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Appendix Three:
Technology Applications
Note: This Appendix is taken from another report written by Neil Butcher for the Global e-Schools and Communities Initiative (GeSCI) African Leaders in ICT (ALICT) capacity building programme. The original report can be located at:
This Appendix provides a quick guide to some of the technology applications which are available to support education and development initiatives and that are helping to stimulate creation and use of openly licensed or, at least openly available, educational resources.[1]
- Social network sites – social network sites are web-based services that allow people to construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, define a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. Possibly the most well known of these sites are Facebook and MySpace, although many such sites exist. Some also focus on specific dimensions of social networking. For example, social bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us allow people to save bookmarks to websites and tag them with keywords, generating community-driven, keyword-based classifications known as 'folksonomies'. Likewise, photo-sharing websites such as Flickr allow people to upload, tag, browse, and annotate digital photographs, as well as participate in self-organizing topical groups. While social networking sites have massive potential for influencing the way in which we organize and find information and how we interact with people, it is important to note that the for-profit sector is selling itself as the provider of choice for these Web 2.0 collaboration capabilities, predominantly in an effort to create new platforms for funding consumers and selling advertising.
- Blogging – blogging is remarkable for the speed with which it has grown as an online communication vehicle. Blog is an abbreviated version of 'weblog', which is a term used to describe websites that maintain an
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