 Hi, my name is Robert Shaw. I'm the head of the Human Capacity Building Division in the ITU development sector. And our main mission is to really assist developing countries and adapt to a new environment and new information communication technologies. So Mr. Shaw, can you tell us first about the definition of capacity building and how you view the concept? Well, at the World Summit on the Information Society in 2003 and 2005, they made the right observation that although we may be able to bring access to the internet and broadband and these sorts of things, you can bring these new technologies but also that has to be coupled with capacity building. People have to learn how to use the tools. I mean, you can sort of divide capacity building into two broad areas. The first area you might call just general, building general, ICT literacy. People become aware of the internet that they can use office automation tools that they know how to use internet browsers and so on. And that sort of goes up through various levels of sophistication. At the first level, you might just know how to use these tools. But at a later level, more advanced level, you know how to really integrate the use of these tools into your daily work and so on. So that's sort of one category, building general ICT literacy. And I think that category will be seen more and more as just part of normal cognitive skills development, something that we all have to learn when we go through our education systems. The other areas that, and a scenario that we focus on a lot is building particular ICT skills like assisting governments to how do they develop policy and regulation or enabling environment to advance the use of ICTs in their countries. We might do quite esoteric subjects like a particular type of mobile technology or a particular type of broadband technology. So it's sort of these two broad areas. One is the general ICT literacy. The other is the highly specialized skills and a lot of our membership asks for it. So speaking of capacity building, which target audience or audiences do you usually intend to speak about when you speak about the concept of capacity building? Well, since the ITU is an intergovernmental organization with 191 member states, of course, who we pay attention to first is our government members and particularly the policy makers and regulators. So that sort of is kind of our key focus area with those specialized skills to assist our government members to really bring the benefits of ICTs to their citizens. So when we discuss capacity building based on the work you did in ITU, what are the challenges to achieving capacity building in developing or developed countries? Well, I mean, yeah, well one of the things we want to make sure is that the digital divide doesn't become a knowledge divide. I think it's very easy for us who have access to the internet and these great tools, we forget that that really opens up access to the world's knowledge resources. I mean, when we want to know about something in developed countries, we just go to Wikipedia and we know right away. We forget that that knowledge is just not available because people don't have fundamental access. So in certain regions of the world where they have unstable power supplies or no fiber optic connectivity with poor, let's say, local knowledge or how to implement the, how to have the internet or something like that, these could be major challenges for bringing knowledge about ICTs. Okay, so you mentioned that you're particularly interested in the link or correlation between ICT and learning. So can you elaborate on that? Yeah, well, it's a very interesting time. You know, there's the old Chinese proverb, I often put a slide up for some of my presentations and it's a picture of the first European university in Bologna. It's actually a painting from the 14th century by an Italian painter and it shows people like your medieval robes and the professor is up at the lectern lecturing to the students and the students are in the back and there's one of the students is asleep and other people are chatting in the background. And that sort of the lecture and the lecture too, that was sort of the model for over 900 years basically as how we, how you imparted knowledge to people in schools and tertiary education. But that has changed a lot in the last few years. What's happened, we've seen tremendous growth in online learning and distance learning. So for example, in the United States last year, the largest, it became the largest university was Phoenix Online University. And I know in other parts of the world it's become very popular too in India and Pakistan. Also I know there's a lot of advances in the Arab states in this area too. So suddenly people can tap into knowledge 24 hours a day. They don't have to go to a building and get information. Let me give you another example. MIT, you can now download almost 2,000 courses from MIT. You can get access to the actual courseware curriculum and that's a big revolution. Okay, so we're interested in the second segment on the interview to know more about the ITU Academy portal project. So first can you tell us a brief background about how the project started and what's the state is now called? Okay, well we started about I would say 18 months ago and basically one of the reasons is that we needed to replace our what's called a learning management system or LMS. And an LMS is really something to help you deliver online courses, distance learning courses. So we decided to go with an open source platform which is called Moodle and it's a very big open source community around that initiative. And then we built some special software around that to really facilitate creating, well basically trying to create more of a learning environment. Because more and more learning, it would be a bit silly for us not to use what ICTs had to offer in order to deliver good skills about ICTs. So we wanted to use these new revolutions and new revolutions in e-learning, perhaps in video, perhaps in linking and tags, social media and all these sorts of things. So to really facilitate the learning process. So we do things like if you want to look up a certain topic, let's say you're looking for information on that topic. We tag all these things and then we show you that oh on this topic we're actually teaching a course on this somewhere. So it's a way to make relationships between different pieces of information. So it's sort of aggregating things together. So this platform we're just officially announced here at the WTDC and we're really working on moving content, a lot of content up in this platform. So we have a lot of work still to go but these things take a long time. But we wanted to profit from this conference in order to make the announcement. And just a question that jumped into my mind, moving to open source platforms, was it a challenge in any way or was it an easy decision to make? In this case it was an easy decision to make. I mean sometimes it can be a difficult decision not a cost benefit ratio. I mean software is actually never really free. I mean it's free but it actually takes a lot of work in order to support it and so on. So I think there's a lot of companies that make a very good business by taking some open source software and providing customer service and support around it. And we still needed to have a lot of support in order to get this platform off the ground. But it's a fairly popular platform. For example in the UK, their Open Learn Initiative, Open University, they use this platform. They were one of the early adopters and there's many other universities and schools and institutions around the world who are using it for their purposes or for in-house training and so on. It allows you to track, you know, did the people have quizzes, did the people complete courses and so on. So some companies, not the ITU, they use it for things like compliance training that every employee has to go through certain courses. Okay. So I'm interested to know about the content of the courses. So what about the courses offered, what languages they are in and are they for free or not? Well we offer a lot of courses for free. It depends. It's either free or low cost. It really depends. And we work with a lot of partners around the world. And in some cases we're also trying to support that they become sustainable as an institution. And that may require that they charge for them. But we offer a lot of courses free and sometimes they get oversubscribed. Because practically all our distance learning courses are not just you run the course by yourself. It's actually instructor led. So you go through various modules over several weeks and so on. So a course like that might take four to six weeks. It might have online chat sessions. There can even be a face-to-face meeting at times. But the vast majority of our courses are free right now. And for the languages? Currently on the distance learning we do English and Spanish a lot. Some French. We do some French. We have Arabic, I know we have Arabic face-to-face courses. But surprisingly in the Arab states region a lot of these courses are run in English. So for organizations or individuals who want to join the portal, what are the steps that they have to do and is it equally available for individuals or institutions? Well a lot of the information you can get off the portal or look at the old courses. Because what I really insist upon is that once we run a course we open it up so that guests can look at it and use the materials. So for example you can browse the list of courses and see how they were delivering it, perhaps download the materials as you want. So we tend to open up the courses afterwards because they make a great learning resource afterwards. So I'm interested to know about the centers of excellence. What are they and what services did they offer? Well centers of excellence is basically a partnership that part of the ITU Academy framework where there's about 60 institutions around the world that we partner with to deliver sort of what we say frontline training. They're close to the region, they know about the particular needs in that region and we work with them to get the top experts to bring training to the region that's relevant to local needs. So for example we have a centers of excellence network in Arab states and CIS states and in Africa both in French and English speaking and also for Portuguese and Spanish speaking. So in Africa, in the Caribbean, in the Americas and Asia Pacific I think I got them all. So in the Arab region in particular since our audience are from Qatar what are the future steps you're going to make in the Arab region regarding the centers of excellence? Any specific courses? Well we distributed here at this conference a listing of all the catalog of courses that we're going to be offering in 2010. But also as soon as we get this information we put it up on the IT Academy portal at academy.itu.int. So you can go to the portal, choose training and events and then choose face to face workshops or distance learning workshops and then browse through them and see. And of course you're absolutely right what we really need and we plan to implement is that you can navigate to courses by region. So maybe you want to navigate by time and date or you want to go by Google Maps and they show me all the courses being run in this region. So we're planning on doing that but right now there already is an indication where the courses are so you know that it's in the region. So what are the open educational resources or OERs? What do they refer to and are they part of the portal or not? Well we're just starting with open educational resources. Basically open educational resources are a bit like the open software. It basically means that you can download for free a course or a curricula and then either reuse it or adapt it or translate it into a local language. So the pioneers in this were MIT with their open courseware initiative. Now there's about 1800, 1900 courses that you can freely download from MIT's open courseware. So it's a very, very interesting experiment. It was a big UNESCO Hewlett Packard initiative I've got when it started exactly. But it's something becoming more and more important and it's useful for us because if we identify a course on some esoteric subject that was delivered let's say at MIT we can take that and adapt it perhaps for you at MIT or your academy and make sure that our membership can get access to it too. So these things are typically licensed under what's called a Creative Commons type license. So you can reuse them for non-commercial purposes typically which in this case it's more for public good that we deliver these courses for the most part. So people since they are under Creative Commons license can educators use the material after getting your consent of course? No and one of the conditions typically if they want to reuse a course like this is I actually don't have the right to assert copyright. I have to give the same licensing conditions. So if I reuse the materials you're allowed to reuse the materials too. So what are the trainer activities that are part of the project? Well trainer activities is really where we're trying to provide institutional support for people who are delivering training in ICTs. So for example I'll give you an example. We ran a training recently on Moodle in Mozambique because they want to deliver online courses in Mozambique but they're not familiar with the technology. So we ran an event for Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries in Africa. We're going to run the same sort of training this summer in Tanzania for all our African centers of excellence. So it's our way of really trying to assist those who are doing the direct training and give them the expertise to leverage tools as much as they can. Okay my final question is the ICT Learn conference. You briefly mentioned during your session so please tell us more about it, the venue, the focus of the conference and when will it take place. Okay well ICT Learn is a new conference we're organizing on what is the very interesting topic of the intersection of ICTs and learning and training and so on. And as I mentioned ICTs are fundamentally changing training and we think there's a lot of potential in the future for more change. I mean for example if you go to iTunes you can download video courses from the best professors in the world. In fact now there's some professors who have almost become internet celebrities because they are great teachers. And I think one of the, there's a very famous one of a professor, I think he's at MIT where he teaches physics and the way he teaches physics is by swinging himself on a pendulum across the room. And those sorts of learning experiences really stick in people's minds and I think there's a lot of potential in the future for video learning. And now that we have these beautiful handheld devices and the iPads and stuff like that and the storage is getting so cheap we have the ability to have wonderful learning and training on these devices. I think this is probably going to radically change the way we learn in the future. And so this is one of the topics that's going to be discussed. The conference will be held the 30th of November through the 3rd of December and it will be in a place called Busan, Korea. Busan is the second largest city in Korea right after Seoul. It's on this very southern tip although in November we won't be able to go to the beach. But I've been there before, it's a very, very nice place and we're very fortunate to have the Korean Communications Commission act as our host for this thing. Also Busan City Council is helping us and also the Department of Broadband Communications and Development, I think DVCD in Australia. They're also providing some funding for this event to help us bring developing countries in this conference too. So I think it's going to be a quite interesting event, it's sort of unusual and we're really looking forward to it. We look forward to it as well and thank you so much for all your insights. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much.