You will take part in the section "Introducing eLearning to the school system". Would you please be so kind as to give a short description of what your organization, Uconnect, is working toward?

Daniel Stern: Our not-for-profit NGO, Uconnect, has been working in Uganda for ten years to bring the benefits of the Internet to as many people as possible. We have concentrated our efforts on bringing the Internet to primary and secondary schools - and through the schools to parents and the community, by providing them with computing equipment and training. We are working with ISP partners to provide discounted connectivity and collaborating with education ministry colleagues in presenting the benefits of Internet-enhanced education at workshops for head teachers throughout Uganda.

In which learning fields does school-based Internet training constitute an alternative form of instruction in school? What will be better?

Daniel Stern: Though some fields of learning may lend themselves to the Internet better than others, the distribution of learning materials, interactive collaboration, tutoring, and assessment through the Internet should benefit every field. Teaching and learning methods will adapt over time as emerging technologies make the Internet more widely available through greater affordability and with people's growing understanding that Internet services are relevant to each one's needs, as is commonly accepted in the case of the mobile phone in rural sub-Saharan Africa today.

Internet-enhanced learning could start by only complimenting existing educational methods: a trainee working on his or her own with online resources, search engines, and more structured distance-learning courses. Gradually, as greater numbers of people enjoy its benefits, new forms of face-to-face training will emerge that will transform our concept of school, moving it away from the 'bricks and mortar' concept prevalent today.


Incidentally, the schools-based Internet training that our NGO is promoting is only one of a number of possible first steps towards providing communities, especially those in rural areas of less developed countries, with access to the benefits of the Internet. We can expect that other means of using the Internet for learning will emerge as more cost-effective services and affordable new devices become available. In time we should see a higher penetration of Internet learning in rural areas as growing numbers of people within those communities gain an appreciation of the Internet's value, especially its value-for-money as compared with other means of communicating, doing business, acquiring knowledge, and publishing.

Prior to the arrival of relatively inexpensive pre-paid top up cards, mobile phones had been the preserve of the middle classes. I expect to see people walking barefoot along the murram roads carrying yellow plastic twenty-litre water containers or firewood on their heads as they read the next assignments of their distance learning courses from an inexpensive wireless device - much the way they do now with mobile phones. You don't have to be a soothsayer to know that those devices will eventually be available at the local markets: the hand-me-down, last-generation WiMax-enabled Blackberries or iPaqs from wealthier countries shipped thousands at a time by sea container. Talk about having the best of both worlds!

Why is it important and for whom?


Daniel Stern: Visit a classroom during the school term at any of the 14,000 primary and secondary schools in Uganda. You will see a teacher working with a piece of white chalk, transmitting knowledge to students from the one textbook available to the school on the subject being taught and the students copying with pencils into their lined notebooks from the blackboard. Of the two or three percent of those schools that have computers (the vast majority don't yet have electricity), only a small proportion of the students can use the computer lab. A prestigious secondary school with 2,800 students and a lab of less than thirty workstations is one of the most fortunate of schools. Only a very small proportion of the few hundred schools that have computers have Internet access.

This everyday reality must be comprehended - perhaps 'believed' is the better word - for those who have yet to experience it first hand. Otherwise they cannot fully understand how important it is that we find a way to provide the Internet's fabulously rich, yet relatively inexpensive, learning resources to those students and teachers who struggle to learn and teach under the conditions I have just described.

What is your vision of school reality in the future?

Daniel Stern: In light of alternative or complementary ways of learning afforded by emerging technologies such as the hand-held distance-learning scenario I described earlier, Internet-enabled learning will afford educational opportunities that are much more adaptable, less intrusive, and disruptive to family life and society than the institutionalised education we know today that grew out of the industrial revolution.


According to firebrand educator, John Taylor Gatto, the need for large centralised schools, was required for the teaching of reading and numeracy skills to a future, hopefully not-too-literate labour force. At the same time, it served to provide minders for the children of the thousands of mill-working parents concentrated in those towns where water wheels and later steam engines powered huge factories, who might otherwise not have been available to work in the factories.

Internet-age children no longer need to endure the deprivations suffered by us, their industrial age forebears, victims of an artificial, probably pernicious system of education, separated as we were from our mothers and fathers during those critical tender years. Who could argue the need for an institution in rural African society, one of whose main tasks is minding the children of working parents?

Instead learning can take place in a natural home environment; the children can acquire numeracy by counting beans and learn to read with the help of an older sibling. They will work together in the age-old custom of their ancestors for their own survival, prosperity, and mutual happiness, learning important and interesting life skills in an utterly meaningful context instead of having to be taught out of a textbook in dry theory classes at today's institutionalised schools.

'This is a wooden spoon that is used for cooking' versus 'Let's make bread' or 'Who would like to pound millet?' And having acquired the necessary literacy and other skills, each member of the family could use the Internet to further explore the world around them, communicate their needs, interests, and discoveries, find solutions to problems, and post lessons learned to their websites' blogs. In short, they would be able to build their knowledge and develop intellect in the context of the immediate needs of their family, neighbours, and local community as they are learning, teaching, getting educated, and educating.

This type of education, made possible through Internet technologies, is so much more relevant to the needs of a community and conducive to the building of a healthy society than the fragmented disconnected-from-life education that has contributed to the dysfunctional families and other ills of today's modern society. 'Mama, I've finished with the washing and I've downloaded my English and Maths. May I have my lessons under the tree?'