwe factored in the last 3 countries together with Timor-Leste and Chad, two other “African” countries. Tunisia officially the Republic of Tunisia a country located in North Africa was a breath of fresh air ranked at number 38 being the only African country ranked in the top 50 countries or economies.
What is wrong with us? Take notice “the framework aims at assessing the different degrees to which countries around the world leverage ICT for enhanced growth and competitiveness” , and Africa is still lagging behind! Who needs to “enhance growth” let alone “competitiveness” now more than ever if it’s not the African continent? I would have thought that off the cameras and somewhere in secret we would be working so hard to bolster our position, secretly and quietly, but alas we are doing the opposite. I would have thought that after having seen how we were left behind in the Industrial Revolution we would not be left behind in the Information Revolution but alas, the opposite is true, the gap continues to widen. How do you compete when you have mastered the art of begging at every turn oh Africa! ‘Life is unfair so get over it’, we cannot continue to wait for things to happen, instead we need to cause things to happen, we can’t continue to live by the tragic cliché that “good things come to those who wait” and seem to work so hard in public. After all the gurus of the Information Age worked so hard in private only coming into the public arena when all the money there is to make was safely banked and competition was on how to spend it and which Aid organization to spend it on. Africa has been “independent” cumulatively for at least 50 years with a sizeable number of Northern countries obtaining “independence” in and around the year 1960 with others coming on board in the mid 70’s but the dream of “freedom” yes “freedom” to stand on our own and chat our own course has been illusive very illusive indeed. How can we be free when all standards that were set up to judge our progress are not our own? We unfortunately for now, are relegated to followers of progress but the speed of execution will decide our fate as in being leaders of progress, innovators of the next age. If we are to grow up we cannot continue to trip and fall on our own underwear. We need to rally at one central point, unfortunately that point is not the illusive United States of Africa but in the creation of growth points – Technological Growth Points. Apart from creating national Technology Growth Points we need to engage from the smallest cell to the biggest formation such that Africa resonates with one voice for the adoption and diffusion of technology. We need to desist from consuming our seed and making sure that our seed is planted in good time so as to ensure a good harvest. Let us desist for once from looking outwardly to what the world can do for us but what we can do for the world, what we can receive from the world but how and what we can give to the world. Why do we keep on expecting “someone” to pay the price for our ticket to success as if that “someone” owes us for every breath they take? Sorry to say the world did not do any worse for us than we were already doing for ourselves, look no further than the Darfur conflict and see the truth our brothers perish as we expect the West, East and so forth to come to mediate. Talk about the genocide in Rwanda, what a shame.
In examining ourselves we need to focus on three pillars which unfortunately already stand as benchmarks by which we are adjudged whether fairly or unfairly I shan’t tell namely The Environment, Multistakeholder Effort and ICT Usage.
1.Environment
A precursor to benefitting fully from the opportunities offered by ICT, is the demand for the presence and establishment of a friendly and conducive environment for ICT development. The appropriate business environment, regulatory framework, and infrastructure must be in place for stakeholders to use and leverage ICT for development. ICT development does not happen in a vacuum, but happens in an enabling environment. Worst case scenario, who would think about buying a computer when “machetes are the hottest property on the market to smartly slice your brother’s throat and to cleanse the land from wide nosed neighbors or roaches as they would say”? Surely GOD forgive us for our errors of omission and commission.
- Market environment
By now all and sundry followers of this column would understand that in deed there can be no meaningful progress in today’s age with the exclusion of ICTs, but why do governments in Africa continue to appear as if they are punishing business for importing and utilizing ICT by continuously levying heavy taxes and duties at points of entry? Surely no known country in Africa, for now at least, is recorded as manufacturing ICTs thus rendering Africa a net importer of ICTs. Maybe it is due to our confusion that ICTs are luxury products with special mention being given to mobile phones which hail in most parts of Africa as fashion statements and not for their true worth. The absence of Capital sources (chiefly venture capital) is a thorn in the flesh to enterprising natives of the land, hence the unfortunate reality being that anyone who dare be great has to look West, East or elsewhere for funding. I’m reminded of the “spider web” theory but even the spider takes time to meticulously weave its web which time seems to be running out and fast on Africa. The degree of business sophistication, and the innovation potential, together with the ease (or is it dis-ease) of doing business compounded by the lack of freedom in information exchange as well as the related accessibility of digital content (where it is present), pose as major threats to the growth of ICT in the beloved continent.
- Political & Regulatory Environment
In Africa is where you find typical test cases of “the Spirit willing and the body being weak”. From the top echelons of governance seems to resonate with the bold belief in the cause for ICTs but somewhere in the execution is where the gold coin is lost. We need effective law-making bodies, drafting real laws relating to ICT with judicial independence being observed to enforce those laws impartially and to preside over disputes justly. The thorny issue of Intellectual Property Protection cannot be ignored in order to reward innovation and creativity. I wonder what would happen if Bill Gates’ and yes Microsoft Corporation’s “backdoor” to the Windows Operating System was open to all, how much disaster would occur and what challenges “hackers” would pose on the world. Property rights cannot be overemphasized here. One major challenge observed over time and through the breadth and width of Africa is the issue of quality of competition in the Internet Service Provider (ISP) sector. Do we continue to look inwardly for players in the sector or open up the sector to foreign players with benefits and disadvantages accruing on both sides of the coin? How do you rationalize the sector, do you choose to wear the spectacles of the user or the contact lenses of the local capitalist ISP with barley enough capital but is homegrown or an international consortium ISP with enough capital to lay undersea cables connecting and linking you to the rest of the world but at what cost to you. In short do you sell your birthright for a plate of stew and lentils like Esau or “die” of hunger as he presumed he would have, had he not sold his birthright? We need to be cunning and calculative for sometimes two is greater than one, and we are greater than the sum of our individual parts.
- Infrastructure Environment
I don’t know which Africa you hail from but from where I hail the disregard for infrastructure, especially fixed telephone lines is grandiose. With the presence of only one fixed telephone operator, who is undoubtedly heavily incapacitated, you would think the general populace would be grateful for the existence of fixed telephone lines and would hold them in high esteem, but not so, a good number of such lines has been vandalized. How then do you progress as a people when you destroy your own infrastructure intended for your own good. Just compare the level of foolishness, how much will say a hundred or two meters of telephone cable will cost in comparison to the benefits of having a reliable, cost effective (I said I would not use the word cheap ever again) and efficient fixed telephone system. So why do we have vandals doing their nasty on our infrastructure sometimes while we wait by and spur them on? We need to up the quality of scientific research institutions and create a conducive environment in our Education domain for ICT penetration and curricular. Obviously we cannot afford not to have secure internet servers or else our sovereignty will be lost let alone compromised. One burning issue here would be that of Electricity Production. I really wonder why a continent so rich in natural resources would have blackouts. These should never be allowed to exist what with all the coal deposits, the gases, the oil deposits and the various sources of water energy abounding, not to mention wind and solar. Just to throw in a quick win, I wonder if all the blackouts and load shedding which we have been subjected to in Zimbabwe have really brought any benefit. What would happen if we sincerely rotated the load shedding or blackout for just one month to everyone I say everyone such that cumulatively out of a possible 12 months we would have one month of total blackout with the savings going towards research and development of alternative sources of energy like wind and or solar. The rationale being that we would save on the import of power. I wonder how many times a year our generators at Hwange or is it Kariba break down in a year and what they are costing us in terms of maintenance. Isn’t it time to look for a lasting solution, who will we import from next, seeing that our major suppliers will one day be under pressure to serve their own domestic markets due to increased demand if this is not already obtaining. Apologies are in order for wondering into a danger zone by the way I am not an electrical engineer so let me just focus on my core competence here.
2.Multistakeholder effort
Success stories show that networked economies foster a joint effort between multiple stakeholders which are the government, businesses and civil society. There is need for governments to take the lead in giving impetus to ICT penetration and innovation by giving it pole position in national agenda and enabling the establishment of the relevant infrastructures.
- Individual readiness
A nation can only be as ready for any undertaking as its citizens are. Critical mass is achieved when appropriate human skills for ICT usage are in place, ICTs are accessible and affordable for both businesses and citizens, and government prioritizes ICT in its daily activities and organization. The bedrock of individual readiness is founded on the quality of education with a bias towards Mathematics and Science, internet access in schools, residential telephone connection charges, high speed broadband and the cost of mobile telephone calls.
- Business readiness
To be able to compete internationally African businesses need to consistently train staff as well as participate in Research and Development (R&D) as well as to foster a closely neat relationship with academia. Our absence of continuity plans is a major drawback with little if anything is done for future generations. The quantity and quality of ICT suppliers in the economy, coupled with the affordability of ICTs as well as the levels of imports serve to lubricate businesses towards ICT Readiness. It is not a coincidence that telephone connection charges as well as monthly telephone charges can create an enabling environment for Business Readiness or can be a deterrent factor to the same.
- Government readiness
Governments are appointed by the people for the people and are a true reflection of the people just as the people are a true reflection of the government. It has been said that people get the government they deserve. Put across more simply governments are a mirror image of the people and reflect the state of a people. Put in perspective there is need for government to prioritize on the agenda, a clear vision to promote the use of ICTs and their diffusion. There has to be clear cut policies on government procurement of ICT products seeing as the local government has to be seen to support local business as opposed to foreign players. In order to market and to push forward the agenda on E-culture, governments need to seriously engage in E-Governance with all national (or at least those that concern the general public and that do not compromise national security) sources of data, being accessible to the general public.
3.ICT Usage
We need to take stock of the actual usage by the three main stakeholders of the networked readiness framework, providing insight on the efficiency and productivity gains linked to ICT.
- Individual usage
On the individual level areas of consideration would be aligned to internet users, internet bandwidth, broadband internet, personal computers and yes mobile telephone subscribers.
- Business usage
Issues that come to the fore are availability of new telephone lines, extent to which business uses the internet, the creation or presence of capacity to innovate, to abstract perspectives like firm-level technology absorption and the prevalence of foreign technology licensing.
- Government usage
Measurables here would be government success in promoting the cause for ICT, availability of up to date government online services, to the presence of ICT in government offices and departments.
“We are at an extraordinary period of history. It is a time of crisis and unprecedented
uncertainty, even fear; but it is also a time of opportunity for change and profound
transformation. Now, more than ever, we are aware of how globalization has increased our interconnectedness and how global cooperation is absolutely essential. How we, as a
community of global leaders, proceed in the succeeding months will change the
course of history.”
“Wherefore seeing we also are encompassed with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” Hebrews 12 verse 1.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Marketing in the ICT Era - Promotion
“In the future, computers will shop for us. You will log into a virtual supermarket and order food, they will send it to you the next day. School will change too. You could have school at home and fax your homework in, but you won’t make any
friends that way. We will have to make friends on the Internet. Libraries will still be there, but not many people will visit them anymore and they will be knocked down. ” — Nicholas Phibbs, age 12 Surrey, UK
PROMOTION
One of the major battles which business has had to fight for time immemorial is the war of costs. How do you bring this devil down and kill of your competition? On the other hand, the customer has had to engage in an opposite but challenging war with the central rallying point being how to achieve value for money, maximize, get more for less. Two major events have taken place in Africa if not the world, within the past three decades or so, the first being the emergence of a strong black middle class with so much “cash” to spend and the second being the emergence of a vibrant and forceful new age dubbed the Information Age with Information and Communication Technologies being the driving force. Mix the ideas in this serving and you have business with costs that they are trying to contain on one hand and a middle class which has lots of spending power on the other but is not necessarily gullible as to buy at any price (this excludes luxury cars of course).
When the patriarchs of the National (or Global or Galactic) Information Infrastructure now known as the Internet, were busy discussing the possibilities of such technology, little did they perceive as to how robust and useful the “final” product would be and the uses generations to come would attach to it. For business to flourish in the international domain without harnessing internet tools and fully utilizing them, would be tantamount to milking a bull. Markets are fast evolving and to stay in the past is more perilous than death. What with the advent of mobile telephones, broadband internet and other related technologies. If a twelve year old boy could perceive that one day computers would do the shopping in virtual supermarkets and school would change too, then surely our mature minds have to seriously engage. The possibilities are endless and the benefits too numerous but where do we start? The answer is not too far from us it’s the grass roots. From intranets to extranets to the internet (WWW - world wide web).
One of the major problems we have as a people (Africa) is that we believe that someone other than us should initiate progress, we look further than at ourselves. In turn we tend to play the blame game, if something is wrong blame the government or the authorities or the manager or the supervisor. We are never at fault for the predicaments that we find ourselves in, it is always someone else’s fault. Hence we have watched others develop whilst we continue to grope in the dark. The internet has been a growing force for the past two or so decades with major progress occurring within the past ten years. Don’t forget that ten years is a long time in deed more so when you look at this industry with new inventions on a daily basis. Just study the history of the founding fathers of the game they had little sleep if at all trying to come up with new programs, new inventions and acquiring massive programming hours in various computer laboratories. Those long hours spent have created new ways of doing things look at Amazon.com Inc an American-based multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, which is America's and one of the world’s largest online retailer, with nearly three times the internet sales revenue of runner up Staples, Inc. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, Inc. in 1994 and launched it online in 1995. It started as an on-line bookstore but soon diversified to product lines of VHS, DVD, music CDs and MP3s, computer software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys, etc. Amazon has established separate websites in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, China, and Japan and also provides international shipping to certain countries for some of its products. A competitor to Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Inc. is referred to as the largest book retailer in the United States, operating mainly through its Barnes & Noble Booksellers chain of bookstores headquartered in lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The company operates the chain of small "B. Dalton Booksellers" stores in malls. The company is known for large, upscale retail outlets, many of which contain a café serving Starbucks Coffee, and for competitive discounting of bestsellers. Most stores also sell magazines, newspapers, DVDs, graphic novels, gifts, games, and music. Video games and related items were sold in the company's GameStop retail outlets until October 2004, when the division was spun-off into an independent company. The summarized story of Staples, Inc. is that it is the world's largest office supply retail store chain, with over 2,000 stores worldwide in 27 countries. The Framingham, MA based company has catalog and delivery businesses and serves customers in Argentina (as Officenet), Austria, Brazil (as StaplesOfficenet), Canada (as Staples, in Quebec as Bureau En Gros), China, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Portugal, United Kingdom and the United States. Staples, Inc. sells supplies, office machines, promotional products, furniture, technology and business services both in stores and online via Staples.com. The company opened its first store in Brighton, Massachusetts in 1986.
That background information on its own does not amount to much so let’s get into the number crunching part of things. Amazon.com Inc which is in the Retail Industry had Revenue of US$ 19,166 billion in 2008 Operating Income was US$842 million, Net Income US$645 million with an employee base of just 20 500 people. Now look at Barnes & Noble which began as a Printing business in 1873 in Wheaton Illinois (USA) and then opened doors in New York in 1917 with one of many bookstores to come. The Revenue of Barnes & Noble in 2007 from an employee base of 40 000 people was US$5,8 billion from 800 stores. Take a further step and go over the figures of Staples Inc which was founded in 1986 as a Retail concern majoring in Office Supplies which generated Revenue of US$27 billion in 2008. What do those figures tell you? A creative mind will tell that among the three concerns two have generally harnessed more of the “new” ways of doing things – less employees and more technology hence more work covered. Though the figures are from two different and distinct years the underlying factors and constants still hold true that the organizations formed in the Information Age have had a greater advantage due to harnessing of more computer power and creative PROMOTION via ICTs. You would have thought that the “older” companies would do better in resource utilization and a better bottom line profit would be attained but not so, the ones which have been creative and ICT savvy, have become lean and hard hitting have won the cake.
PROMOTION and yes the pillars of Marketing are functions that are and should be embedded in work ethics of all departments from Administration to Sales as everyone uses products or services from other departments. Business operates internally as a spider web linking departments and externally linking with suppliers and customers. There is need when I say from grassroots, to create internal systems or Intra sites whereby the various functions are linked together thereby creating internal markets for products from other departments. The Accounts department offers a carefully created system of documenting and analyzing the profitability and cost effectiveness of other departments, the Administration department offers an enabling environment for others to do their work and the like. From each department there are resources and data which other departments can utilize and as such can be stored on and accessed via an Intranet (internal network) and so on. On the Extranet, reporting data from various branches within the network of related branches can be shared and performance compared of which branches are doing better than others on set targets, or which branches still hold stock on various products and the like. From there Websites can then be created but notice that you have a system or culture of sellers and buyers, a consumer today being a manufacturer of another product and the Internet then functions as a complete unit. Now consider the colossal and or ripple effect if every other business is linked up on the Internet. Who has to rent out a large retail space and for what? You eliminate the need for large retail outlets. One can order anything without moving away from his or her computer or mobile phone. All you need is warehouses and lots of them. Now let’s get back on track we are talking of PROMOTION, instead of confining your market to a small village or city, the Internet or website in particular which is a major tool in the ICT era can be viewed by connected people all over the world. Now instead of having a market of just 13million or so Zimbos now you have billions of consumers who can access you and your products. Ain’t that grand? The face of PROMOTION has to change in this era, old tactics will not work we need to reinvent the wheel here. Whatever product you are making, remember that now money has changed hands from the old aged to a vibrant middle class who are mostly in the ages between 25 and 50. Now what products do those people need and more importantly how can you get to them or PROMOTE such products, do you use the conventional methods or creativity is needed here. By the way what happens to the data that we all submit when we buy a new cellphone line, open a new bank account, fill in some form somewhere in a government department? That information is priceless and there is need for us to begin to be a Database centered country if we are to fully harness ICTs for Marketing and PROMOTION. We need to open up more and more on the uses and access of data such that information sharing and data gathering can be promoted to the betterment of our own cause. Imagine if I wanted to market razor blades for shaving and I would just go to a Cellular Network company and asked them to broadcast my advertisement to men of a certain age (the assumption being that men are the only ones who shave using razor blades of the manufactured nature), in Harare say, for a fee of course, how much would that achieve. Such data is available or should be available the simple criteria being used having been obtained from the time of contracting one company when you fill in a form denoting your age, sex and so on.
ICTs are the major reason why some countries and companies continue to flourish while others continue to be basket cases. Our level of backwardness is so much that we are amongst the last in an index of Network Readiness in the world. Well we will talk more on that next week but we need to seriously engage if we are to go further than extinction. Imagine the amount of money floating in space and how you can get a hold of it. That is the new face of PROMOTION. By the way can someone tell me which television station one has to advertise on if you need to capture the Zimbabwean market? I wonder! I know for a fact that most Africans especially Zimbos know more about the UEFA cup and the FA Cup than about our own major leagues (reasons are said to abound). That should be PROMOTION, but how? ICT - Information and Communication Technology. When the idea of the network of networks kicked off, business or the exchanging of wealth was forbidden. That was not the intended purpose but hey, these guys later noticed that there was lots of gravy embedded in the concept. Can you handle nobody owns the Internet! “It’ a free for all.” Now let’s get to it and see how we can PROMOTE our products there and make money from anywhere anytime mari hairari (money does not sleep).
“Wherefore seeing we also are encompassed with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” Hebrews 12 verse 1.
friends that way. We will have to make friends on the Internet. Libraries will still be there, but not many people will visit them anymore and they will be knocked down. ” — Nicholas Phibbs, age 12 Surrey, UK
PROMOTION
One of the major battles which business has had to fight for time immemorial is the war of costs. How do you bring this devil down and kill of your competition? On the other hand, the customer has had to engage in an opposite but challenging war with the central rallying point being how to achieve value for money, maximize, get more for less. Two major events have taken place in Africa if not the world, within the past three decades or so, the first being the emergence of a strong black middle class with so much “cash” to spend and the second being the emergence of a vibrant and forceful new age dubbed the Information Age with Information and Communication Technologies being the driving force. Mix the ideas in this serving and you have business with costs that they are trying to contain on one hand and a middle class which has lots of spending power on the other but is not necessarily gullible as to buy at any price (this excludes luxury cars of course).
When the patriarchs of the National (or Global or Galactic) Information Infrastructure now known as the Internet, were busy discussing the possibilities of such technology, little did they perceive as to how robust and useful the “final” product would be and the uses generations to come would attach to it. For business to flourish in the international domain without harnessing internet tools and fully utilizing them, would be tantamount to milking a bull. Markets are fast evolving and to stay in the past is more perilous than death. What with the advent of mobile telephones, broadband internet and other related technologies. If a twelve year old boy could perceive that one day computers would do the shopping in virtual supermarkets and school would change too, then surely our mature minds have to seriously engage. The possibilities are endless and the benefits too numerous but where do we start? The answer is not too far from us it’s the grass roots. From intranets to extranets to the internet (WWW - world wide web).
One of the major problems we have as a people (Africa) is that we believe that someone other than us should initiate progress, we look further than at ourselves. In turn we tend to play the blame game, if something is wrong blame the government or the authorities or the manager or the supervisor. We are never at fault for the predicaments that we find ourselves in, it is always someone else’s fault. Hence we have watched others develop whilst we continue to grope in the dark. The internet has been a growing force for the past two or so decades with major progress occurring within the past ten years. Don’t forget that ten years is a long time in deed more so when you look at this industry with new inventions on a daily basis. Just study the history of the founding fathers of the game they had little sleep if at all trying to come up with new programs, new inventions and acquiring massive programming hours in various computer laboratories. Those long hours spent have created new ways of doing things look at Amazon.com Inc an American-based multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, which is America's and one of the world’s largest online retailer, with nearly three times the internet sales revenue of runner up Staples, Inc. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, Inc. in 1994 and launched it online in 1995. It started as an on-line bookstore but soon diversified to product lines of VHS, DVD, music CDs and MP3s, computer software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys, etc. Amazon has established separate websites in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, China, and Japan and also provides international shipping to certain countries for some of its products. A competitor to Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Inc. is referred to as the largest book retailer in the United States, operating mainly through its Barnes & Noble Booksellers chain of bookstores headquartered in lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The company operates the chain of small "B. Dalton Booksellers" stores in malls. The company is known for large, upscale retail outlets, many of which contain a café serving Starbucks Coffee, and for competitive discounting of bestsellers. Most stores also sell magazines, newspapers, DVDs, graphic novels, gifts, games, and music. Video games and related items were sold in the company's GameStop retail outlets until October 2004, when the division was spun-off into an independent company. The summarized story of Staples, Inc. is that it is the world's largest office supply retail store chain, with over 2,000 stores worldwide in 27 countries. The Framingham, MA based company has catalog and delivery businesses and serves customers in Argentina (as Officenet), Austria, Brazil (as StaplesOfficenet), Canada (as Staples, in Quebec as Bureau En Gros), China, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Portugal, United Kingdom and the United States. Staples, Inc. sells supplies, office machines, promotional products, furniture, technology and business services both in stores and online via Staples.com. The company opened its first store in Brighton, Massachusetts in 1986.
That background information on its own does not amount to much so let’s get into the number crunching part of things. Amazon.com Inc which is in the Retail Industry had Revenue of US$ 19,166 billion in 2008 Operating Income was US$842 million, Net Income US$645 million with an employee base of just 20 500 people. Now look at Barnes & Noble which began as a Printing business in 1873 in Wheaton Illinois (USA) and then opened doors in New York in 1917 with one of many bookstores to come. The Revenue of Barnes & Noble in 2007 from an employee base of 40 000 people was US$5,8 billion from 800 stores. Take a further step and go over the figures of Staples Inc which was founded in 1986 as a Retail concern majoring in Office Supplies which generated Revenue of US$27 billion in 2008. What do those figures tell you? A creative mind will tell that among the three concerns two have generally harnessed more of the “new” ways of doing things – less employees and more technology hence more work covered. Though the figures are from two different and distinct years the underlying factors and constants still hold true that the organizations formed in the Information Age have had a greater advantage due to harnessing of more computer power and creative PROMOTION via ICTs. You would have thought that the “older” companies would do better in resource utilization and a better bottom line profit would be attained but not so, the ones which have been creative and ICT savvy, have become lean and hard hitting have won the cake.
PROMOTION and yes the pillars of Marketing are functions that are and should be embedded in work ethics of all departments from Administration to Sales as everyone uses products or services from other departments. Business operates internally as a spider web linking departments and externally linking with suppliers and customers. There is need when I say from grassroots, to create internal systems or Intra sites whereby the various functions are linked together thereby creating internal markets for products from other departments. The Accounts department offers a carefully created system of documenting and analyzing the profitability and cost effectiveness of other departments, the Administration department offers an enabling environment for others to do their work and the like. From each department there are resources and data which other departments can utilize and as such can be stored on and accessed via an Intranet (internal network) and so on. On the Extranet, reporting data from various branches within the network of related branches can be shared and performance compared of which branches are doing better than others on set targets, or which branches still hold stock on various products and the like. From there Websites can then be created but notice that you have a system or culture of sellers and buyers, a consumer today being a manufacturer of another product and the Internet then functions as a complete unit. Now consider the colossal and or ripple effect if every other business is linked up on the Internet. Who has to rent out a large retail space and for what? You eliminate the need for large retail outlets. One can order anything without moving away from his or her computer or mobile phone. All you need is warehouses and lots of them. Now let’s get back on track we are talking of PROMOTION, instead of confining your market to a small village or city, the Internet or website in particular which is a major tool in the ICT era can be viewed by connected people all over the world. Now instead of having a market of just 13million or so Zimbos now you have billions of consumers who can access you and your products. Ain’t that grand? The face of PROMOTION has to change in this era, old tactics will not work we need to reinvent the wheel here. Whatever product you are making, remember that now money has changed hands from the old aged to a vibrant middle class who are mostly in the ages between 25 and 50. Now what products do those people need and more importantly how can you get to them or PROMOTE such products, do you use the conventional methods or creativity is needed here. By the way what happens to the data that we all submit when we buy a new cellphone line, open a new bank account, fill in some form somewhere in a government department? That information is priceless and there is need for us to begin to be a Database centered country if we are to fully harness ICTs for Marketing and PROMOTION. We need to open up more and more on the uses and access of data such that information sharing and data gathering can be promoted to the betterment of our own cause. Imagine if I wanted to market razor blades for shaving and I would just go to a Cellular Network company and asked them to broadcast my advertisement to men of a certain age (the assumption being that men are the only ones who shave using razor blades of the manufactured nature), in Harare say, for a fee of course, how much would that achieve. Such data is available or should be available the simple criteria being used having been obtained from the time of contracting one company when you fill in a form denoting your age, sex and so on.
ICTs are the major reason why some countries and companies continue to flourish while others continue to be basket cases. Our level of backwardness is so much that we are amongst the last in an index of Network Readiness in the world. Well we will talk more on that next week but we need to seriously engage if we are to go further than extinction. Imagine the amount of money floating in space and how you can get a hold of it. That is the new face of PROMOTION. By the way can someone tell me which television station one has to advertise on if you need to capture the Zimbabwean market? I wonder! I know for a fact that most Africans especially Zimbos know more about the UEFA cup and the FA Cup than about our own major leagues (reasons are said to abound). That should be PROMOTION, but how? ICT - Information and Communication Technology. When the idea of the network of networks kicked off, business or the exchanging of wealth was forbidden. That was not the intended purpose but hey, these guys later noticed that there was lots of gravy embedded in the concept. Can you handle nobody owns the Internet! “It’ a free for all.” Now let’s get to it and see how we can PROMOTE our products there and make money from anywhere anytime mari hairari (money does not sleep).
“Wherefore seeing we also are encompassed with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” Hebrews 12 verse 1.
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