Media.Knet.Ca

Economic Development officers, Community Futures program staff, and others gathered in Pinewa, Manitoba on Thursday and Friday, September 25 and 26 to discuss different community development opportunities and experiences. Dan Pellerin, K-Net's Network Manager, travelled over to the session for two panel presentations about the K-Net broadband network and its impact on community economic development in the communities across Ontario.

As part of the First Nations SchoolNet and Smart Communities initiatives sponsored by Industry Canada, Keewaytinook Okimakanak is providing on-line Grade 8 supplementary Science, Math and English courses for 12 First Nation schools in Ontario. Fernando Oliveira, a former Keewaytinook Internet High School teacher in Poplar Hill and Fort Severn, is developing and delivering these courses in partnership with the twelve Grade 8 teachers. To register your school and participate in this innovative program visit http://g8.firstnationschools.ca

This past winter, Fernando organized a pilot Grade 8 Supplementary program working with KIHS and Grade 8 teachers in several KIHS partner First Nations. The program was well received, as documented in the project evaluation and final report (click here to view). This school year's project is now being expanded to include more schools and more subjects intended to help the students, the teachers, the schools and the communities provide additional resources for their young people.

The September 18 issue of Wawatay News contains two more news stories about the work being completed within the Kuh-ke-nah Network of Smart First Nations demonstration project.

This week's issue of the Kuh-ke-nah page in Wawatay News include the following articles:

• Keeping their community satellite systems going: Fort Severn, Webequie and Slate Falls are three of the 12 First Nations across Northwestern Ontario that have to use a C-Band satellite connection for their community broadband services. Local technicians and administrators in each of these communities share their business strategies for maintaining their local broadband network.
• Rez Pez; the hilarious on-line diabetes health initiative: Rod Fiddler, the Sandy Lake Diabetes Coordinator, is working with a variety of communication technologies along with a heavy dose of humour (Sandy Lake style) to get a very important message across about the food we eat and its effects on our health.
• K-Net Showcase - contains photos from the K-Net photo gallery with images of the some of the elders who are living and working across the north, ensuring the traditions, culture and language are protected and maintained.

Rick Garrick is researching additional stories for future articles. If you have a story that you want to share about this project and the work that is happening in your community to get connected, please send us an e-mail.

On Friday, September 5, Charles Ailey travelled to Sioux Lookout to meet with K-Net staff. Charles is developing a regional strategy to support the successful implementation and operation of the telehealth and teleradiology initiatives being undertaken by the NORTH Network. The meetings with K-Net staff involved discussions around the technical requirements and support services needed to make these initiatives work in the remote First Nations across the region.

During his visit to the K-Net office, Charles was able to discuss some of the challenges affecting Fort Severn with Mel Orecklin, the Band's Co-manager.

Douglas Crust is a Program Officer with the Community Access Program from Industry Canada’s Toronto regional office. On Monday, September 8, he flew to Thunder Bay and met with Carl and other people in the Thunder Bay FedNor office. Then he drove to Sioux Lookout to meet with K-Net staff and learn about some of the work being done in this region.

After a tour of the satellite earth station site and the fibre network hub at the local library, Doug visited the local community CAP site located in the library which was a beehive of activity with nearly all the terminals being used by community members. Check out the pictures of this portion of the visit.

At supper, Robert Thomas from Fort Severn joined us and shared information about the development and operation of the CAP sites in his community. Discussions also focussed on local needs and issues that can influence the present and future successful operation of these resources in remote communities.

Doug’s journey continues with a drive over to Red Lake to visit the McDowell Lake public access sites located at the KO office in Balmertown and the Band Office in Red Lake. Then on Wednesday, Doug will be flying into North Spirit Lake to visit the CAP sites and to meet the people in that community.

Ricardo Ramirez and the team from Telecommons Development Group have been working with Keewaytinook Okimakanak for the past four years in the development and facilitation of the program evaluation tools we are using to assess our work in the KO First Nations. Ricardo recently developed and published a paper for the Journal of Development Communication about this work for an academic audience and communication practitioners internationally. This journal is published by the the Asian Institute for Development Communication (AIDCOM) in Malaysia.

The paper is called "Bridging disciplines: The natural resource management kaleidoscope for understanding ICTs" and is available on-line by clicking on the title.

Abstract

The potential of information and communication technologies (ICTs) as tools to enhance the development of rural and remote regions remains largely undetermined. The component technologies are designed as commercial tools for industrialized settings and the fact that they have potential for rural and remote community development worldwide is an add-on. The role and impact of the new technology is so vast that a multidisciplinary approach is needed to appreciate it. There are a growing number of tools and diagrams in the literature to capture the multiple dimensions of ICTs, and they all seem to fall short of capturing their very essence. In other words there is a need for a new epistemology to guide this process. This paper provides elements for that epistemology from the field of natural resource management (NRM). The fields of natural resource management and information and communication technology for rural development share several features: they involve multiple dimensions and technical disciplines, multiple stakeholders are involved, a seemingly endless number of variables and indicators need attention, and there is increasing unpredictability and complexity. Four pillars are proposed towards a new epistemology to understand ICTs as tools for rural and remote community development: acknowledging diversity in paradigms; embracing pluralism; embracing a systems approach; and emphasizing learning and participation. The paper describes ongoing action research with attention to stakeholder engagement in planning, tracking impact, and creating local capacities.

The September 4 issue of Wawatay News contains two more news stories about the work being completed within the Kuh-ke-nah Network of Smart First Nations demonstration project.

This week's issue of the Kuh-ke-nah page in Wawatay News include the following articles:

• Learning Video Production in Their Communities - North Spirit Lake and Keewaywin First Nation band members each participated in a seven day video production training workshop to begin producing video material that can be posted on-line. The other three KO First Nations will be completing their community based training workshops in September. Capturing and archiving digital video material is another initiative supported under Industry Canada's Smart Communities demonstration project.
• KiHS well prepared for another on-line school year - KiHS teachers and classroom assistants each participated in training and development workshops in Balmertown during the last two weeks of August in preparation for the 2003-2004 school year.
• K-Net Showcase - contains photos and the URL address about the construction and maintenance of the infrastructure that is in place to make all these connections work.

Rick Garrick is researching additional stories for future articles. If you have a story that you want to share about this project and the work that is happening in your community to get connected, please send us an e-mail.

Various newspaper articles are being scanned and stored for reference purposes in this photo gallery.

Adam Fiser and Karina Griffith drove from Toronto to spend the long weekend meeting with K-Net staff to learn about the community networking work being completed in this region. Adam is a PhD candidate student at the University of Toronto working with Dr. Andrew Clement in the Faculty of Information Services. They are collecting information and conducting research as one component of the Canadian Research Alliance For Community Innovation And Networking (CRACIN) initiative in which K-Net is one of the case studies being proposed.

Karina is a video producer who is worked with a video cooperative in Ottawa (http://www.sawvideo.com). Both Karina and Adam are interested in supporting the production of video material that can be used on-line to support the archiving, the maintenance and development of Native language resource material.

Over the three days meetings were held with Brian Beaton (K-Net Coordinator), Dan Pellerin (Network Manager), Les Meekis (Community Manager who was in Keewaywin working on some video production training), Adi Linden (K-Net Systems Analyst), Jesse Fiddler (K-Net Multi-media producer), Cal Kenny (K-Net Graphics Design), Darrin Potter (KiHS Principal), Marlene McKay (KiHS teacher in Frenchman's Head), Florence Woolner (working on the First Nation SchoolNet initiative), Lorraine Kenny (producing on-line Native Parenting resource material) and Tom Terry (supporting the KO GIS initiative). Visits were made to Lac Seul First Nation (to see the KiHS sites in Kejick Bay and Frenchman's Head) and Wabigoon First Nation (to see the 2-way satellite install at the local school, the local wild rice production plant and the traditional pow-wow). Tom and Carol Terry supported the visit with the use of their cabin (and sauna).

On the final day of the visit, discussions focussed on putting together a presentation about the work that KO is doing as the Ontario Regional Management Organization for Industry Canada's First Nation SchoolNet Program. Adam, working with K-Net staff, is now exploring ways to collect more information and supporting our work in introducing broadband and high speed connectivity in the different First Nation schools across Ontario. He will be joining K-Net staff on-line as we work with school staff and First Nations to bring new ICT tools and applications into these environments.

Over 13 MILLION hits occurred on the K-Net servers during the month of August. Specifically, on the seven servers with traffic graphs, there were a total of 13,075,607 hits made to these on-line services provided by Keewaytinook Okimakanak.

Several of the K-Net servers that are being monitored for hits, visits and usage statistics using the webalizer program again showed an increase. In particular, the http://myknet.org server rose again to over 7.3 million hits during this month.

Please note:

• other on-line K-Net services, such as K-Net chat and the video streamer are not included in these numbers;
• server traffic monitoring information is located at http://tech.knet.ca/~tech/monitoring.

Over the labour day weekend (Saturday and Sunday), K-Net staff took down the K-Net mail service for a 24 hour period to upgrade the storage devices. As well, staff are beginning the process of planning a strategy to filter virus from the mail attachments to prevent the mail service from being swamped with all the viruses and worms that are attacking on-line mail services around the worm.

We appreciate your patience and support in our efforts to improve these on-line services for all K-Net users. We expect that the mail service will be back up and running again by 5 pm on Sunday afternoon.