Media.Knet.Ca

First published in Thunder Bay’s Chronicle-Journal newspaper on Saturday, October 16, 2004 (Page A7) as a Guest Column by Geordi Kakepetum, Keewaytinook Okimakanak’s Executive Director.

As Thunder Bay Telephone adopts a new course ("TbayTel aims to keep up with times" - C-J, Sept 29), it’s important to consider some of the opportunities that information communication technologies (ICTs) offer for community-based development.

Keewaytinook Okimakanak (the Northern Chiefs Council) was created more than 10 years ago to bring support services and other applications including connectivity and ICTs to our member First Nation communities in Ontario’s Far North. Back then, many of our communities did not even have residential telephone service. Our leadership understood that a technological revolution was taking place that we could not afford to miss.

To learn more, our chiefs travelled by bus to witness a demonstration of tele-medicine in Ottawa. They watched as a cardiologist at the Heart Institute diagnosed a patient in the Northwest Territories. Our leadership immediately saw the potential of such a tool to imporove the lives of people in Ontario’s Far North.

Since then, Keewaytinook Okimakanak (KO) (http://knet.ca) has become a leader in First Nation connectivity and telecommunications. We operate KNet Services (http://smart.knet.ca), a community-based telecommunications network, KO Telehealth (http://telehealth.knet.ca), and KiHS (http://kihs.knet.ca) to name just a few. Each of these applications was developed by our communities to address local needs.

I would like to share with you how education has changed in Ontario’s Far North because of this. Historically, our children had to leave their families and communities after they finished elementary school if they wanted to continue their education at high school in Sioux Lookout, Kenora or Thunder Bay. Not surprising many of these young people ran into trouble as they struggled to deal with the challenges of urban life.

Most of our communities simply could not support a full high school program because populations are small. Those communities with enough students to support a high school program could only afford to hire one or maybe two teachers. Like all rural and remote schools, our programs could not provide the full range of curriculum options that urban students take for granted. Further, it was difficult to hire and retain teachers to work under such conditions.

Keewaytinook Internet High School (http://kihs.knet.ca) was created by our communities to address each of these challenges. KiHS now offers Grade 9 and 10 courses for those who wish to remain home for the first two years of high school.

KiHS is not a "cyber school" where teachers and students can only interact with each other via e-mails and web pages. KiHS is a high school with classrooms located in the thirteen partner First Nation communities across Northwestern Ontario.

KiHS students attend a regular classroom each day under the direction of a teacher accredited by the Ontario College of Teachers. Instead of trying to teach all subjects at every grade level, each teacher is responsible for teaching only two courses, one at the Grade 9 level and the other in Grade 10, in his or her area of specialization. The teacher in Fort Hope, for example, teaches computer science to all of the students across the KiHS network via the Internet and videoconferencing.

How successful is KiHS? This program has been operating for only three years so it has not been objectively evaluated yet. We would like to know if smaller class sizes and the opportunities for on-on-one mentoring better prepares our students for the remaining years of high school. We would like to know how successful our students are when they graduate and move towards college, university and beyond.

Nevertheless, KiHS has achieved a number of its original objectives. It keeps our youth at home under the guidance of their parents and grandparents during those critical early teenage years. Would you want your children to leave home to attend Grade 9? Would you want them to board with strangers?

Many First Nation students who travel south to attend high school drop out shortly after September and return home. Without KiHS, these students would have nothing to do except get into trouble. KiHS allows these students to save their year by achieving at least some of their credits.

Some complete the maximum number of credits available. Many of these young people choose to remain KiHS students for Grade 10. There is pressure from the Chiefs and parents to expand KiHS to include Grade 11 and 12. If the program was not meeting their needs and expectations, our enrolment would not grow every year.

KiHS is just ne of the ICT applications that Keewaytinook Okimakanak has developed to serve the needs of our members. Like KiHS, KO Telehealth links via videoconferencing the sick and injured in 24 First Nations in the Sioux Lookout Zone with physicians and specialists in Winnipeg, Thunder Bay and Toronto. KNet Services is a community-based telecommunications network that is now supporting "Voice-over-Internet" telephony, videoconferencing, web pages and e-mail to name just a few of the services that we provide to First Nations people.

Seventeen First Nation grade 8 classroom teachers are participating in this week's teacher orientation session to on-line learning in preparation for the start of this year's Grade 8 on-line Science course. These classrooms have approximately 190 First Nation students who will be working together to explore the exciting world of science using a variety of new innovative learning tools. Click here to see the flash presentation for this on-line course participants.

Fernando Oliveira, the Program Coordinator for the G8 Supplementary Courses Program, worked over the summer with a number of different parents to modify the open source, e-learning platform (called Moodle) to address a number of the issues identified from last year's courses. The new e-learning environment promises to support the local students, the classroom teachers, the course markers and course teacher to deliver an exciting and interactive on-line course.

The Grade 8 on-line supplementary program is another innovative service being delivered through Industry Canada's First Nations SchoolNet program and the Keewaytinook Okimakanak Regional Management Organization (RMO). The RMO team is supporting First Nation schools across Ontario in a number of areas including:

• developing broadband connections to the local schools that can then be shared with other local organizations, businesses and community members to ensure the ongoing sustainability of these connections;
• providing computers and multi-media equipment that can be used by the students and community members in producing and publishing local information, resources and services on-line;
• researching and creating local success stories about First Nation schools, communities and individual champions engaged in the creative and innovative use of these communication technologies;
• partnering with other organizations and First Nation schools in developing video conferencing workshops and sessions that address local needs and issues;
• delivering a helpdesk service to support First Nation schools and groups in the use of these interactive technologies and connectivity solutions;
• hiring local youth to work with education authorities and schools in the development and delivery of on-line services, activities and information.

Everyone is invited to explore these services on-line at http://g8.firstnationschools.ca to find out how the RMO team can support your local school and its on-line activities. Or call Jeannie Carpenter, RMO Administrator toll-free at 877-737-KNET (5638) ext 0 to find out how you can become involved in these opportunities.

Representatives from the six regional management organizations (RMO) are meeting with Industry Canada officials in Cranbrook, BC to develop a strategic plan to better support First Nation schools in their efforts to become the leaders in the delivery of education programming through the innovative use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Carl Seibel, FedNor's Telecom Officer, is attending this session with Brian Beaton, K-Net Coordinator as the Ontario RMO representatives. Other members of the RMO team will be joining the meeting via video conferencing.

These strategies include discussions about working with First Nations and their organizations across Canada to ensure EVERY school and community is provided with the opportunity to develop their own broadband infrastructure. With broadband infrastructure in place, First Nations are positioned to become involved in the development of local social and economic opportunities including telehealth, e-learning, e-commerce, e-government, etc.

Industry Canada programs and staff are working with communities across Canada to develop local broadband infrastructure. Many First Nations have already created their own community broadband solution. The challenge now is to get other Federal and Provincial government departments (like Indian Affairs, Heritage Canada, etc) investing in the ongoing operational costs of this infrastructure and the resulting applications. Health Canada is today investing in the Keewaytinook Okimakanak Telehealth Initiative that is making telemedicine and medical education programs available in remote First Nations across northwestern Ontario. Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) made a commitment in 2003 to fund the Keewaytinook Internet High School but the annual struggle to secure the necessary funding to operate this service in thirteen First Nations demonstrates a lack of support for the uses of these infrastructure on the part of this department. These are just two examples from the many broadband applications and the work that is required to create new opportunities in First Nations using broadband infrastructure.

The meetings in Cranbrook will include people from across the country using the K-Net video conferencing network and bridging service. The meeting is being facilitated by Harvey McCue. The agenda follows:

4th FIRST NATIONS SCHOOLNET
NATIONAL STRATEGIC
PROGRAMME PLANNING MEETING
October 12-14, 2004
Delta St. Eugene Mission Resort, Cranbrook, B.C.
Facilitator:  Harvey McCue

Tuesday, October 12th

6pm – 9pm First meeting with the Techmobile – St. Eugene Mission· The “Techmobile” is a multimedia truck designed to provide education regarding broadband to communities. St. Mary’s Room

Wednesday, October 13th

Connectivity
9am – 9:30am Keynote Speech: Chief Sophie Pierre, St. Mary’s BandChief Pierre is a nationally recognized leader whose vision has always been building for the future to make a better life for her nation and people.  She attended St. Eugene Mission residential school as a child and has been the driving force to convert it to a $40 million resort/casino. Chief David Room

9:30am – 10:15am E-Learning Direction – Pierre Gendron

10:30am – 12:00pm Strategic Planning Session 1: Mandate, objectives

• Mandate, programs objectives and priorities
• Collective objectives, individual member objectives
• Who is the target audience?
• Has your view of the FNS objectives/mission evolved?
• Current viewpoint of conference participants

Promising Initiatives
1:00pm – 3:00pm Strategic Planning Session 2: Continuing the discussion

• What is success?
• Measurements, indicators
• Industry Canada requirements – coping with the change
• First Nations requirements – coping with the change
• General Overview – Suzanne Robert
• RMAF/RBAF – Bruno Makoundi
• Broadband – Gerry Briggs 

3:15pm – 5:00pm Strategic Planning Session 3: Continuation

• Working with Education Authorities – Issues, Challenges and Outcomes · Events

Thursday October 14th

Moving Ahead
9:00am – 9:20am Strategic Planning Session 4 · Administrative Details - Suzanne Robert, FNS Program Manager

9:20am – 10:30 · Additions to FNS infrastructure

1. FNS Advisory Board
2. Aboriginal E-Learning Virtual Institute
3. Potential Networking- FNS- Federal and Provincial Governments
4. Unifying the RMOs
5. Key Players
6. Decisions/Actions

10:45am – 12:30pm Strategic Planning Session 5 – Final Steps, Moving Forward

1:00pm – 2:45pm Moving Forward - Discussion 

All of the sessions will utilize a Roundtable format

Thanks to Adi Linden (K-Net's Systems Analyst), Dan Pellerin (K-Net's Network Manager) and Jean-Francois (JF) Delorme (KRG's Network Coordinator), the satellite served communities across Northern Ontario and Northern Quebec are now operating on the 1A satellite transponder using the new 7.3M satellite earth station in Sioux Lookout. The move from the 12A transponder and the 3.8M dish was completed on Thursday evening with Adi and JK being able to successfully migrate each of the communities over to this new service.

With funding support from Industry Canada FedNor to construct the new earthstation and access to this transponder space from Industry Canada's National Satellite Initiative (NSI), Keewaytinook Okimakanak and our partners (including the communities, Kativik Regional Government and the Keewatin Tribal Council in Northern Manitoba) is able to better deliver telehealth, e-learning and other on-line, broadband applications.

Click here to see pictures of the new 7.3M earth station in Sioux Lookout

KO staff discussed the use of ICTs at the "Celebrating Communications for Social and Environmental Change" a conference hosted by the Snowden Program in the School of Environmental Design and Rural Development at the University of Guelph and was coordinated by Helen Hambly.

Cal Kenny, K-Net Graphic Artist and Website Design and Brian Walmark, KO Research Coordinator, joined George Ferreira, PhD Candidate and Ricardo Ramirez, SEDRD at University of Guelph on a panel entitled "K-NET: Experience in Participatory Video in Northern Ontario" (Chaired by Helen Aitken of TDG). Click here to see more pictures.

Cal Kenny shared his latest video with conference participants during one of the workshop sessions.  His work was well recieved and he shared a copy of the video with Stephanie Barker, the head of outreach at the National Film Board.

The goal of "Celebrating Communications" was to strengthen communications for social and environmental change, both as a field of development practice and academic research. The Symposium achieved all of its goals. Participants from around the world including community activists in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

While connectivity and ICTs have had a major impact on KO and other First Nation communities across the NAN territory, the Internet has been much less successful as a communications tool in Latin America and Africa. The availability of electricity, the costs of connectivity, and the failure of many e-centres to truly reflect local needs and aspirations, limits the effectiveness of ICTs at the community level. Many e-centres in Latin America simply closed after funding ran out. Local people in many cases felt little if any ownership of these e-centres. These concerns were reflected by Alfonso Gumucio Dagron, the Executive Director of Communications for Social Change Consortium in the key note address. Dagron emphasized that process not the medium is critical if local communities are to develop a strong sense of ownership. "Access to media is not the same as community ownership," he said. Community radio in Latin America, he said, has been very successful in addressing local concerns for the past twenty-five years. He said sustainability is critical if community radio is to survive the impacts of globalization. He argued that economic sustainability is only one factor that must be considered. Institutional and social sustainability are also critical elements if a media, community radio or ICTs survives are to give a voice to those increasingly muted by globalization.

Carl Greenidge, the Director of the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation, agreed that connectivity and ICTs are expensive especially in Africa but he cautioned that no media should be considered a panacea. "No matter which medium you select, some group will be excluded. It is important to select carefully and adopt a process that encourages the community to take ownership of it," he told the Symposium participants.

All agreed that media empowerment is a profound tool of development and social change. Stephanie Barker, the Head of Outreach at the National Film Board, outlined the impact that documentary films have had on the Canadian public policy such as "The Things I Cannot Change," the "Fogo Island Project," and "Ecole des Autres." She emphasized that the Challenge for Change program changed the way documentary filming takes place in Canada. "Participatory video allows communities to take on challenges and find solutions that ultimately change attitudes and social change," she said.

The Journal of Community Informatics http://www.ci-journal.net/ (JoCI) is pleased to announce the online availability of its Inaugural Issue http://ci-journal.net/viewissue.php .  JoCI is a peer-reviewed Open Archive on-line quarterly journal for and by the Community Informatics research community and produced under the auspices of the Community Informatics Research Network (CIRN) http://www.ci-research.net  

This Inaugural Issue of JoCI is an invitational response by members of the Editorial Group to give a context to our enterprise through position papers, scholarly papers and other materials.

The issue includes:

• An introduction (in part through video) to the work of K-Net, an aboriginal group in Northern Canada which is innovating in the use of ICT for education, for administration, for health and perhaps most importantly, is demonstrating the way in which ICT truly can enable AND empower communities to move beyond traditional barriers and impediments to find a new and more equitable role in the Information Society. (Beaton)
• A description of an ambitious current research project examining the impacts and outcomes of government support for community technology in Canada with an overall objective of providing insight toward the future of such programs and their impact on the larger society (Clement, Gurstein, Longford, Luke, Moll, and Shade)
• A presentation of a most important rural ICT initiative whose current success is transforming large areas of rural India (Jhunjhunwala, Ramachandran, and Bandyopadhyay)
• An analysis and plan for using a major university in a Less Developed Country (South Africa) as a base for a highly innovative program of CI for community transformation (Erwin and Taylor)
• A highly significant analysis of the current state of the art with respect to Telecentre development in Latin America and where it might go from here by three key actors in these developments. (Menou, Delgadillo and Stoll)
• A fine paper examining the theoretical background to community use of ICT in the context of Human Capital development and giving most useful directions for future research as well as community practice towards this end. (Pigg and Crank)
• A most original and insightful critique of current thinking and approaches to ICT for Development (Robinson)
• A path breaking approach to applying an analysis drawn from the methods and insights of Social Anthropology to ICT design and development as a response to rural poverty (Salvador)
• A brave and insightful analysis of the opportunities and risks that are attendant to ICT in a most important but largely unknown part of the world. (Stafeev) and
• A document presenting the current "state of play" for a leader in supporting ICT use by women in local communities (Webb and Jones) .

The second issue which will appear January 1, 2005, will consist of peer reviewed papers on "Sustainability and Community Technology" presented at the recent CIRN Prato conference http://www.ciresearch.net/conferences on this subject. The papers will be revised and edited as per conference feedback and a second round of peer reviews.  The third issue scheduled for April 1, 2005 is currently soliciting articles. The fourth issue, scheduled for July 1, 2005 has the tentative theme "Gender and Community Informatics" and will be edited by Lesle Reagen Shade of Concordia University.

Each issue will include, in addition to peer reviewed articles, a Review section, documents and reports of CI significance, and commentaries on peer reviewed papers by leading CI practitioners and those with a policy interest in CI and related matters.

Members of the Lakehead University Faculty of Education, graduate students and tribal council officials were briefed on KiHS...

e-Commerce to e-Economy: Strategies for the 21st Century

Click here to visit the conference web site to see the background information.

Conference Background Paper: The Challenge of Change: Building the 21st Century Economy [PDF - 560KB]

e-Commerce to e-Economy: Strategies for the 21st Century is a two-day, national conference, hosted by Industry Canada. This exclusive event will bring leaders from business, government and the research community together to discuss and develop a shared strategic vision for Canada's economic future.

The spread of Internet-based technologies throughout society has become the dominant economic reality of the 21st century. The e-economy - the use of information and communication technologies for product and process innovation across all sectors of the economy - has emerged as the primary engine of productivity and growth for the global economy. Successful economic strategies will enhance our capacity to adopt and exploit these technologies to create competitive advantage.

The goals of the conference are to:

• Highlight the importance of the Internet and e-business to productivity, competitiveness and economic growth;
• Assess Canada's progress as an e-economy, its future challenges and opportunities;
• Establish strategic priorities for government, business, and academia.

This conference builds on a series of thematic workshops to review Canada's e-economy strategies and define their next iterations.

Canada Connects is partnering with K-Net to provide what we believe is the first national, public, web-based seminar, hosted using Macromedia Breeze. Registration deadline is Tuesday, Sept 21. The actual event takes place on Sept 23 starting at 7:30am EST with Bill Muirhead's presentation starting at 7:45am. The title of Bill Muirhead's presentation is "Hybrid Learning Environments Integrating eLearning with Face to Face Instruction". For more information visit  http://www.canadaconnects.ca/breakfast/

Participation will provide you with first hand experience with how this tool can be used to deliver an online conference. It will provide you with insight into how Canada's newest university is planning to blend eLearning technologies with face to face instruction and finally you will have a chance to meet like minded professionals within the BREEZE environment.

All registrants will receive the National Attendees list identifying colleagues from across Canada who share their interest in eLearning.

We believe that this is an exciting opportunity for Canadians to connect from sea-to-sea. ... For more details and online registration please see:
http://www.canadaconnects.ca/breakfast/

Bill Muirhead, the Associate Provost of Ontario University will explain how Canada's youngest University is building eLearning into their campus' instructional culture from the ground up.

In the spirit of the eLearning seminar series Bill Muirhead will be presenting live from Downtown Ottawa with seminar attendees located on the Algonquin College Campus.

The remote broadcast of Dr. Muirhead's presentation will be faciltated through the use of Macromedia BREEZE. The BREEZE server and hosting support will be provided by K-Net. K-Net Multimedia Applications Manager, Jesse Fiddler will provide additional background information on the use of the Breeze server and how it was used successfully by K-Net to host a national First Nations conference with over 150 on line attendees.

A Question and Answer session will follow Bill Muirhead's presentation with live questions coming from the floor at Algonquin Campus and from online attendees.

This is an ideal opportunity to network with eLearning enthusiasts while participating in the use of Macromedia's most advanced web event delivery product.

Online attendance: $10 ( pre-event Breeze training sessions included in both options)

Please register before 4pm Sept.21. Payment can be made online by credit card or call 613 731-8330 for special payment arrangements.