e-Skills Academy of SA launched

At the official inauguration of the e-Skills Academy of SA, President Mbeki said the academy had an important role to play as it involved the young people of our country upon whom the future of the country depended. ‘This [academy] should also help in our on-going efforts to extend ICT access to all our people as a catalyst to lift the poor out of poverty’, he said. The e-Skills Academy is aimed at accelerating the development of professional qualifications and ‘job-ready’ skills in the ICT sector. It offers internationally accredited courses and certified qualifications that are designed to meet requirements defined by technology users throughout, both the private and public sectors of the SA economy. President Mbeki said ICT has been identified as an important contributor to the growth and development of the country’s economy. He also added that one of the challenges facing SA was that globalisation has brought about intense competition with regard to skilled workers. ‘Accordingly, it is important to train as large a number of skilled workers as possible, so that, even in the event of migration of skills to developed countries, the developing countries will themselves be able to maintain a competitive edge’.

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Arabian brainpower

On the shores of the Red Sea, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is launching a university with the ambition of making it a world leader in science and technology. Not only will the school – called King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) – have one of the 10 largest university endowments in the world, but it will also allow women and men to study side by side. The greatest challenge that the potentially revolutionary school now faces is attracting top-rated talent to a geographically isolated university with no track record. As enticement, KAUST will offer new labs with the best equipment and award grants to scientists. KAUST will also endeavour to overcome any isolation researchers might feel by keeping them linked with the rest of the world – allowing scientists to maintain appointments at other universities, for instance. To attract students, the university will initially offer full scholarships, not only to all graduate students but also to overseas juniors and seniors to cover remaining tuition at their current institutions in return for commitments to enrol at KAUST.

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The digital divide

Business Day reports that, according to the MD of Pearson Education, Steven Naudé, the biggest challenge in education today is bridging the divide between those born into a digital world and those who were not. He also stated that research and experience showed that traditional computer-based education was not very successful in dealing with the challenges of higher education in SA. This is partly because many students were ‘digital natives’ — people who had never known a non-digital world — while most lecturers were ‘digital immigrants’, ie, not born into the digital world but fascinated by new technology and willing to adapt to using it. Another reason for failure of electronic learning was rooted in the fact that many lecturers resorted to simply putting their class notes on a computer without reinterpreting them in any way. Moreover, testing had been in multiple choice; there were high licence fees for the software; and there was poor interaction between student and lecturer. All of this had led to low usage. What was needed, said Naudé, was computer-based learning that included frequent self-assessment for students to determine where their strengths and weaknesses lay, and work on the weaknesses through remedial ‘intervention’.
Ioltechnology reports that Internet service provider, WebAfrica, in conjunction with the Western Cape education department's technology project, Khanya, has invested in bridging the digital divide of 11 previously disadvantaged schools through bandwidth sponsorships. Khanya was launched in 2001 to increase the capacity of educators. They aim to create technology centres to ensure that educators in Western Cape schools are empowered to use technology for the delivery of curriculum to learners. Matthew Tagg, MD of WebAfrica pointed out that: ‘The government simply doesn't have the capacity to provide Internet access for all the schools, so with the help of Khanya, we were able to help enable these schools to become more technically independent.’ The principal at one of the beneficiary schools said that the school is exploring the opportunity of making the Internet available to the community after hours, thereby making it possible for the school to benefit from the sponsorship financially.
South African telecommunications innovator Rael Lissoos has been named Social Entrepreneur of the Year for his project Dabba which brings cheap mobile communication technology to townships in South Africa. His Dabba Telecoms project was honoured for the way in which it uses modern technology to bridge the digital divide. His company DABBA Telecoms provides the township of Orange Farm south of Johannesburg with cheap to no cost VoIP mobile. Dabba Telecoms is a continuation of Lissoos' ongoing work in technology and education that started with the Learning Channel Campus, an extension of the programme from television to the Internet. In order to see as many schools as possible benefit from the online Learning Channel content, Lissoos founded Video Out Knowledge In (VIKO), which allows schools to connect all their computers to one central computer that holds the relevant educational content. The computers are connected via a network, thereby eliminating the need for an Internet connection, and removing financial and technological barriers to access. Lissoos believes that telecommunication companies in SA are over charging their customers in what he refers to as ‘pure greed.’

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New skills development centre

According to Engineering News, IBM recently launched its Africa Innovation Centre, part of its $120m, two-year investment which included new market expansion initiatives. IBM Software senior vice president and group executive Steve Mills commented that the centre was a ‘landmark investment’ for IBM, because it represented the company’s commitment to be a partner in Africa’s growth agenda. IBM is already working with almost 300 software companies in sub-Saharan Africa. The new centre would offer access to IBM's global network of 39 IBM Innovation Centres and 60 research and development labs. The centre would showcase business approaches and open technologies such as cloud computing (in cloud computing, dynamically-shared computing resources are virtualised and accessed as a service, making it a particularly attractive proposition for small to large-sized companies in Africa), Web 2.0 technologies, service-oriented architecture, and systems management. It would also demonstrate next generation banking systems offered at the Banking Centre of Excellence as part of the new innovation centre, and environmentally-friendly computing designs. This year IBM will also donate a $5m Blue Gene supercomputer to the Meraka Institute, which would be hosted by the Centre for High Performance Computing in Cape Town. It will be used by a range of stakeholders on the continent for challenging social, economic, and environmental issues, as well as for skills development. The deputy president, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, welcomed the initiative, saying that ‘We are highly energised by IBM's investment because it directly responds to our call for increased private sector investment into sustainable initiatives that advance priority technical skills. It is also encouraging that the company's plans integrate the entire sub-Saharan Africa, which assures us that in the long term we will secure a thriving South Africa in a prosperous region.’

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Microsoft investment in SA learners

In 2003, Microsoft launched a five-year, $250m initiative called Microsoft Partners in Learning, through which it has been working closely with government policymakers, teachers and community leaders in 100 countries, including SA. In the past four years, Microsoft has provided training for more than 17 000 South African teachers on how to use information technology in the classroom. Now, the company has announced its intention to supply productivity and server software worth about R750m to public schools, with an expected reach of 26 000 government schools and 11m learners across the country. Education director-general Duncan Hindle expressed great appreciation for Microsoft's investment and its continued contribution to the education of South African pupils, pointing out that ‘The Education Department would like to see to it that in the next five years pupils leave schools being computer literate.’ According to Hindle, currently only 9 000 schools have computer laboratories. He also said that ‘… teachers aren't ready to integrate this software into the schools and in the classrooms yet. But the department is working hard to make sure teachers will understand and be able to use the software properly and effectively.’ Each of the schools that participate in the programme will receive free licences for a range of software, including Microsoft Office 2007, Vista Business, Visual Studio Pro, Exchange Server, SQL Server and Microsoft Encarta multimedia encyclopaedia. Chris Roberts, Microsoft's industry director in the public sector for the Middle East and Africa, said in addition to teacher training, the company was committed to helping schools increase access to technology for every pupil and teacher, and to building strong infrastructure that supported learning as well as the administration of education.

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Cloud computing

An article in [email protected] suggests that the next big upgrade in corporate systems departments may be something that will be used but never seen. Cloud computing is the next step in the evolution of software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology. Through SaaS, companies can access applications and large amounts of virtual computing power without buying it. Instead, the application is hosted offsite by some other company, which cuts maintenance problems and most of the setup costs for users. Some SaaS applications may operate through a connection between only two or three computers. Cloud computing represents a ‘much larger-scale implementation,’ says Haluk Demirkan, professor of information systems at the W. P. Carey School of Business. ‘Now we're talking about thousands of computers linked together via the Internet or some other network,’ he explains. Demirkan uses email as an example. If you get a gmail account on Google, you're accessing the application via the SaaS model. However, when Arizona State University contracted with Google to run more than 50 000 student email accounts last year, the game changed from SaaS to cloud computing. The reason for this is that Google is managing the entire service, from infrastructure to software applications. In short, the provider manages the service, while the user pays according to how much computing is used. This model is probably called ‘cloud computing’ because the computer functionality happens out there ‘in the clouds.’ Regardless of its origin, experts are saying this isn't some pie-in-the-sky buzzword. According to Gartner ‘by 2011, early technology adopters will forgo capital expenditures and instead purchase 40% of their IT infrastructure as a service. Increased high-speed bandwidth makes it practical to locate infrastructure at other sites and still receive the same response times. Enterprises believe that as service-oriented architecture (SOA) becomes common, 'cloud computing' will take off, thus untying applications from specific infrastructure.’ Not only is cloud computing a speedier way of getting IT together, and more cost-efficient; it has the potential to apply the kind of power handled by today’s supercomputers (tens of trillions of computations per second) to business problems.

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Siemens and open source

Ioltechnology reports that Siemens was previously a wholly Microsoft house with no sign of offering open source. Recently, however, Siemens identified open source as being a ‘very viable business case’, hoping that its open source strategy will find a new niche in an already highly-competitive market. One of those niches, says Felix Honigwachs, head of Siemens' open source centre of competency, is the South African public sector. Siemens already has relationships with a number of government departments including the departments of science and technology and labour. The open source unit will look to expand these to include open source desktop, server and networking services. On the desktop, Honigwachs says that the unit plans to offer either Red Hat or Ubuntu. ‘The advantage of having both Red Hat desktops and servers is the ability to have a single management tool. But in government there is a preference for Ubuntu. We like Ubuntu and we have good quality skills on Ubuntu,’ he said. The open source centre of competency was started at Siemens just three months ago and has already started hiring the skilled staff it needs. The unit will initially be looking to employ between six and 10 Linux-skilled staff, some of whom will be ‘upskilled’ internally with the remainder sourced from outside the company – the company has already snapped up some of SA's brightest open source minds.

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Technology in the classroom

A state-funded school in Boston provides a glimpse of the classroom of the future. There are no textbooks; students receive laptops at the start of each day, returning them at the end; teachers and students maintain blogs; staff and parents chat on instant messaging software; and assignments are submitted through electronic ‘drop boxes’ on the school's website. Unlike traditional schools, students work at different levels in the same classroom. Children with special needs rub shoulders with high performers; computers track a range of aptitude levels, allowing teachers to tailor their teaching to their students' weakest areas. According to Michael Horn, co-author of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, ‘… 50% of high school courses will be taught online by 2013. It's about one percent right now.’ Online tutoring is also expanding rapidly. Bangalore-based TutorVista, which launched online US services in 2005, estimates its average global growth in active students at 22% a month - all taught by ‘e-tutors’ mostly in India. Horn expects demand for teachers to fall and virtual schools to boost achievement in a USA education system where only two-thirds of teenagers graduate from high school - a proportion that drops to 50% for black Americans and Hispanics.