 Today, I would like to talk about ICT4E, the back story, ICT4E, meaning Information, Communications, Technology for Education, and this is the back story, a sort of a backgrounder of other sessions that would follow on ICT4E policy and standards. Now the ICT4E discourse is actually based or it's an offshoot of a larger discourse on the information society. Now many of us think that this discourse started very recently, maybe around 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, but actually the information society traces its roots in economics actually. During the 30s, post-depression 30s, we could trace it to three Austrian economists. Friedrich Hayek was the first one. If you Google his name, you will be provided with a link which leads to this information that he's born in Austria-Hungary as Friedrich August von Hayek and he's frequently referred to as F.A. Hayek, an Austrian economist and philosopher best known for his defense of classical liberalism, but actually he was the person who introduced knowledge economics to the discipline, the economics discipline. Now again the backgrounder, consider Germany during the depression, it was being humiliated by the Allies since it lost during the Second World War and it had to pay outrageous reparations to the Allied countries, but then just prior to the war it became one of the top 10 economies. Now how did that happen? Was it because of economic policies of Hitler? No, this fellow, Friedrich Hayek, submitted that it was because of science and technology, it was because of knowledge that Germany earned its place in, well as one of the major economies in the world and one of his associates, Schumpeter, also from Austria, another one of his associates or actually students is a person by the name of Fritz Maklopp. Now Fritz Maklopp emigrated to the United States and at the United States knowledge economics began to be referred to as information economics. Now he was the person who introduced the trichotomy of the agricultural society, the industrial society, the information society, the term information society actually came from him, but it was one of his students, Mark Porat whose 1976 dissertation, a 20 volume dissertation described information of the information economy of the US. During Porat's time he talked about information economics, information-based economies, industrial-based economies, agricultural-based economies. Now how is this related, this concept of information society, how is this related to ICT4E, well as I said the ICT4E discourse is an offshoot of this larger discourse called information society. What makes society an information society, what makes a country an information-based economy? Well according to Porat if the larger number of your workforce are information workers then your country is an information-based economy, it's an information society. If the larger portion of your workforce are agricultural workers or farmers then your country is an agricultural society. Now is the Philippines an information society, well that just happened to be the subject of my dissertation in 1983. Then I found of course given secondary data as well as other sources that the Philippines is an agricultural society, but in 2007 somehow our classification was changed from an agricultural to an industrial to an information society, that is because our overseas Filipino workers were classified as service workers, many of them were put into the category of information workers for one reason or another. Now again what makes an information society, I will show you a graph. Now this graph is called the volatility index, the CBOD or OE volatility index, CBOE meaning the Chicago board of economics if I'm not mistaken. Now this graph shows times when volatility is very high volatility meaning economic markets tend to sell, people have lost trust in their stocks, so they sell their stocks. In this graph you would see peaks in 1987 and 2007 or 2008. Now a large part of that peaking up was due to media coverage of this behavior in the stock market. In 2007 if you're not too young to remember people watched as their people watched CNN or ANC while the value of their stocks fell and as this was being covered by media they started selling selling selling. So this is you know the influence of information and communication in our economy. Another example a more recent one in 15 September 2016 I was on my way to Los Baños along EDSA. I was caught in EDSA traffic and so I switched on the radio. This was at around 10 a.m. and lo and behold the voice that I heard was the voice of Lila de Lima and Edgar Matobato. And the resource person, it was a senate hearing, the resource person was giving out details of a heinous crimes in Davao. And at that time I was checking the Philippine Stock Exchange Index on my phone. So this is a picture of the Philippine Stock Exchange Index at 10 to 1030. Now at around 10 the witness was giving his testimony and at that time the PSE index dropped drastically. Okay now at around 1030 he was interpolated by Senator Tito Soto and at that time when Tito Soto started putting or was punching holes into his testimonies it was the stock index was going higher. It went a bit higher and then de Lima interjected and served as a lawyer to the witness. Again it went down. Now immediately after that I got home, I watched TV and then also monitored the PSE index on my phone and this is the image that I got. Okay now if you look closely the ebbs and flows, the speaking and diving of our index coincides with interpolations of Senator Sandy Angara and Senator Cayetano actually ending with Cayetano's interpolation after his questioning the witness the index was at the same level as it was before 10. So you could just imagine how coverage, how media coverage, how information and communication could actually dictate the value of your stocks. Such is an information society, how is this relevant to us in the education sector. Now one of the foundations, one of the found or the basic assumptions of the information society discourse is that information is a commodity that has value. It should be factored into our economic equations. Information is something that can be sold or bought. Counterpoint to that is the open access movement. Now what you see is the universal symbol for open access. How does it look like? It looks like a padlock doesn't it? Okay an open padlock with an O in the middle and an A so that's for open access. Open access submits that information is free, knowledge is free. It should be accessible to all its users. Now along that comes the open educational resources along the same line. This is what is known as the creative commons stamp. The universal symbol for creative commons. If you have copyright then you would have copy left. Within the information society discourse is the concept of openness in sharing knowledge and what you see now is the coat of arms of the open university which refers to the UK open university. Note that its motto is learn and live. In 2011 a ranking was made to determine the top 10 research universities at the UK and according to Sir John Daniel the UK open university was fifth in that rank. Number one was Cambridge. Number three was the London School of Economics. The fifth was the UK open university. It outranked even Oxford which was number six. And this open university actually is becoming a trend. What you see is the seal of the University of Michigan. The University of Michigan or the University of the Philippines has its open university and they call their open university open Michigan. So perhaps we should call ourselves open Philippines or open UP. There is also this Nottingham University has its open Nottingham. Now these trends are all offshoots of information society. You must have heard of the concept of mega universities. A mega university is a university with a minimum of 100,000 actively enrolled students. This term was again coined by Sir John Daniel in 1995. Only 11 such institutions existed. By 2011 there were almost 50 mega universities worldwide. And an example of a mega university is the University of Phoenix in Phoenix Arizona. Perhaps or arguably the most successful open university in the United States. And of course we have our UP Open University. It's the fifth constituent unit of the University of the Philippines system. It's UP Cyber Campus. And we believe strongly that we pioneered an ICT for education. We established a Faculty of Information and Communication Studies in 2004. And 100% of our courses are offered online. Also as educators we should be aware of what is known as the Paris message. In 2015 49 countries converged in Paris to deliver this so-called Paris message to agree first and then deliver. Part of the Paris message reads we call on governments to recognize the important contribution of online open and flexible systems to meet the challenge of scale and quality in the provision of higher education and lifelong learning for the period 2015 to 2030. Consider that this was the Paris message was drafted the same month as the release of the Sustainable Development Goals 2015-2030 which has one of its major goal lifelong learning and education for all. The countries who participated in drafting the Paris message believed that higher educational institutions will not be able to accommodate the uptake of college enrollees by 2030 or even the years towards 2030. There will be a deficit of something like 30 million up or students who would want to take college they will not be able there or educational institutions will not be able to accommodate them because of the lack of facilities the lack of space and this is the reason why we have to go online we need to explore or mainstream online open and flexible systems. Yes ICT is an offshoot of the information society ICT meaning information and communication it's either say communications technology or information and communications technologies okay it's a new generation of technologies brought about by the merger of computers and telecommunications okay internet the worldwide web and so on multimedia. Now in the late 90s somebody felt that it should be applied for the development agenda and so we have ICT4D meaning information and communication technology for development this was this movement originated in the world bank and eventually UN agencies adopted it such as UNESCO and UNESCO and as a sub category or sub field under ICT4D ICT4E information and communication technology for education in the Philippines the pioneering institution that went into this is fit ed now the UP Open University was quite fortunate that two of the fit ed's thought leaders in the early part of the 21st century were actually part of our faculty I'm referring of course to Dr. Laudit Supplido who introduced e-learning to UPOU and Dr. Pat Arinto who is now the Dean of the Faculty of Education okay at around the same time the CICT was established by the Philippine government now how did ICT4E get into the Philippine education scene since the time of fit ed and CICT among the intentions of the basic education sector reform agenda in 2006 was to develop an ICT4E strategy for the Philippines and there were a number of studies that were conducted that led to this ICT4E strategy some of which assumed these propositions that ICT4E programs in the Philippines during that time tended to be technology driven and ICT4E programs tended to be donor driven and social realities necessitate the appropriate use of ICTs for education okay then ICT4E had three functional areas ICT for pedagogy okay there was a depth ed computerization program the DTI PCs for public schools project I schools e-school community e-centers okay the ASEAN school net consider this was from the period of 2004 to 2007 the APEC ICT model school project and so on and so forth there was systematic exploration of the feasibility of e-learning for basic ed which was yet to be initiated the next functional area was ICT for teacher development okay there was the CHED initiative on standards for ICT teacher competencies I think which is part of this program that is developing this open educational resource Intel's teach to the future pit eds instructional design workshops etc etc okay the third functional area is ICT for governance and management okay depth ed then had a number of databases the basic education information system and others okay now there were structural issues then depth ed had no organizational readiness the current organizational structure of depth ed may not be very conducive to networking information and communication flows were stymied instead of flowing freely horizontally vertically and radially I understand that nowadays there's a move to improve this the internal communications within depth ed and the symptom was that there were too many channels for too much paperwork the organizational culture of the department was possibly averse to knowledge sharing and reuse there were also political issues such as interfacing and coordination among the different bureaus one project would develop its own database another project would develop its own database and these database do not communicate with one another they cannot exchange data they cannot merge data they're also programmatic issues there is very little appreciation of primary secondary and tertiary impacts of ICTs in the development development setting what determines current ICT program design it's actually assessment needs or donor agendas it's based on social agendas or technologies the relevance and sustainability would be enhanced if impetus for the project came from a real and felt need the conclusion of these different studies then among these studies were one which was funded by CIDS the Center for Integrative and Development Studies is that in spite of clear visioning among ICT4E advocates programs tend to be insensitive to social realities because of the lack of proper appreciation of higher order impacts of ICTs donor agency country agendas industry agendas structural issues within depth ed and there were a number of policy instruments that were introduced or proposed the first one was defining the coverage of ICT to include traditional media not only those where computers and telecommunications merge another policy instrument was an appropriate use policy okay the rationale of which was that with the adoption of the above definition what follows is an appropriate use policy that sets efficient and effective utilization guidelines the next policy instrument that was proposed then was donor coordination and harmonization and public private sector partnerships now all of these studies these policy options all contributed to an ICT4E strategy of the department of education which will be one of the topics in a future session okay so I will end with my favorite poem you know or stances from a very old poem endless invention endless experiment brings knowledge of motion but not of stillness knowledge of speech but not of silence knowledge of words and ignorance of the word or all our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance all our ignorance brings us nearer to death but nearness to death no nearer to god where is the life we have lost in living where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge where is the knowledge we have lost in information the cycles of heaven in 20 centuries brings us nearer or father from god and nearer to the dust tsl yet a poem which he wrote in the 1934 the rock okay where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge where is the knowledge we have lost in information we hope that the educational sector will not be asking these questions to itself thank you very much