Alfredo Terzoli

Enabling and constraining ICT practice in secondary schools: case studies in South Africa

The use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) in education is being seen as a way of widening access to education, particularly in developing countries. This paper addresses the issue of ICT implementation in secondary schools and focuses specifically on the practices that enable or constrain the successful implementation of ICT for teaching and learning activities. It reflects upon the lessons learned from a collective case study undertaken in 12 of the 13 secondary schools in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape in South Africa. School principals and designated IT teachers were interviewed and on-site infrastructure audits conducted. This paper identifies a number of key enabling and constraining factors surrounding practical issues, including sufficient hardware, appropriate software and affordable connectivity, sufficient technical support and training, policy-related issues such as the role of national, provincial and school policy, the vital contribution of principal leadership and champion teachers as well as ongoing teacher professional development coupled with a willingness to change.

An ontology-based, multi-modal platform for the inclusion of marginalized rural communities into the knowledge society

With the information revolution that promises to shape the 21st century, knowledge has become the prime commodity, very much like land, means of production and capital have been at different times in the past. Access to information, made instantly available by the growth of the Internet, determines access to economic resources, social participation and better quality of life. For this reason, the knowledge stored on the Web and the advantages offered by the spread of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) are equally important for rich societies to prosper and for poor ones to develop. The only difference is that marginalised communities do not have access to the tools and have little control over the content found in the domain of ICTs. In this paper we describe an intervention to develop the potential of a typical rural community in South Africa through ICTs. This involves providing Internet connectivity and deploying a platform to support e-commerce, e-learning, e-government and e-health. The core of the platform is an ontology-based model designed to integrate and respond to Indigenous Knowledge Systems. This has been achieved by combining a deep understanding of local knowledge and social networks with the use of authoring, communication and ontology-management tools. The primary goal of this new approach is to find a way to make ICT solutions more sensitive to the local context, and therefore more effective. Secondly, we hope to foster a sense of ownership of the project among the community, by capitalising on local knowledge and resources.

Using an RTSP proxy to implement the IPTV Media Function via a streaming server

Multimedia in IMS, including IPTV, is handled by a separate unit, the Media Function (MF), which is made up of Media Control and Media Delivery Functions (MCF & MDF). According to the different specifications of an IMS based IPTV architecture, the User Equipment (UE) is expected to use the RTSP protocol as a media control protocol to interact with the MCF, and gets delivery of media from the MDF using the RTP protocol. This generally means that the streaming session is initiated from the media controller on behalf of the user but the delivery of media is sent to the UE from the media deliverer (media server). Due to lack of free and open source Media Servers and on the contrary, the availability of free and open source Streaming Servers, the ideal choice for the delivery of media in multimedia services, including IPTV, by the research community are Streaming Servers. Nevertheless, because of denial of service attack and other issues, most streaming servers do not allow different locations for the session setup request and the delivery of media of the streaming session. This makes it difficult to have a separate media control unit for IPTV service in IMS, if one wants to use a streaming server as an MDF unit. For this purpose we propose another component (an RTSP proxy and relay unit) to be part of the IPTV Media Function (MF). The unit will be used to mediate between the MFC and MDF and will properly relay media control (RTSP) commands from the UE and MFC to the MDF and RTP packets from the MDF to the UE. This, we believe, will facilitate the development of an IPTV service using readily available open source streaming servers. In this paper we show how this RTSP proxy and relay unit can be integrated into the Media Function of the IPTV architecture to ease the media delivery process of IMS based IPTV service.1

eServices provisioning in a community development context through a JADE MAS platform

A growing proliferation of ICT4D interventions has necessitated the exploration of innovative solutions for the provisioning of eServices in rural, marginalized communities. The challenges currently faced in these interventions include: situating the developed applications within the cultural and ethnographic context of the target communities, integrating greater levels of granularity and flexibility within the applications for increased context sensitivity, handling the intermittence and instability of supporting infrastructural services. These are the challenges that we address in the context of ICT4D intervention undertaken in a rural community in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. We explore the design and implementation of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) for this community as a platform for provisioning of context-sensitive eServices, and highlight some observations with regards to the applicability and adequacy of the solution.

Wi-Fi as a Last Mile Access Technology and The Tragedy of the Commons

With an alarmingly low teledensity in South Africa, just 12%, and not much hope of further wired infrastructure at the local loop level, as the costs incurred are high compared to potential revenue, wireless connectivity could be a great asset and service in South Africa. However, the use of unlicensed spectrum in building wireless networks can be comparable to “The Tragedy of the Commons”, the result of selfish behaviour towards common and limited resources. This paper evaluates the use of 802.11 wireless technologies in building a broadband wireless network and the effects of high amounts of interference on such a network. The paper concludes that for urban areas 802.11 technologies using unlicensed spectrum is not advisable, unless used in point-to-point links, while its use in rapid rural development (where there is less interference) is very promising.

Research Testbed Networks: Practical Tools for Service Delivery?

The Telkom Centre of Excellence (CoE) at Rhodes University, housed in the Computer Science department was opened in 1997. The CoEs focus on Distributed multimedia service platforms soon showed that the technology being researched could be applied in the disadvantaged peri‐urban communities. The CoE has thus concentrated its research on building a testbed network that delivers real services to real users. In 2007, the testbed was extended to include a marginalised rural area in the Siyakhula Living Lab. The greatest factor in the sustainability of the CoE testbed network has been maintaining usefulness to all the stakeholders over the last 12 years. Industrial funding, University outreach goals and research goals could all be harmonised, while sustaining the delivery of high quality informatics services in the community. This paper presents a brief case study of the communications network testbed and how it was applied to the Development Informatics space. It analyses the roles played by stakeholders in either assisting and sustaining or obstructing the service delivery. It makes key recommendations on best practices for research networks that can also bring informatics to disadvantaged communities. It shows how testbeds for the research of new technologies can be designed so as to allow Development Informatics work to take place on such networks.

The role of indigenous knowledge in computer education in Africa

The integration of indigenous knowledge/languages in formal education is a contentious issue in post-colonial Africa. For historical and economic reasons, these are devalued in the formal education system. We argue that appropriate use of indigenous knowledge/languages can empower African students academically even in typically “Western” disciplines, such as Computer Science. We discuss the potential role of indigenous languages/knowledge in ICT education and then describe an intervention, supporting students from marginalised communities, at a South African University.

Teleweaver: An architectural overview of a customised application server for rurality

The Siyakhula Living Lab in the rural Eastern Cape province of South Africa has been in existence for over a decade now. In this time, several software artefacts have been developed by students and partners with the aim of providing contextually-relevant services to the rural community. However, reliance on different platforms and paradigms has meant that the deployment of such services would be difficult to implement and maintain reliably in actual practice. What is required is a single software platform that can act as a docking station for multiple applications, as well as a routing substrate for applications living inside and outside the platform. A candidate platform to enable this is currently being integrated under the codename Teleweaver and is built from a free, open source J2EE application server and integrates with other software components. This paper provides an architectural overview of the platform and demonstrates how it provides a sustainable context for application development going forward.

HealthMessenger: An e-health service to support ICT deployments in poor areas

Development and implementation of appropriate e-services as well as revenue generation are key to deploying and sustaining ICT installations in poor areas in developing countries. The area of e-Health is a promising area for e-Services that are important to populations in poor areas and health service organisations that are already spending money on different health initiatives in these areas. This paper discusses an e-Health service that facilitates dissemination of health information to people living in poor areas and that is subsequently used to generate revenue to support deployment and development of ICT in the areas. The tool was developed within the context of the Siyakhula Living Lab (SLL), a multi-stakeholder operation that promotes ICT for Development in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. Creation of health content for the e-health service and its subsequent consumption happen in two different environments from a technological and social point of view. To enable this to happen, the e-service comprises two component applications that run in a peer-to-peer fashion. The component that is used to disseminate content for end-user consumption is called the HealthMessenger. The HealthMessenger is hosted on an environment called TeleWeaver, an application integration platform developed within the SLL to host software applications targeting people living in poor areas. The platform is customised to support services with a revenue generation component.

A Framework for the Management of Operator Policies and User Preferences for Service Compositions in the IP Multimedia Subsystem

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a telecommunication middleware platform with robust service features that enables the delivery of a wide range of services to mobile network subscribers. Network operators are encouraged to develop services from service building blocks in order to avoid redundancies by re-using existing functionality. In this environment, operators must be able to control the service execution chain in order to prevent undesirable interactions from occurring between individual building blocks. It is also in their interests to provide subscribers with personalisation options so that they can modify service compositions and define their own preferences for how they would like their services to behave during live sessions. This paper describes a solution for these challenges that involves the storage of service information in an XDMS and allows operator staff and subscribers to manage this information using the XCAP protocol. The ETSI-defined XCAP application usage named simservs was chosen to demonstrate an application usage that can be used to create service compositions in XML format. A prototype is described that uses components of the open source Mobicents project to verify the suitability of the design. This work is part of a larger effort aimed at modeling interaction management in the IMS through the use of a service broker that is part of an extended IMS service layer (EISL). The service brokers functional and structural architecture have not yet been standardised.