Wednesday, 23 June, 14.00-15.30, Room 2

"BUILDING AND MANAGING WEB SITES FOR YOUNG USERS"

Introduction

The United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child states that access to modern teaching methods (28.3), to diverse points of view (17a/b), and to freedom of expression (13.1) is every child's right. Voices of Youth (VOY), UNICEF's online forum for young people, and the new teacher training web site, Teachers Talking About Learning (TTAL), are taking steps to help UNICEF offices take action on this agenda. It's easy to view access to the Internet as a benefit of privilege that has little relevance to children's rights. However, the grip of this technology on economic and educational matters grows daily. Without intervention by inter- and non-governmental organizations, lack of access will increasingly isolate and exclude children who are disadvantaged.

The purpose of the TTAL initiative is to establish the Internet as a tool for the professional development of teachers, to provide a forum for sharing best practices of teachers working in developing countries, and to demonstrate the interactive rather than merely the broadcast capabilities of the Internet. The purpose of the VOY web site is to provide a forum for learning and dialogue about global issues among young people, and to establish human rights, specifically the rights of children and young people, as the foundation for engagement with the virtual, and virtually global, community constituted via Internet. As projects of UNICEF, both web sites hold three commitments in common. These are: (1) valuing the messengers, that is, the young people and the teachers; (2) valuing the Internet as a learning tool; and (3) increasing the participation in online learning and professional development of young people and teachers from disadvantaged communities, in developing and industrialized countries alike, in order to reduce, rather than increase, disparities in development. Both web sites are organised using a common framework: Explore, Respond, Take Action, which allows users to interact with new ideas, respond with their own ideas, and move ideas into practical actions. This three-step cycle, consists of an exploration phase, followed by a responding phase, during which participants apply the information to their own experience, by becoming familiar with a range of perspectives and developing empathy, as well as a sense of personal involvement and commitment. This leads to a third phase that of taking action. Here users explore practical actions that might address the issue in question. This presentation will highlight the foundations of both projects, emphasising strategies for encouraging interactivity and building an online community. We will also briefly touch on the issues involved in promoting Internet access in resource-poor areas.

2. VOICES OF YOUTH: A FOCUS ON EDUCATION FOR DEVELOPMENT

How can young people acquire the knowledge, skills and attitudes required to become actively involved as agents of social change? How can new technologies help them to develop values such as global solidarity, justice, peace and tolerance, which in turn may enable them to exercise, mobilize and advocate for human rights? These are challenges which educators face today when confronted with the need to promote wider awareness among young people of global issues of development and justice, of growing intolerance and racism, environmental degradation, alienation and apathy of youth. In an attempt to respond to this challenge Voices of Youth (http://www.unicef.org/voy/ ), the UNICEF Internet Forum for young people has been set up. It is a trilingual (Spanish, French and English) web site that offers learning activities and materials, including web-based and chat discussions, on issues that affect the lives of children and young people world-wide such as child labour, armed conflict, urbanization, gender discrimination, and HIV/AIDS. In operation since 1995, the site now hosts 17 active discussions and regularly convenes chat sessions and focus groups to encourage dialogue and learning both youth-to-youth and youth-to-policy maker.

As an extension of UNICEF's advocacy on behalf of children and young people, "Voices" is guided by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which strives to establish children's rights as enduring ethical principles and international standards of behaviour towards children. The web site's educational materials on global issues endeavour to teach young people about their rights, encourage empathy with those whose rights have been denied, and help young people become empowered to take action on behalf of their own rights and those of others. In its sponsorship of this web site, UNICEF has both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity is to participate in fostering a culture of human rights, specifically the rights of children and young people, on the World Wide Web. The challenge is to mobilize recognition of and participation in global issues whether at the community, regional, national or international level. Voices of Youth is a project of the Education for Development programme (EDEV) within the Education Section at UNICEF. EDEV has a twofold foundation. Firstly, it has a conceptual framework, which is based on a series of global concepts to help learners understand the multiplicity of factors that influence the shaping of a rapidly changing world. Secondly, it uses a learning process that brings the learner through stages of awareness building followed by a personal responding phase and leads to a commitment to take action. EDEV's conceptual framework consists of 5 "lenses" that allow the learner to approach the study of global issues from a variety of perspectives: conflict resolution, images and perceptions, social justice, change management, and interdependence. At the heart of this approach is the notion of citizenship in a global community, specifically, the challenges to equal citizenship where citizens, in industrialized and developing societies alike, experience vast social and economic disparities. By emphasising concepts like social justice, interdependence, and conflict resolution, the EDEV programme, through projects like Voices of Youth, endeavours to provide a framework for an informed and compassionate activism among young people.

3. TEACHERS TALKING ABOUT LEARNING: A SITE FOR TEACHERS

UNICEF has set up a web site: Teachers Talking About Learning (TTAL) (http://www.unicef.org/teachers) in order to support teachers in UNICEF-assisted Education projects around the world. This web site has content topics related to The Learner, The Teacher, and The Child-friendly Learning Environment. In addition there is a framework for Internet-based web site discussion for teachers ("Teachers Talking"), and a Teachers' Forum which introduces exemplary teachers discussing particular teaching and learning issues in developing countries. Dissemination of web site content to countries without Internet connectivity is possible though the use of re-recordable CD-ROMs, and by downloading web pages and printing them for distribution. Interactivity is offered through e-mail responses and posting of responses to the TTAL site.

The goal of the TTAL web site is to engage teachers in activities that support professional development, self-assessment and reflection, and joining together in a community of practice. The structure of the web site is designed to create clear connections between the content ("Explore Ideas") and the interactive opportunities ("Discuss Issues" and "Take Action") by promoting assessment and analysis, giving teachers a forum to describe their methods and bringing them into contact with experts from around the world. In these ways, Internet-enabled teacher development has the potential to be a very effective complement to training that is delivered in workshops and via other means. The TTAL web site gives teachers the opportunity to put their ideas into practice, and to continually refer to expert information that is relevant to their situation. Most importantly, it invites teachers to communicate their experiences and to frame them clearly for others, and in the process, for themselves. For teachers in challenging circumstances, achieving these goals is inseparable from achieving understanding of the right to education and of the key conditions necessary for learning about adequate nutrition, safety in school and at home, and respect for gender, ethnic and cultural differences.

Actual content from UNICEF-assisted teacher development projects around the world was used for the Explore Ideas section of the web site. At present, most of the content comes from teacher development projects in the Philippines, VietNam and Bangladesh, and more will be added as teachers post new ideas and resources. The content reflects UNICEF's awareness of the links between human rights and successful education. One key thrust of the site, based largely on the field-project materials, involves helping teachers find ways to craft learning experiences that are particular to the cultures and communities their students live in. The site also helps teachers to frame ways that the community can contribute to the school, by assisting with a school garden, by visiting the classroom to share stories, and in many other ways. Teachers from these projects have also contributed many resource ideas, including instructions for playing games and ideas for science projects. TTAL provides teachers with information and interactions that can help them explore new ideas and practices and see their students and learning in general in a new light. But the communication possibilities that the site provides, also gives teachers ways to understand the results of their attempts and the support that they need to persevere.

4. INTERACTIVITY

In creating Internet projects UNICEF takes on an obligation to assist young people and teachers in becoming active participants in the issues which affect them. The Internet must serve not only as a method to inform children and young people about their rights, but also as an active medium of communication between all the stakeholders in the process of fulfilling children and young people's rights. Human rights may be defined as a broad field of relationships among various stakeholders: individuals, families, communities, and nations - rights holders and duty bearers bound together by mutual obligations. The UNICEF Internet initiative opens communication among and between three groups of stakeholders: 1) young people themselves; 2) policy-makers, educators, and other care providers; and 3) the UNICEF web teams (see figure 1).

Voices of Youth for example facilitates youth to youth communication on a number of levels and through a number of means. It provides a forum for young people whose rights have been violated, to tell other young people of their situation by presenting writings, drawings, and messages from young people affected by wars, from child labourers, from street children. It provides an opportunity for young people in positions of privilege because of gender, social position or nationality, to learn about the situation of others not as lucky as themselves. It provides an opportunity for young people who are already active in rights issues to describe their action projects and to discuss goals and tactics with other youth activists, and an opportunity for those who are not yet active to learn more about what they can do to actively participate in issues that concern them.

Youth to policy maker communication has also been a central part of "Voices" from the beginning when thousands of messages from young people in 81 countries were presented to delegates at the 1995 World Summit on Social Development. The Voices of Youth web-based forums have also presented questions and suggestions from young people to delegates at many other international conferences on such issues as child labour, housing, gender equity, conflict resolution, and human development. VOY live chat sessions have given the opportunity for Romanian orphans and Costa Rican street kids to discuss adoption; issues with those responsible for formulating policy direction on inter-country adoption, for out of school youth from Mongolia, Turkey, Honduras and Mexico to discuss educational needs with educators; and for HIV/AIDS activists from Namibia, Malawi, and Togo to discuss the relation of poverty to disease with human development policy makers. Nor has the flow of information been only from youth to policy makers: VOY has been a medium of communication from policy makers to youth including ministers of education, youth, labour, and development from dozens of countries; leaders of major international NGOs; educators and development workers from around the world.

Voices of Youth and Teachers Talking About Learning also facilitate communication from policy makers to children, youth and educators, by presenting major international documents such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child. This is done in a series of age-graded materials which provide not only the full text of the documents, but also shorter summaries aimed at younger children, through pictures, through interactive games and exercises, as well as through links to complete documents on the UNICEF web site. For example, Teachers Talking About Learning asks teachers to consider why human rights should make a difference to classroom life through an interactive exercise called 'Why so child-friendly?' The UNICEF Internet initiative also provides opportunities for policy makers and care providers to communicate among themselves on issues of concern related to education and to youth. The VOY "Teachers' Place" and the TTAL "Teachers Talking" sites provide forums for educators to discuss global issues, education practice, and the role of the Internet in education. Both web sites link directly to the main UNICEF web site which presents statistics, policy statements and documents of use to all those involved in youth and education issues.

In order for the UNICEF Internet initiative to be successful in promoting communication between all stakeholders in children's rights, the Internet development teams must also be an active partner in the communication process. In addition to soliciting general feedback from youth and policy makers through email, web based forms, and person to person communication at international youth gatherings, the UNICEF web teams have also taken a more proactive role in soliciting input from both youth and policy makers. The recent Voices online quiz on HIV/AIDS is an example: drafts of the quiz were circulated to medical and development experts at UNAIDS, UNICEF, and other agencies and to over 40 young people in 20 countries. The youth focus groups provided invaluable suggestions for making the quiz more relevant to young people and to phrasing things in a way likely to be accessible and of interest to young people worldwide.

5. CONCLUSION

The Internet helps children and young people to learn about children's rights and how these affect them, as well as other children and young people from around the world. It is also a means for providing on-line professional development for teachers. The challenge of the future will be to make such valuable resources more readily available to teachers and young people in remote and disadvantaged areas through satellite and digital radio technologies. Although not a focus of this paper both VOY and TTAL are piloting projects aimed at exploring suitable connectivity options for low-income and remote communities. For example, satellite and "Sneaker net" (ways of increasing coverage through extending the use of the Internet in non-connected forms) for TTAL, and encouragement of public-private partnerships and equipment shares for youth participation in VOY. This will be the next chapter.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF EACH AUTHOR

Elaine Furniss is a Senior Education Advisor in the Education Section UNICEF New York. Her area of work concerns Education Quality issues related to curriculum, teachers, and technology. She has worked for UNICEF in New York and in VietNam, and was previously a teacher and academic in schools and universities in Australia. She has written a number of books related to teacher education and literacy. She supervises the work of TTAL.

Edmond Gaible is executive director of the EOE Foundation, dedicated to research in online learning communities. He has designed computer support for teacher resource centres in rural Zimbabwe and investigated distance learning in Bangladesh for the UNDP. He is currently developing distributed learning environments for Turkish secondary teachers and for the U.S. Dept. of Defense.

Andres Guerrero is a Programme Officer in the Education Section, UNICEF, New York. From 1990 to 1996, he managed the Education for Development Unit in the UNICEF Regional Office for Europe in Geneva. Currently, he advises UNICEF country offices and National Committees on all matters related to UNICEF Education for Development policy supervises Voices of Youth and is focal point in the Education Section for adolescent education.

Anne Sheeran is a consultant to UNICEF and is in her third year as co-ordinator of the UNICEF Internet forum for young people, Voices of Youth. She has conducted research and worked in development planning in Sri Lanka. As a cultural anthropologist and university teacher with training in regional planning, Ms Sheeran maintains research interests in South Asian studies and the impact of global capitalism on popular conceptions of race and gender.

Jeff Zucker has been co-ordinator of UNICEF Voices of Youth since the project started. He has designed over a dozen international web sites in the fields of health, arts, sustainable development, and human rights. The author of three books and many shorter pieces, he has a background in cultural anthropology, teaching, counselling, and software design.

Abstract for workshop

"BUILDING AND MANAGING WEB SITES FOR YOUNG USERS"

(EXTENSION EVENTS: Audio/Video and Multimedia Centres, Internet Café)

This demonstration addresses key elements in the design and operation of participatory and educational web sites for young users. Issues include: (1) desiging software that encourages broad participation and active learning; (2) using the internet to cross borders - borders of age, gender, language, nationality, and social class; (3) forging public-private partnerships to forge greater access for youth in technologically disadvantaged communities.

The presenter, Jeff Zucker, is the webmaster, co-founder, and co-coordinator of UNICEF'sInternet forum for young people, Voices of Youth (http://www.unicef.org/voy/ ). Voices of Youth operates within the framework of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and encourages young people worldwide to learn about and discuss today's issues of peace, social justice, and human rights. After nearly four years of operation the Voices site hosts 10 open discussion forums which together contain nearly 7000 messages, including over 100 from world leaders.

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