Selected TechNotes – May 2005

Tagging becoming mainstream
The process of “meta tagging” items has tended to be the domain of a few geeks and librarians in the past, but this is set to change. Tagging is what librarians do when they catalogue a book. The tags enable one to search for the item being tagged, by searching for it against the tagged fields. These may be the author’s name, keywords or subject. If all your pictures were tagged, you could search for a particular kind of picture without having to open a single folder. The new gMail™ email service offered by Google is using a system of tags rather than folders. Mail items are either in your inbox or in the archive; but each item can be tagged by a name from a list that you compile yourself. The system also automatically maintains a single “email” for a particular subject line (a “conversation”) thereby reducing the number of scattered emails on the same topic. You can then search for any email using the well-known Google search tools. With over 2gig of storage space at one’s disposal, there is little pressure to delete any emails. An interesting characteristic is that the only way to get an address is to receive an invitation from an existing gMail™ account holder, even though the system is entirely free. The advertising required to pay for the service that raised some concerns is fairly unobtrusively placed on the right hand side, just like it appears in the familiar Google search. The service seems “low bandwidth” (i.e. it works well on slow dial-up and institutional connections (readers in developing countries will understand this). This is a very welcome tool for people who do not own their own computer and need a place to keep files (just email the file to yourself and tag it as a “document” or “file”) and emails in one place (http://gmail.google.com/).

Have you been chipped yet?
The universal identification code for humans seems to be coming closer with trials at night-clubs in Spain under way. Clubs are inserting a tiny identification tag into a person’s arm or other selected part of the body that can be easily scanned on entrance to the club. The ID gives instant access to the person’s personal details and most importantly, the person’s access to money to pay for their night’s entertainment. Each club is, at this stage, reported to be doing their own thing, which might mean multiple chips for clubbers. A single, universal, personal code (ID) could be useful for accessing, information for entertainment, like these clubs, access to medical information, etc. The fear is the amount of information anyone might have on them, should the systems be broken into illegally, by criminals or legally, by government agencies.

Open Source as a way to expand the IT budget
The proprietary software (e.g. Unix, Sun, Microsoft) versus open source (Linux) seems like a good way to heat up a discussion amongst techies these days. People are taking opposing views and digging their toes into the sand to keep their position in the tug-of-war. The real answers in the part of the world that comprises well over 2 billion people is that institutions just don’t have the money to pay for their computing needs, to help educate people, to make the countries less “developing” and more “developed”. There’s a line of logic that you can only spend the money you have and for a while, the debt you can raise. After this, you need to fit your expenditure to your income or run into serious trouble.

Institutions need to take their IT budgets and spend the money as wisely as they can on those items that absolutely require hard cash – like hardware and absolutely necessary programmes that require license fees to be paid. If you have a course that trains people to use “Microsoft Word” you cannot use another computer programme. However, much of the education or training an institution wishes to offer might be found to be more generic, opening some opportunities for low priced alternatives. Also, those behind-the-scenes services that the IT folk desperately need to offer to improve services to users can frequently be cobbled together on old PCs and free software – a lot better than just saying: “we do not have the budget so we cannot do it”. So, if you IT department is asking for more money that the institution can provide, ask how creative they can get with what they have – all the old PCs that have been replaced and the free software they can download from the internet. This only applies to institutions that find their budget a little short in the IT department!

Cost of bandwidth in Africa
On a recent trip to three African countries, I again asked about the cost of bandwidth. The cost differences to industrialised countries are quite astounding. An ASDL or cable connection in industrialised countries cost about USD40 per month (less actually in most cases I hear of), the bandwidth is, let’s say about 500kilobits (I know it varies and providers will give much higher rates). A company in Kenya told me they are paying (now, in 2005) about USD500 per month for a 32-kilobit connection – i.e. a slow dialup connection speed. This would cost USD10 to 20 per month in industrialised countries. A 512kilobit connection was reported to be about USD 5,000 in a second African country. This example represents a cost some 125 times higher, which is reported to be much higher in some other countries in Africa. This causes me to ask where the governments are in all this? Internet bandwidth for educational institutions is a crucial tool for learning. The Internet contains thousands of free books (e.g. the African Digital Library), hundreds of thousands of reports and documents of value (e.g. the COL knowledge finder) and thousands of pieces of learning content that lecturers and learners can access (e.g. the COL learning object repository) – and all this saves the institutions thousands of dollars on otherwise purchased books, journals, etc. The alternative is no doubt true, that lecturers and learners can do without the resources, but what is the real cost of that to the quality of the country’s education? It is time to resolve this long-standing issue. A top management team that does not feel it has sufficient technical competence to tackle the issues on their own can easily collaborate with other institutions and international agencies to form the necessary technical and negotiation skills to confront predatory service providers. Bulk buying of bandwidth through collaboration can help drive down costs. Maybe we should publish the prices institutions pay so that we can compare these both within countries and between countries? [See: http://www.cto.int/ ;
http://www.comnet-it.org/ ;
http://www.inasp.info/training/bandwidth/]

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