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Assié-Lumumba, N’Dri T. (2004). Cyberspace, Distance Learning, and Higher Education in Developing Countries: Old and Emergent Issues of Access, Pedagogy, and Knowledge Production. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

Pp. ix + 253
$69 (paper)     ISBN 90-04-13121-3

Reviewed by John Rothfork
Northern Arizona University

May 24, 2005

Instead of “developing countries,” this book is about Africa; and instead of Africa, it is pretty much only about one country, South Africa. I am not complaining. It is an interesting book that caused me to spend many hours on the Net following links to discover a whole new world of ICT (information and communication technology) resources and strategies used for development in Africa and elsewhere. Much of this has sprung up like mushrooms in the last five years and promises exciting developments for the future. The editor is a distinguished professor of Africana Studies at Cornell <http://www.asrc.cornell.edu/assie.html> and the book is volume 94 in Brill’s International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology. Having taught abroad and bought my share of computers since 1985, I was intrigued—and skeptical—about the possibilities for online distance education in the developing world. The first essay quickly showed me how limited and stereotyped my ideas were about using the Internet for distance education. I identify and review each of the chapters in the following.

1. ICT4D: A Frontier for Higher Education in Developing Nations, Royal D. Colle and Raul Roman.

The acronym in the title stands for “information and communication technology for development.” The Cornell University authors cite an American study from 1999 to say that only “one out of 250 to 400 persons” in Africa has access to the Internet and almost all of those live in South Africa or in the North African Mediterranean countries (pp.18-19). They also inform us that the cost of accessing the Internet for only 20 hours a month is $60, which you may suspect is “higher than the average African salary” for a month (p. 24 < http://www.internet.org.za/costs.html >). If you have the American model of online distance education in mind that assumes most students possess a personal computer linked to the Internet, these numbers seem to end the discussion about online distance education. The African model, however, is often one in which “radio broadcasting is expected to be used for relaying information drawn and edited from the Internet” (p. 28). Knowing that the Internet has no organization and is not comparable to a library, I wondered about the research and rhetorical skills of the village computer expert who may be surfing the Web to find answers to local questions and solutions to local problems. Perhaps I should have known about agencies like the Canadian Communication Initiative Web site that provides “17,000-plus pages” of material to offer help with communication and development work. It also hosts “Soul Beat Africa,” which offers a forum for discussing communication technology and applications <http://www.comminit.com/mission.html>. For satellite radio as the primary means of reaching a remote audience, see First Voice International <http://www.firstvoiceint.org/How/Satellite.html>. Because radios that can directly receive satellite broadcasts wholesale for $70, the relatively high price means that the audience is often a community or group of listeners who may be students in a distance class. As with Internet content, some local radio stations also rebroadcast satellite programming. (As I write this, I must confess to listening to the African music channel, Ngoma (drum), on satellite radio <http://www.xmradio.com/programming/channel_page.jsp?ch=102>. An antenna and interface for my radio cost about $100 from Ebay and monthly XM service charges have risen to about $14 a month.) If you visit First Voice International, look at the programming for the Africa Learning Channel (ALC) to see its community education focus. And, if you are really intrigued, First Voice offers unpaid internships for graduate and undergraduate students.

In the computer-Internet-radio model, a village expert may act as something of a reference librarian. With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, Cornell University offers a “library in a box” in the form of a CD-ROM collection containing back issues of over 140 agricultural journals that offer 2.2 million pages on 426 CDs (p. 22). The Cornell Web site identifies nearly 50 countries that have acquired the library <http://teeal.cornell.edu/>. The price of $15,300 may seem expensive ($36 per disk), but the Web site explains that buying the print journals would cost $900,000. Another model—that of the telecentre—is strangely familiar because I live on the edge of the Navajo Nation where a Bill and Melinda Gates project put computers with Internet access into all 110 Navajo Chapter Houses (cf. community centers) using solar panels to provide electricity <http://www.millionsolarroofs.org/articles/static/1/1084897730_1023713684.html> . Telecentres in Hungary and Western Australia provide models. They bundle services we might expect to find at Kinkos and Blockbuster with those offered by a public library. Telecentres feature Internet access, desktop publishing, community newspapers, books, audio and video recordings, photocopying, faxing, and telephone services. Africa is also adopting the telecentre model for education, communication, and community development. In Uganda “60 percent of the villagers are telecentre users” (p. 25). I was never able to reach the Nakaseke Telecentre site <http://www.nakaseke.or.ug/>, but there are several descriptions of the project on the Web, including one from Unesco’s “African Communities” <http://www.unesco.org/webworld/highlights/africa_com_130799.html> and another in the United Nations online magazine, International Telecommunication Union <http://www.itu.int/itunews/issue/2002/05/nakaseke.html>. More links to telecentres in Africa are offered at <http://perso.wanadoo.fr/christian.carrier/Africa.htm>. The telecentres illustrate an interesting way in which the Internet can be used in the developing world and there is lot of information available about them, mostly accessible through UN sites on the Internet.

If you click through the links offered at the bottom of this review to read some of the pages, you will probably share my frustration at rarely getting to the primary material outside of South Africa. When you do, the links never go very far. Obviously, this is caused by limited technology, but it also illustrates that “Africa generates 0.4 percent” of the “2.1 billion Web pages on-line.” If we leave South Africa out, “the estimate is 0.02 percent” of Internet pages are authored by Africans (p. 30). The Internet may offer something of a free library, and radio may reach most of the people in Africa, but as we might expect, “the greatest barrier keeping people […] away from information portals was a lack of locally relevant information.” As with TV, there is some concern that “developing countries are being ‘invaded’ by foreign ideas and values” (p. 31). Most of the material “offered by African telecentres is in English” and despite the emphasis on education, health, and economic development by the various sponsors of ICT projects, Africans primarily use telecentres “to contact family and friends (principally through the telephone),” prepare social announcements, “and find sources of personal entertainment.” I am surprised to find no mention of video games. Perhaps it should not be a surprise that “There is hardly any use of telecentre resources to find professional or practical information for economic or educational purposes” (p. 32). It is not just that there are other interests in life besides education. One report explains that information is a means to an end and if there are no roads to reach markets and no money to buy medicine, then agricultural and health information remains academic (p. 36).

Speaking of academic, the authors say, “one of the oddest characteristics of the telecentre and ICT” development “is the absence of universities.” I don’t think this is especially strange. Rather, the problem here is the opposite of what I confessed to at the beginning of this review. Colle and Roman should know better than to expect university professors in the developing world to be dedicated to village or community development. When I was affiliated with one of the Indian Institutes of Technology, I had a neighbor who regularly admonished me for not having a better sense of our august status to, for example, jump the queue when waiting for the bus into the city. The authors suggest that community development using ICT methods “is likely to require a major shift in the culture of colleges and universities in Africa and Asia” (p. 38). And what, I wonder, would cause this shift? A few areas in higher education, such as professional education, agriculture, and health (especially HIV prevention), may sign on for community development, but the culture of higher education, worldwide, is committed to individual competition and esoteric research. If the developing world doesn’t actually do much research, professors still provide an audience for it, just as they were trained to be in graduate school.

The authors do illustrate rare insight by suggesting what is wrong with much of the research and assessment done on telecentres and other ICT initiatives, which are conceived as catalysts for community development. They say the studies “do not gauge what is happening in the field (how is the technology being used, if used at all, by whom, and for what, and what are the social constraints and opportunities for equitable and effective use).” Instead, most studies “concentrate on national structural factors” of budget and administration (p. 47). The Acacia study found only two out of 36 African telecentres solvent, one in Senegal and another in South Africa (p. 48). Again Colle and Roman make an obvious but often overlooked point when they suggest that most villagers do not “know what a computer or the Internet is,” much less how it might be used as a tool to improve things for them and their community. It is not enough to simply open a telecentre. Some community work needs to be done to illustrate to those with no online experience how the Internet can be a valuable resource. We might be surprised to learn that in South Africa putting a telecentre in a library proved to be a problem because “People were intimidated by the library and what it means; they think it is for ‘intellectual people.’ They do not feel it as their own community center if it is located within the library” (p. 49). Ironically, the suggestion is that using the Internet is less intellectual than leafing through a magazine in the library!

This is the most informative chapter in the book, but Colle and Roman end with a mixture of exasperation and idealism hoping that despite all the problems, African universities will more fully participate in “the ICT revolution” (p. 52). The author of the next essay explains that most university presidents “are selected by heads of states on the basis of political preference” and are, perhaps, more interested in their own prestige than in public service or education (p. 87).

2. Partnership in Higher Education in Africa: Communications Implications beyond the 2000s by Jacques Habib Sy

Jacques Habib Sy knows how to write for publicity (see, for example, this description of his 2003 press conference in Dakar <http://www.osiris.sn/article567.html>). His contribution is reworked from a paper given in 1997 at a conference on higher education held in Botswana. Habib Sy is the director of something called Aid Transparency in Dakar <http://www.ue-acp.org/en/forum/presentations/sy.html>. This is an agency that ironically seeks to protect aid recipients from donors! Among its mission statements is this: “To publicize violations of people's rights to a fair delivery of international development assistance and access to relevant information on and independent evaluation of aid” <http://www.justiceinitiative.org/db/resource2?res_id=101956&preprint=1>. I am sure that I do not understand the intricacies, problems, and dangers involved in the “business” of international aid, but I do recognize Habib Sy’s recycled Marxist rhetoric in warning us that “The promises of the information age are all about money and financial leveraging” (p. 66) and that “the concept of a virtual university” is offered as “a panacea to Africa’s severe education crisis” by the USA as part of its plans for “global hegemony” (p. 67). Dr. Habib Sy’s 1984 dissertation for a Ph.D. from Howard University was on the “Capitalist Mode of Communication.” Habib Sy uses a lot of “shoulds” in his essay. For example, he writes that the abject poverty of at least half of Africa “should prompt African scholars and decision makers […] to stop fantasizing about the Internet” (p. 72), but African leaders also “should provide the entire nation with an enabling environment making telecommunications services available to the university, the private sector, and communities” (p. 84). Capitalist methods may be slow to deliver such services, but it produces more than the rhetoric of outrage. Habib Sy complains that capitalists “sell information and documentation to end-users, when instead universal access to the world’s scientific and cultural heritage should be guaranteed to all” (italics added, p. 68). Guaranteed by whom? Someone must pay the bills. The question is not about rights or censorship or tyranny. Once people are delivered from oppression, the Enlightenment authors argued, they remain ignorant. Instead of talking about how some specific technology might better conditions in some community, Habib Sy wants to rectify the situation in which the “100 richest persons in the world control more assets than the combined fortune of one and a half billion habitants in the world” (p. 69).

In his novels and non-fiction work (including his great African novel, A Bend in the River) V.S. Naipaul has responded to the moral outrage that Habib Sy echoes. Expecting deliverance ends by empowering charismatic thugs like Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot. Of course, there are right-wing thugs as well, such as Mobutu and Idi Amin. Naipaul is more incensed by the Islamic version of the virtue and justice argument, which condemns the West for having no religion or virtue. Apparently, we abandoned these in the Renaissance and Enlightenment to pursue godless science and technology. Instead of seeing this as a change of faith, dedication, and culture, the Islamic critique considers this to be a loss of faith motivated by iniquity. We have either no culture or one devoted to hedonism. Since the virtuous have no experience or understanding of how advanced technology is produced by university education and research, they view it as a natural product that should be equally distributed. This is illustrated by Habib Sy’s outraged demand that “the world’s scientific and cultural heritage should be guaranteed to all.” Naipual’s advice is for the virtuous to stop praying and complaining, and begin professing in science, if they want the technological products and services that scientific culture produces. Naipaul’s explanation makes Habib Sy’s essay either a lament or an ungracious request for aid that is really a Marxist complaint. I understand something of the colonial holocaust and legacy of slavery, and will admit to “knowing” far less about these than the Senegalese professor. But, if Habib Sy fears that the Internet and distance education over it are instruments of U.S. hegemony and capitalist neo-colonialism, isn’t the answer some kind of self-development rather than a moral drone about what someone else should do? Habib Sy knows all of this as well as Naipaul. For example, he writes that:

Telephone sets, computers, even radio sets, microwave technology, optical fibres, switching equipment, earth-stations technology, satellite dishes, connectors, transponder hardware, submarine cables, and the like are all imported at extremely prohibitive costs.

The options seem to be to ignore them in prayer, to demand them in the in the name of justice, to fight over possession of limited imports, or to try to produce them. In the next sentence, instead of asking for African universities to be more dedicated to science, engineering, industry, and community development, he complains that African universities are “remnants of nineteenth-century technology introduced by colonialism” (p. 72).

Habib Sy does make two good suggestions, but he knows they are likely to be ignored. He wishes to scrap African higher education as a remnant of colonialism and make it over again as a kind of partner and extension of something like the telecentres. India did something like this in the 1960s. After independence in 1947, national policy wavered between following Mahatma Gandhi back to virtue and the village temple, and following Jawaharlal Nehru to the university and accepting the policy of seeking international aid from anyone who would give it. Nehru was deft at playing U.S. aid against Soviet aid for the benefit of India. Indian universities were also colonial remnants controlled by faculty pedants and student militants well versed in anti-colonial and Marxist complaints about justice. Instead of fighting to gain control of the schools, Nehru—in a typically adroit Indian nonviolent move—simply by-passed them to create a half dozen Indian Institutes of Technology, each with help from an international partner. Yes, half the IIT graduates continue to come to America, but communication and commerce today goes both ways and India is immensely better off, in part, thanks to thousands of IIT graduates. Instead of considering how some similar model might work in Africa, Habib Sy adapts tired Marxist rhetoric to complain that young and promising scholars, like the brilliant Nigerian computer scientist Philip Emeagwali, are forced “to sell their skills to other countries” or market their skills on the “international private sector” (p.75).

Dr. Habib Sy’s second suggestion may sound strange for a Marxist, but not if we understand that his Marxist rhetoric is a kind of capitalist academic performance and marketable skill. In any case, Habib Sy argues against the policy advocated by OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries that pressures “African governments to sell their telecommunications industries to multinational corporations,” which he believes “may lead to Africa’s economic, financial, and political recolonization” (pp. 78-9). With no other real choices in the post Cold War world, Habib Sy trusts African government officials to control, nurture, and regulate these for the public good.

One of the interesting sidebars in a book like this allows us to compare research methods. In the first essay, Professors Royal D. Colle and Raul Roman offered 20 or more urls, which often, like the UNESCO portal, open or lead to literally hundred of other pages. In comparison, Habib Sy cites print resources and relies on elaborate flowcharts and diagrams. Without pressing this too far, I felt that after some study I understood where Habib Sy was coming from and rather predictably going to with all the shoulds for national and international development. In contrast, Colle and Roman put me in touch with a wealth of resources to let me find out for myself what is going on in regard to ICT and African development. Perhaps it is too early and perhaps I’m too much of an advocate for online research methods, but the switch in methods promises to do far more than merely offer different forms of the same information.

3. Implementing The Online Learning Community in Africa: A Unisa Case Study by J.F. Heydenrych, P. Higgs, and L.J. Van Niekerk

These authors are administrators and education professors at Unisa (University of South Africa). Their article offers good advice on online distance education pedagogy. It is also concerned with the opposite end of African community development. Unisa is a mega-university serving 200,000 students and hopeful of establishing a reputation to rival the Open University, University of Phoenix, or University of Maryland (University College) as a distance learning provider. In 2003 the authors say Unisa enrolled 130,000 distance students (p. 93). Most of this is done the old-fashioned way with print materials and physical mail. A 1998 study “compares the institution to a nineteenth-century correspondence college” (p. 94). The Web site advises international students and those “in remote or isolated areas” that “All learning materials are sent by airmail or may possibly in future be downloaded from the Internet” <http://www.unisa.ac.za/Default.asp?Cmd=ViewContent&ContentID=6027>. There is a “Students Online” area that seems to be in the early stages of development <https://sol.unisa.ac.za/>.

The authors do not tell us about the difficulties of restructuring and redefining education to be more about learners’ needs than about professors’ lectures, but they do quote someone who suggests “that it would be easier to create new institutions of higher education based on online technologies than to convert old industrial-model institutions doing mostly conservative correspondence teaching” (p. 96). In part, this suggests the U.S. experience with schools like the University of Phoenix and DeVry. Less visibly, established universities have simply by-passed recalcitrant faculty by shifting resources away from tenure track jobs to fund computer support and distance education as new “departments” and functions in the university. For better or worse, this has caused the U.S. to avoid fights by faculty to ensure “that technology is used as a tool or as a means to further academic ends.” Such control, the authors say, will require “aggressive intervention on the part of academic leaders and faculty members” (p. 98). So far, the technology divide has proved too great. Serious, traditional scholars are content not to waste their time online, which has left academic standards or quality control in the hands of administrators, professional education, and MA-level developers.

Interestingly, the three authors argue for an online model of education that is “facilitated” rather than delivered by lecture. Their model is also learner centered relying on “constructivist learning through dialogue” (p. 101). Perhaps the opposite of this is a recitation of memorized material. This model, in which “The learner should no longer receive information, but instead construct knowledge,” was perhaps most aggressively advocated by the University of Phoenix. Other components of online learning are also easily recognized: team and peer methods, challenges to students instead of models and dictates about what to think, and communication skills in presenting reports or arguments (p.102). I smiled at their way of describing traditional education in which “Learners are put through rituals in this process without being able to supply input” (p. 103).

We also recognize the irony in the recognition that what “distinguishes [online] collaborative learning from individual and competitive learning is its social nature” (p. 104). This requires the professor, in spite of his professional authorship, to facilitate student discussion instead of offering models of how to think. Such professors would, perhaps, be surprised “that ‘caringness’ is identified by learners as the most important quality they look for in an instructor” (p. 108). This need not imply maudlin therapy. At least I think of “care” in the sense in which Heidegger used it to characterize language. When we speak to another person, we presume that she cares enough about the message and meaning to pay attention and probably to respond. In online pedagogy, this means that a facilitator responds to coach student thinking and writing instead of simply delivering information.

The authors suggest that these characteristics are also found in ubuntu. There is a Linux support site that is called ubuntu. Their homepage explains that “‘Ubuntu’ is an ancient African word, meaning ‘humanity to others.’ Ubuntu also means ‘I am what I am because of who we all are” <http://www.ubuntulinux.org/>. Other explanations suggest a comparison with Heidegger’s sense of care exhibited in language. It is plausible to suggest that online distance education “best practices” should be an expression of ubuntu, but it is more plausible to suggest that ubuntu is an African cultural expression of love, goodwill, caritas, Confucian ren, or civic involvement. In an overly long essay, the authors turn from discussing online pedagogical methods to tell us about a pilot course offered at Unisa. The method, illustrations, and results are all pedestrian. Who would be surprised to discover that students preferred to be involved in an online learning community rather than to plod through print texts on their own in the old correspondence school model (p. 135); or that students felt that in receiving email and discussion posts from peers and instructors, “they experienced an exceptionally high support and facilitation service compared with what they were used to” (p. 136)? So, if the question is which is better, online distance education or the print-based correspondence model, or whether “the online learning community (based on integrated support and facilitation) [can] be a successful and quality learning experience in the UNISA context?” (p. 116), the answers are obvious. The pedagogy review is interesting and important for anyone involved in online education. The second half of the essay, which ploddingly describes the pilot program at Unisa, is probably only of local interest being a decade or so behind developments in the USA and UK.

4. Pedagogical Issues and Gender in Cyberspace Education: Distance Education in South Africa by Chika Trevor Sehoole and Teboho Moja


This is an interesting piece on technology and social policy, specifically on South African “government hopes to provide higher education to the people that were previously excluded, such as blacks, women, rural communities, and those who cannot access higher education through conventional means” (p. 148). In the U.S., more women than men enroll in distance education classes. The authors say, “It is imperative that women be involved in designing courses that will potentially be used by women” in South Africa because of the policy to use ICT to foster education for the previously neglected. On the other hand, they also say, “South Africa is the only country on the continent that has a balanced participation rate of men and women” in civic affairs. But even there, the government will probably prefer to invest in distance education methods rather than new facilities and campuses “to provide access to higher education for the majority of people who, under the former apartheid government, could not easily” attend a university (p. 151).

If so, the problem is the cost of technology. A World Bank study indicated “that in 1997 about 37.7 people out of 1000 people had access to personal computers” in Africa. That is 4%. A year later the Association of African Universities “found that only 52 of the 232 academic and research institutions that responded had full Internet access, while the rest had only limited access. Internet access was generally limited to faculty and graduate students.” Things improved by 2000 when “all 54 African countries were finally brought online” but the authors admit they don’t know exactly what this means in each of the universities. They speculate that in their own country, “Given the racial and gender disparities that characterize South African society, it is most probable that black and female people constitute a minority of those with Internet access” (p. 152). Telecentres and learning centres do not seem to offer much promise in rectifying this. The authors say “Programmes offered in this mode are generally targeted at niche markets and/or offered at the postgraduate level and “the majority of the people, such as women, blacks, and residents of rural communities, who traditionally have had no access to higher education, remain marginalized” (p. 154). The concern for gender equality is understandable, but even so, the authors again suggest that this may not be the problem they fear it is, saying that female students are the majority in distance education offered by the University of South Africa (Usina) and their numbers “in the distance education Technikon have increased tremendously in the last decade” (p.156). Technikon is the distance component of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology <http://www.ctech.ac.za/users/visitors.html>. In fact, they admit that wherever data is available, it shows “women are the majority of distance-education learners” (p. 156).

Despite all the problems and cost of access, the gender situation should shift concern to other areas, such as retention and quality. If their claim that “about 85 percent of the students” in distance programs drop out before graduating, I would expect Sehoole and Moja to be much more concerned about quality. Reading between the lines, I infer that the problem centers on the skills, dedication, and pay of indifferent or distant teachers or facilitators. “The goal is to produce a new generation of teachers from higher-education institutions who have an understanding of how to use ICT in their school teaching” (p. 161). This sounds very slow and not radical enough to foster teachers with “high-level skills” in both computer use and a content area coupled with a caring “relaxed participation” manner, which is required to make online education a more “productive environment” (p. 160). They offer another inauspicious comment: “Internet access is costly and therefore impacts negatively on an attempt to spend hours searching through research materials in contrast to spending time in the library” (p. 162). Apparently, they haven’t spent time searching the thousands of online journals that can be easily accessed with online methods or don’t know that increasingly going to a university library means sitting down at a terminal there instead of accessing the same materials from home or office.

5. Distance Learning and Virtual Education for Higher Education in Africa: Evaluation of Options and Strategies by Stanley Moyo


This piece identifies the usual problems encountered in developing online distance education. Because it is expensive, distance education “remains underdeveloped in Africa” (p. 170). Internet distance education in the U.S. is only ten years old, so it is no surprise to discover that “Distance-education programs in Africa can be largely considered as being in their infancy” (p. 171). Despite spending $20 million in the attempt, Britain’s Open University failed to attract American students, in large part because the materials were too English—too much Queen and cricket. Moyo finds the same problem in Africa: “When programs are of foreign origin, questions of relevance and ethno-domination inevitably arise” (p. 173). “Many projects in Africa have run into problems because they were introduced to Africa as ready-made prescriptions from outside the continent.” It should be obvious that turnkey projects do not kindle creative development skills and pride of ownership. When something breaks, we call the vendor. For content and facilitation, as much as for technical development, “It is important to include as many stakeholders as possible in the whole process of [developing] distance-education projects” (p. 174). This will take a good deal of time, not just because of the hardware and user skills, but because, as everywhere in the world, “A lot of conservatism and skepticism exists in some of the traditional SSA universities. Distance education is perceived as a threat both at the administrative level as well as in academic circles. The academic community views it as a threat to their jobs” (p. 180). Rather than hoping to change the habits and dedications of established and older scholars, the better strategy was illustrated by India’s IIT schools and, strange to say, by the University of Phoenix; both started over, so to speak, dedicated to new and different modes of education.

Now we return to costs. Moyo mentions the African Virtual University (AVU), which so far is more about planning than delivery <http://www.avu.org/display.cfm>. It exemplifies Moyo’s thinking about how administrators, faculty, and support personnel need to be “left to figure things out themselves” and to ask for help only when they perceive that they need it. AVU should help everyone recognize “that quality teaching materials are key to the success of distance education” (p. 177). Quality does not mean bleeding edge research. It means materials and facilitation appropriate to the needs and level of development of students. If students are not engaged with material that they find interesting, nothing happens. AVU convened its first meeting on the use of ICT and distance education in 2004.

At that meeting, Dolf Jordaan from Pretoria University offered an interesting model of distance education (not to mention photos of flowering Jacaranda trees on his campus) that relies on cell phones and palm pilots <http://www.avu.org/downloads/mlearning.pdf>. Our thinking (or maybe just my thinking) is so limited to our cultural habits. I hadn’t thought, until Professor Moyo explained, that “Students do not visit their rural post offices very often and this lead to many returned packages” of instructional material. If the student has a cell phone, the distance education office can alert her about a sent package or communicate other short messages to support traditional modes of correspondence education. In every part of the developing world, wireless technology is the future and so-called M-learning (M for mobile) is a relatively cheap application (see: “A Guide to Improving Internet Access in Africa with Wireless Technologies” <http://web.idrc.ca/en/ev-11190-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html>). Obviously, it does not offer the wealth of information and communication available with a computer that has access to the Internet, but is an intriguing supplement and instance of appropriate technology. I will be returning to the AVU Web site, in part because it promises to offer variations on the model of distance education that I know best. It also illustrates interesting partnerships with New Jersey Tech for computer science education and Curtin University in Australia for business education.

6. The Chances for Success of the Francophone Centers for Distance Education of the GDLN Network: The Case of the Centre d’Education à Distance de Côte d’Ivoire by Kouassi Yao

This chapter offers a report on the Global Development Learning Network, which specializes in world-wide teleconferencing. Yao Kouassi is the director of the the GDLN center in the Ivory Coast, which is the CDE-CI (Center for Distance Education in Côte d’Ivoire). His essay offers annual reports of activities and revenue that illustrate that the center serves elite government clients. For example, it puts university or government administrators in real time contact with other officials anywhere in the world via telecommunication technology. CDE-CI educational activities seem to be confined to arranging such meetings and to professional growth workshops for government officials. GDLN centres are located at “public educational institutions in charge of training […] decision makers École Nationale d’Administration (ENA) in Côte d’Ivoire, École Nationale dAdministration et de Magistrature (ENAM) in Senegal, or Institute National d’Economie (INE) in Benin.” It seems to be more than a matter of perception, but Dr. Yao comments that in Ivory Coast, his center “is perceived as [an] institution for the training of state agents” (p. 205). His essay is full of charts and financial reports but has little to say about university students. He recognizes there is a “lack of suitable material in French” that hampers “all the francophone centres. Until there are content suppliers at the local level there will be limited possibilities” for elearning. Then there are the usual problems: little money, resistance to innovation, faculty development, unreliable electrical current, and untrained local technicians who could maintain equipment (p. 206-7). All of this leads Yao to say, “In the medium term, the introduction of e-learning and the training of diplomats would allow the CED-CI to be a real distance-training center for the public outside [the city of] Abidjan” (p. 208). It doesn’t sound like it will soon happen.


7. Higher Education Reform: Challenges Towards a Knowledge Society in Malaysia by Akiko Kamogawa

This is the only essay that does not focus on Africa and it is unfortunately too brief and too general to inform us about what is going on in Malaysia. I had the good fortune to teach for the University of Maryland in Malaysia, so I know something of the conditions and context. The author, by the way, is a Japanese professor affiliated with Waseda University in Tokyo. He tells as much about the higher education structure in Malaysia as about distance education, but even then, much remains unsaid. Kamogawa admits “the higher-education system has been limited to the elite citizens of the country” (p. 218) and “the number of universities” was limited by national policy for forty years (p. 219). Why would a rich country seek to limit higher education? I also used to wonder why the country contracted with a half-dozen American universities to teach in Malaysia instead of spending the money to invest in its own universities.

As Prime Minister, Mohammad Mahathir kept a tight reign on his country from 1981 until 2003. When I was there in the late 1980s, there was virtually nothing to read because Islamic censorship kept books out the country. And, I think that was the answer to my question. Mahathir did not invest in universities knowing they would foster an intellectual class he couldn’t easily control. Contract schools could be kicked out and free thinkers could be branded as having been corrupted by foreign influence. Three ethnic groups continue to live together in Malaysia without much integration. The population is comprised of about 60% Bumiputeras (ethnic Malays; the term means sons and daughters of the soil), 25% Chinese, and 8% Indian. Values among the three groups can be distinct, but education statistics for the three ethnic groups are similar <http://www.statistics.gov.my/English/frameset_keystats.php>. One other factor; Malaysia is in some competition with Singapore in regard to technology.

MMU is the Multimedia University in Kuala Lumpur where English is “the language of instruction" (p. 222 <http://www.mmu.edu.my/v4/>). The Web site reports there are 11,000 undergraduates and nearly 1,700 graduate students enrolled at the new school. Like the more traditional universities, the curriculum is almost entirely devoted to science, engineering, and business. In addition to peninsular Malaysia, the country includes an equal amount of land in Sarawak on the large island of Borneo. The university there is also committed to ICT <http://www.unimas.my/faculty.htm>. Sarawak is partly where all the money comes from in the form of palm oil, rubber, and tropical wood. Two million of Malaysia’s 26 million people live in Sarawak.

Kamogawa says that “Malaysian higher education reform is progressing rapidly because the government needs to develop highly skilled human resources” (p. 228). Nevertheless, education involves more than technical training. I recall being nonplussed when, about midway through an English course in Malaysia, a puzzled student asked what literature was. I could have flippantly said, “it is what we have been studying for over a month,” but I understood her sincere bewilderment. The culture of books and reading, except for the Koran, which is memorized more than read, was entirely outside her experience.

8. Strategies for Promoting Virtual Higher Education: General Considerations on Africa and Asia by Kazuo Kuroda and Hossain Md. Shanawez

Dr. Shanawez is an economist educated in Australia; Professor Kuroda is an international studies scholar at Waseda. In this short essay, they try to think big to speculate on the future of ICT and online distance education. Their conjectures remain too broad to be useful. For example, they say “It should be ensured by law that degrees granted by distance-education and virtual institutions have the same value as degrees granted by the traditional institutions (p. 238).” A law in which country? I see shadows of both Japan and Prime Minister Mahathir in this statement. In Japan, the ministry of education takes a much more direct hand in managing education than does the Department of Education in the U.S. In Malaysia, Mahathir controlled everything. Apparently, the authors know little about the complex process of accreditation in the U.S.

They recognize that preparing content for online instruction requires complex skills while “In developing countries the problem of qualified faculty is acute” even without taking into account the online medium and the new skills it requires. In addition to talking to someone about educational administration and accreditation, the authors might also benefit from talking to a university librarian. They think that “the Internet diminishes research costs and compensates for the shortage of books and scientific journals that often plagues university libraries” (241). Instead of thinking of online journals, apparently they are thinking of all the millions of Web pages on the Net authored by anyone, which are hardly a substitute for a library. Moreover, Malaysia is a rich country that could afford all the books it wanted for its libraries. The question is whether they want the libraries. The point here is about culture and values, not poverty.

Finally, the two authors predict that “Virtual higher education will, in the future, formulate a global consortium of academia and higher learning in cyberspace as a mega-university, above or beyond the existing universities” (p. 243). I doubt this, except perhaps as a very loose-knit consortium modeled along the lines of the United Nations. Nothing like the Japanese Ministry of Education is going to dictate standards for degrees offered by thousands of schools. Such “thinking” ignores what education is and how it is done. It is done in conversation and writing between a teacher, facilitator, or mentor and a student, and among fellow students. All the stuff above this level is concerned with money, politics, technology, and bureaucracy. Columbia, Cornell, NYU, and the Open University squandered $100 million on “thinking” like this, which hoped to create an elite brand for distance education.

Decades ago I took a course in comparative education, or so my transcript reports. I can’t remember a thing about it. Assié-Lumumba’s collection offers an interesting look at current African education as it is being driven or influenced by ICT and distance education policies and experiments. The book would be much more useful and interesting, if an editor had collected the urls scattered in the text and in bibliographies for each chapter to make the book interactive with Internet resources and something of a portal to find them. My review of Society Online offers a positive model of how this can be done <http://edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev344.htm>. The following links offer to get you or your students started.

Links

  • Acacia Web Times: Networking Africa’s Future: http://www.acacia.org.za/index.htm
    See the interesting report: "The Acacia Programme: Developing Evaluating and Learning Systems for African Telecentres: http://www.col.org/telecentres/chapter%2015.pdf.
    Also the resources page: http://www.idrc.ca/acacia/
  • ADEA (Assocation for the Development of Education in Africa: http://www.adeanet.org/
  • ADLA (African Distance Learning Association): http://www.physics.ncat.edu/~michael/adla/
  • African Internet Connectivity: http://www3.sn.apc.org/
  • "African Internet Density": http://demiurge.wn.apc.org/africa/density.htm
  • African Virtual University: http://avu.org/section/about/default.htm
  • Assessing Community Telecentres: Guidelines for Researchers: http://www.eldis.org/static/DOC8195.htm
  • Big World: http://www.big-world.org/home/
  • Bridges.org: Spanning the International digital Divide: http://www.bridges.org/
  • The Commonwealth of Learning: http://www.col.org/
  • The Communication Initiative (Canada): http://www.comminit.com/mission.html
  • Community TeleServices Centres Association: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/christian.carrier/
  • Creating an African Virtual Community College: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_11/darkwa/
  • "Distance Education and Open Learning in Africa: What Works or Does Not Work": http://www.col.org/speeches/edi_africa98.htm
  • Eldis: The Gateway to Development Information: http://www.eldis.org/about/index.htm
  • The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library (TEEAL): http://teeal.cornell.edu/
  • First Voice International (Africa Learning Channel): http://www.firstvoiceint.org/
  • Global Development Learning Network: http://www.gdln.org/
  • IConnecT Online: http://www.iconnect-online.org/home/
  • Information for development: http://www.i4donline.net/index.asp
  • International Development Research Centre: http://www.idrc.ca/
  • International Institute or Communication and Development: http://www.iicd.org/
  • International Telecommunicaton Union (UN): http://www.itu.int/home/index.html
  • Navajo Times: http://www.thenavajotimes.com/education.php
  • OneWorld.net: http://www.oneworld.net/
  • One World Radio: http://radio.oneworld.net/
  • PIAC: Project for Information Access and Connectivity (Ford and Rockefeller Foundations): http://www.piac.org/
  • SAIDE (South African Institute for Distance Education): http://www.saide.org.za/Frontend/
  • South Africa: Department of Education: http://education.pwv.gov.za/
  • Sulair: Africa South of the Sahara (Standford University): http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/ssrg/africa/guide.html
  • UNESCO: http://portal.unesco.org
  • UNISA: University of South Africa: http://www.unisa.ac.za/
  • “Using Telecentres in Support of Distance Education,” The Commonwealth of
    Learning: http://www.col.org/Knowledge/ks_telecentres.htm
  • World Links: http://www.world-links.org/

About the Reviewer

John Rothfork
English Department
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, AZ 86011
John.Rothfork@nau.edu

John Rothfork teaches online courses in a graduate certificate and M.A. program in professional and technical writing at Northern Arizona University. His Website is at http://oak.ucc.nau.edu/jgr6/.

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