Building Scholarly Networks in Southern Africa: Solving Problems of Communication
through the Internet

Michigan State University requests funding to promote information sharing and network building amongst Southern Africans countries and the United States for the purpose of scholarly exchange and civic education. Jointly hosted by H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences OnLine and the African Studies Center at Michigan State University, this program will bring a select group of faculty, librarians, university administrators, and higher education policy-makers from South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe to the United States during the summers of 1998 and 1999. The African participants will spend two weeks at Michigan State where they will participate in an intensive workshop on the pedagogical and research uses of the Internet and the World Wide Web, and seminars and roundtable discussions on the Internet and the its use for civic education and democratization. Participants will spend a third week in Washington hosted by Howard University where they will receive training in advanced information systems at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, and the National Archives. The Washington Week will include meetings with USIA staff, as well as education leaders at the American Association for the Advancement of Science and seminars at Howard on Networking-related policy issues.

During the 1998-9 academic year, the project leaders will visit the Southern African sites and conduct local training sessions in conjunction with the workshop participants, and participate in policy discussions with Southern African educational institutions. This project is part of the African Internet Connectivity Project undertaken by H-Net and Michigan State to facilitate the development of Internet resources, training, and networking for African higher education. This project promises considerable benefit, with a strong multiplier effect, on academic communities and other members of the intelligentsia in these three countries and throughout Africa, Americans with professional interests in Africa, and on the structures of higher education and research in Southern Africa.

The Project

The rise of the Internet is perhaps the single most important economic development of the last decade of the 20th century. This new medium is making fundamental changes in the distribution and gathering of economic, social, and political information, both academic and popular. Because information is a key basis of economic and political power, it suddenly is possible to imagine a world in which the division between information haves and have-nots is erased to a degree inconceivable before the Net. The result could be new opportunities in what we formerly called the "developing world" and new political alignments driven by the redistribution of economic and political power. The century that began with the invention of mass propaganda and that saw the terrible results of state information monopolies has ended by creating the freest, fastest, and most efficient means of manipulating and exchanging information in the history of mankind. This change in the basic information infrastructure has the potential to change the course of political history, although it is difficult to tell whether the ultimate effect will be to create more favorable conditions for localized democracy or to make centralized administrative apparatuses more efficient. At this moment, however, it is certainly true that the Internet is making more information flow to more people than has ever been possible before. The project for which we seek funding will help expand and strengthen the development of Internet connectivity in Southern Africa just as we endeavored in West Africa with a similar project funded by USIA last year. Together these projects are part of a larger African Internet Connectivity Project undertaken by H-Net and Michigan State to facilitate the development of electronic connectivity for the stimulation of teaching, research, and collaboration in African higher education.

The Internet transformation of Higher Education around the world by rapidly expanding access to the materials necessary for both research and teaching and linking scholars in new international networks. For major American universities, this explosion in Internet resources and connectivity reinforces and enhances rich educational environments. For universities such as Michigan State, going on-line seems to continue, rather than reverse, historical trends. The same is not true for other places, where the Net has the opportunity to change the flow of history. For Africa, in particular, where universities and other institutions of higher learning are young, fragile, victimized by years of colonialism and post-colonial struggle, and drained of resources that cost foreign exchange, the Internet offers previously-impossible opportunities for higher education. For universities largely devoid of library resources and scholars lacking in travel funds and international scholarly contacts, the Internet offers integration as full partners into the global academy of the 21st century. Throughout the continent, African scholars, university policy-makers, and educational leaders are looking to the Internet for access to educational resources and the development o f intellectual networks. They believe that the Internet will play a crucial role as Africa creates its future.

The Internet has the potential to play two equally important but slightly different roles. As the world’s largest and most searchable library, the Internet offers access to resources. Of particular value to African universities is the rapidly increasing growth of on-line content in all fields. As national libraries and major university research libraries make their collections available over the Internet, African scholars and students have access to resources long out of their reach. For humanists , these library resources are essential for scholarly research. For social scientists, increasing access to statistical material, especially government documents is equally crucial. The digitalization and free electronic distribution of teaching materials from around the world in all fields is likewise of enormous benefit for African universities. The accessibility provided by Internet connectivity is not a one-way street. The Internet has the potential to make the rich resources of Africa available worldwide. It will soon be possible for students in Kansas to click on a site in South Africa to hear speeches by Nelson Mandela. A professor in Kentucky will be able to read abstracts of articles in East African Social Science, and a citizen in Maine will be able to read daily newspapers from a dozen African cities.

The promise of the Internet, however, extends far beyond affording passive access to content. The Net also allows for interaction. The development of scholarly and pedagogical Networks offer African scholars the opportunity to fully participate in the emerging global academy. H-Net’s electronic networks are a first step as they put scholars from every part of the world into daily contact with each other. As we develop new forums for publishing on line the value of such networks will only increase. This connectivity, in real time, on a daily basis benefits not only African scholars long excluded from the international academy by the lack of resources, but also scholars in America and elsewhere who can now read, learn from, and interact with their African counterparts.

For all scholars, whether in the U.S., in Africa, or elsewhere, the Internet also offers the opportunity to expand intellectual interchange beyond the academy. One of the most exciting aspects of H-Net is that the H-Net networks reach far beyond university walls and engage journalists, lawyers, government officials, teachers, and citizens worldwide in intellectual discussions. For African educators in particular the potential of the Internet to expand civic participation and democratic education is particularly attractive and will be an important aspect of all plans to develop Internet capacity.

The physical infrastructure that makes the Internet accessible is increasingly available to users throughout Africa. The United States’ Leland Initiative, along with similar projects by the European Union and UNESCO, have succeeded in establishing national policies conducive to Internet development throughout the continent and in laying the first pipes to bring most African countries on line. The overall picture in Africa is one of a continent rapidly coming to terms with the new technology and eager to apply it. This is particularly true in the three countries—South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia—that we have targeted for this project. Electronic mail is widely available now in each of these countries through the major universities as well as through private carriers, and full Internet capacity is increasingly available as well.

With the policies in place to facilitate the development and use of the Internet and the infrastructure necessary for connectivity increasingly available, the next step for African institutions and countries is to develop the human capital necessary to lead their countries on to the Net. Educational leaders throughout Africa understand that extensive training is necessary. African educational leaders need to be able to see first hand the capacities of the Internet and to develop the expertise necessary to be able to converse and direct the technicians who will build the infrastructures in their countries. At this stage, it is thus necessary and valuable to bring key leaders to workshops in the United States and to arrange visits to pioneering American educational institutions.

Training in these new technologies, however, must also be paired with policy considerations. Educational institutions worldwide face an abundance of choices in developing new Internet technology. The speed of technological change and the scale of in vestment involved to take full advantage of the possibilities poses a challenge to all large institutions, but this is particularly acute in resource-poor environments. American universities have no magical formulae to give their African counterparts. What we can do, however, is invite the participation of African leaders in policy discussions that are taking place throughout this country. In this dialogue, American educators stand to learn much from the experiences of their African counterparts.

It is in this context of opportunity that Michigan State University requests funding to provide training to a select group of Southern African scholars, librarians, university administrators, and education policy-experts in intensive workshops in t he United States during the summers of 1998 and 1999. These workshops will cover:

Research and pedagogical uses of the Internet Policy and opportunities for distance education, scholarly networks, and civil society online Civic education and the Internet Participants will involve a cross-section of key personnel involved in Internet development for higher education in these countries. In particular, we are looking for librarians who are charged with developing online resources and training faculty and students in their use, scholars who are taking the lead in building scholarly networks, university administrators who are guiding their universities onto the Internet, and education policy makers. The choices will be made in cooperation with our university partners in these countries and in consultation with USIA posts. The criteria will be involvement in networks of higher education and research, demonstrated competence in the existing means of electronic connectivity, and willingness to devote ongoing effort to communication among students and scholars of the humanities, social sciences, and journalism.

It is important to provide intensive instruction in the United States for this key group of Southern Africans. They will be able to see the full range of possibilities for communication, instruction and research on the Internet. We will help them gain valuable experience in accessing databases and running networks. In addition, they will establish networks of contacts for answering questions, solving problems and maintaining their own pedagogical and research interests. By providing ongoing sup port, we will help make it possible for these individuals to greatly enhance the benefits of the Net to their own institutions and countries.

In addition to the MSU workshops, we plan to conduct training sessions in each Southern African sites during the 1998-9 year. The trainees from the workshop of the previous summer will be key participants and planners in these sessions. We expect to recruit the new trainees through our university contacts and the local USIS post personnel. Some of these trainees will be candidates for the 1999 workshop at MSU.

The workshops will meet daily for two weeks in August of each year. We will give instruction and hands-on experience in skills that will help our visitors create resources and establish communications networks in their own countries. The courses will cover e-mail lists and mail management, Web searching and resource creation, and distance learning technologies. Part of each afternoon will be devoted to a series of seminars and roundtable discussions about the institutional infrastructure and policy directives needed to develop full Internet capacity at Southern African universities. These sessions will also address strategies and approaches for the use of the Internet in higher education as well as for civic education and networking building within Africa and beyond. In addition to the West African and Southern African participants, university administrators, representatives from the MSU library and Computer Center, and faculty involved in Distance Education will be invited to attend these sessions. This part of the program will be modeled after the highly stimulating and engaging sessions we held with this summer’s West African participants (See appendix).

The participants will spend the last week of their stay in Washington as the guests of Howard University. Their experience will include workshops at the Library of Congress, Smithsonian, and National Archives for demonstrations of the uses of computerization. The visiting scholars will also have discussions with USIA officials, the Council for American Overseas Research Centers, the African Science Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. An important part of this experience, which draws on our very successful visit to Washington with West African scholars last year, will be to familiarize the Southern Africans with sources of support and contacts in the Washington agencies. The global reach of the Internet will make it possible for these individuals to continue to draw on contacts with agencies and individuals; these contacts, as we know from our experience with H-Net, become the framework around which online academic networks are built and around which they grow.

In the second year the principal investigators and consultants on the project will travel to Southern Africa to consult with program participants, discuss Internet development with university officials, assist in developing on-site training program s, and organize recruitment for the 1999 workshop. We will assist the participants in the first workshop in making the transition to teaching their colleagues at home. The trip will also permit us to finalize proposals for training and equipment for other regions of Africa and other parts of the H-Net service. The program scheduled for the summer of 1999 will benefit greatly from the insights obtained during the visits in Southern Africa

We feel that this project has enormous potential for benefit in the United States, Southern Africa, and the rest of Africa as well. It will lay the foundations for closer connectivity and thereby closer collaboration among a wide variety of students, scholars, librarians and others on both sides of the Atlantic and throughout Africa. It will facilitate research for Americans in Southern Africa. It will expose a key group of Southern African leaders to the complex issues of the development and us e of the Internet in higher education, network building, and civic education, and provide them with an accessible network of contacts for the future. Finally, the project promises to provide significant and tangible resources for higher education and research in Southern Africa.

The Institutional Context

This proposal brings together the technical expertise of H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences OnLine and the scholarly resources represented by MSU’s African Studies Center and the International Studies Center at Howard University. The project will be directed by Professor Mark Kornbluh, Executive Director of H-Net, and Professor David Wiley, Director of the African Studies Center at Michigan State. Kornbluh, a national leader in the development of both scholarly and community networks, directs national and state-funded projects using the Internet for teaching and community-building purposes. With 35 years experience as a scholar of Southern Africa, Wiley has worked throughout Southern Africa. He directs one of the nation’s largest and most productive African studies centers and works extensively in partnerships with African universities.

H-Net will play the central role of technical advisor and partner in this project. Established in 1993 to facilitate the use of the Internet to enhance teaching and research, H-Net is funded by Michigan State as well as a variety of national sources including the National Endowment of the Humanities. Comprising 80 separate networks with a total subscriber base of 65,000 in over 90 countries, H-Net is by far the largest consortium of scholars and teachers on the Internet. It is also one of the most thoroughly internationalized. The H-Net community ranges from Japanese- to German-language Networks with international editorial communities. The H-Net Executive Committee, an elected body, has always had substantial international representation. H-Net has always been dedicated to the notion that the Internet is a place where people-to-people conversations can take place across and within national boundaries. Our networks strive to let an international community of scholars work together in ways that are instructive for all. Since the discussion networks are e-mail based, they work at the lowest common technical denominator on the Internet, which makes them as open as possible to participants with all levels of available financial and technical resources. The networks that evolve in this atmosphere are in no way top-driven. They permit the participants to talk, discuss, and let the network community develop its own culture. African lists that evolve from this project will be African communities, even if they are hosted at Michigan State. The content, tone and direction of the discussions will result from the needs and interests of the participants, not from the needs and interests of American sponsors. At the same time, insofar as those virtual communities choose to open themselves to international participation, they will represent marvelous opportunities for scholars to gather and work from their own perspectives. A rich and varied cultural mix will be created even within a single virtual community.

Within H-Net there is a rapidly growing Africa section. Harold Marcus, who specializes in Eastern African history and David Robinson who specializes in West Africa, have worked with Kornbluh and the African studies faculty to develop a family of H-Africa networks. These include H-Africa (African History), H-SAfrica (Southern African History), H-AfrLitCin (African Literature and Cinema), H-AfrArts (African Expressive Arts), H-AfrTeach (Teaching African Studies), and H-AfrPol (African Politics). Also in the development are H-WAfrica (West African Studies), H-AfrDevelop (African Development), and H-AFrJournalism (African journalism).

In the course of completing a three-year international study of multimedia and online teaching resources, H-Net has become acutely aware of the pressing need to educate scholars in the humanities and social sciences in the new pedagogy. We have found that training is an essential component if the information revolution is truly to have an impact on the way scholars frame and do their research and on the classrooms of the next generation. For H-Net, Africa provides an additional challenge: to develop resources of information and access in an even more open-ended environment in which the structures of higher education and research themselves are called into question. H-Net has thus made the African Internet Connectivity Project a top priority and is eager to build upon our West African experience and expand to Southern Africa.

The African Studies Center at Michigan State University has already established many linkages and partnerships throughout Southern Africa, which will serve as the basis of this current initiative. The almost 130 African Studies faculty at MSU have been committed for 30 years to promoting equitable and mutually beneficial partnerships with African universities and institutions, especially in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and South Africa. The basic principles of our collaborations are:

1: The partners should share equally in responsibility, power, and linkage resources. In a very unequal world, we sought a relationship to mirror the kind of society and world we hope for in the future.

2: The cooperation should produce original research, teaching, and service.

3: We should orient cooperation toward the pressing issues of cultural, economic, social, and political development.

The African Studies Center assisted in founding the large AAAS/ACLS African Journal Project which has air freighted approximately 125 U.S. scholarly journals to Zambian and Zimbabwean university libraries for over a dozen years. The Center stands committed to producing original research, and fostering serious scholarship in collaboration with African scholars. With Zimbabwe alone this commitment has led to the publication of more than 200 scholarly articles, academic reports, chapters and books in t he field of health and medicine, education, agriculture, and humanities and social sciences. In addition to the more than 40 MSU students who have studied at the University of Zimbabwe for an academic year, many Zambian, Zimbabwean, and South African post-graduate students and faculty have completed M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at MSU. Similarly, a number of MSU graduate students have completed dissertation research in these three countries with assistance and support from the universities there.

MSU Commitment

Support for H-Net is part of a larger, long-term MSU commitment to education and research through the Internet. The university receives an annual $10 million technology enhancement grant from the state, and it is using a portion of that to both build an advanced Internet infrastructure and support content development projects, including H-Net, which are pioneering new applications of communication technology. MSU supports Internet connectivity throughout the state of Michigan and in all 99 independent school districts in the state. In addition, Michigan State under the leadership of its President, Peter McPherson, has committed itself to internationalizing its undergraduate curriculum and deepening ties throughout the world. (We already send m ore undergraduates abroad to study than any other university in the country.) With this strong commitment to building scholarly partnerships throughout the world and to using Internet resources in this process, MSU is dedicating substantial resources to the African Internet Connectivity Project.

We are asking the USIA to fund the travel and per diem of the Southern African participants for the two summer workshop periods plus the travel for three members of the leadership team to visit the Southern African sites in 1998-9 to conduct training, follow-up, evaluation, adjustment, and recruitment. Michigan State is investing heavily in this project, providing all of the staffing and the major instructional component of the workshops. In addition, Michigan State is pledging $25,000 in matching funds for computer hardware to assist out Southern African partners in more fully utilizing the Internet. These funds will be used to purchase servers where they can be of best use for scholarly networking. MSU will also work to obtain additional equipment funding as needed.

Partnering with African Educational Organizations:

MSU has a long history of support of the capacity, autonomy, and sustainability of African universities. In developing this project, we are planning to work closely with major African educational organizations including:

1. The Association of African Universities (AAU), Accra
The AAU is the official connection among the Vice Chancellors and Principals of the African universities. Two MSU faculty members were involved in assisting with the founding of AAU in Accra in 1972, and we have given active support since then, especially through the AAAS African Journals Program. Although AAU’s connectivity in Accra (like that of the University at Legon) is weak, we believe that it should be brought on-line and assisted in developing more active linkages with its members with improved training of staff.

2. CODESRIA, Dakar
CODESRIA is the leading all-Africa research institute in the social sciences and has made a major contribution to the elevated quality of much recent African scholarship across the continent. Thanks to support from Ford Foundation and other donors, CODESRIA already has excellent connectivity in email, and one member of its staff attended the MSU training sessions in summer 1997. We propose to continue this cooperation with this strategic institute.

3. Special Collaboration with the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), Pretoria
The HSRC is a strategic organ of change in the new South Africa and shortly will be forming the South African equivalent of the U.S. National Science Foundation in union with the Foundation for Research Development (FRD) and the CSIR. HSRC has excellent physical connectivity but can utilize increased web presence in linking with its many constituents across South Africa. With new leadership, HSRC is poised to make an important contribution to reformulated research agendas that focus on the poor majo rity, to leverage strategic linkages between historically disadvantaged and advantaged universities in South Africa, in cooperation with external partners such as MSU and the University of California system. It is important for HSRC to have a collaborating administrator present in this workshop alongside the representatives from the individual universities there. HSRC also has the potential for brokering cooperation between South Africa and universities in the rest of Africa, which such training will empower.

The Southern African sites

We have chosen to focus the first stage of this project on three countries---South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia-- which are the largest, most influential, and most technologically advanced in the region. Our long-term goal will be to reach out from these countries to develop networks throughout the region, but our strategy is to first begin in countries with both the capacity and resources necessary to sustain Network building. The Principal Investigators, David Wiley and Mark Kornbluh traveled throughout South Africa in Spring of 1997 to discuss this and related projects with educational leaders in the Human Science Research Council in South Africa and with the partnering universities mentioned below. This program is thus designed as a partners hip with those institutions. In the intervening six months, MSU faculty have met with the Pro Vice-Chancellor of the University of Zimbabwe, Levi Nyagura, and plan to meet with officials from the University of Zambia to secure their interest in participa ting fully in the project.

Our plan is to bring six participants from South Africa and three each from Zimbabwe and Zambia to the states for the summers of 1998 and 1999. As South Africa’s higher educational infrastructure is far more extensive than that of Zambia and Zimbabwe, these proportions seems appropriate. Given South Africa’s influence throughout the region and ability to anchor regional networks, we are confident that this focus will reap rewards. For South Africa, we anticipate inviting participants from the major historically disadvantaged universities throughout the country, particularly the University of Fort Hare, the University of Transkei, the University of the North, the University of Durban-Westville, and the University of the Western Cape. (Our strong continuingties to each of these universities are described below.) We also hope to include representatives from the HSRC and/or the Ministry of Education.

For Zimbabwe and Zambia, we plan to invite diverse leadership teams from each country’s main university. Our experience of the past summer with our West African program convinced us that, in an environment where Internet capacity is just developing, there is much to be gained by selecting teams that can work together prior to and after their time at MSU. We feel that this approach would be more effective than recruiting participants from disparate institutions throughout these countries. (For South Africa where Internet connectivity is better developed, we feel that reaching a range of institutions is more important.)

For the recruitment of the individual participants, we will rely heavily on university contacts and the advice of the local USIS posts in Pretoria, Cape Town, Harare, and Lusaka. We will also be working closely with post officers for the selection of candidates for the on-site training program scheduled for 1998-9. We will be making adjustments to this design in relation to the national priorities and sensitivities of the countries and the changes in technology. Our Partner Institutions in Southern Africa are described below:

A. The University of Zimbabwe (UZ) and Michigan State University
The UZ and MSU have developed broad collegial cooperation with the exchange of more than 400 faculty and students and the resultant publication of more than 200 articles, chapters, reports, books, and dissertations. This probably is the largest single U.S. university linkage with an African institution. MSU students alone are invited to enroll for the full academic year at UZ, because of the larger faculty exchanges, especially active between the Colleges of Education, Agriculture, Medicine, the Library, Social Science, Arts and Letters, and the Library. Although it has existed only for 12 years, this linkage probably is the largest such collaboration today between a U.S. and an African university. President Mugabe visited MSU in September 1990 to recognize the linkage and to receive an honorary degree. On this occasion, MSU announced the creation of four four-year Robert G. Mugabe Fellowships for Ph.D. students at the University of Zimbabwe and National University of Science and Technology. The linkage was funded from many sources including the U.S. Information Agency Affiliations Program, U.S. AID Faculty of Agriculture Expansion, Fulbright awards, and various private foundations.

Zimbabwe has had a low-grade of e-mail services from the UZ Computer Center for a number of years, hampered by lack of funding support and by the disruptions occasioned by the highest rate of lightning strikes in the world (!). The country, however, is fast being wired, serviced by a number of commercial services, and is poised to leap forward in web connectivity. The faculty, library staff, national archives, Centre for Applied Social Science, the Medical Library, and the many academic departments can utilize this training for virtual immediate implementation.

B. The University of Zambia and Michigan State University (MSU)
MSU has a long collaboration with University of Zambia (UNZA) , dating from the 1960s, when the Center director (in Sociology) and Prof. Michael Bratton (Political Science) conducted Ph.D. dissertation research there and taught for a year each at UNZA. Since that time, a large number of UNZA graduate students have trained at MSU, e.g. the current Dean of Arts and Sciences, in many fields in the agriculture, natural resources, social sciences, humanities, education, and the health fields.

For more than a decade, MSU collaborated in the AAAS journals project with the UNZA Library, in addition to several small accessory projects to ship books and dissertations to that Library. More recently, Professors Bratton and Ferguson (Anthropology and Director, MSU Women in International Development Program) have cooperated on a U.S. AID-funded project with UNZA and the Zambian Government in studying democratization and civil society there. A number of publications have eventuated from the project.

The rapidity of with which Zambia established full Internet serive and widespread access to the World Wide Web has surprised almost everyone. Today, with South Africa, it is one of the best connected sub-Saharan countries. Its students and faculty are active in several listservs, national newspapers are on-line, and the UNZA has good capacity to utilize well the new connectivity. Among the several SADCC nations, we have chosen Zambia as a partner because of its steps toward democracy and the high quality of its connectivity.

C. Five South African Universities and Michigan State University

After years of close relations with and support of the liberation movements for democratization in South Africa, MSU has a strong connection to the new government and its universities. For instance, the sole North American assembly of the African National Congress was organized with MSU in 1990. An MSU Study Committee, the Action Group on South Africa, completed a study in 1996 on an MSU approach to South African universities and decided that the university should focus on the Historically Disadvantaged Institutions (HDIs). In recent years, the collaboration has developed with five HDIs, a university consortium, and with the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC). South Africa is a natural partner because of its need for social, economic, and political transformation, the importance of reconnecting the country to the outside work after years of cultural isolation, and the urgently pressing needs of the HDIs for empowerment. Electronic linkages can contribute to these needs. The five HDIs we propose to collaborate are:

1) University of Fort Hare (UFH) is the flagship HDI of South Africa, and MSU has signed a linkage agreement for cooperation in a broad number of fields, beginning in the Social Sciences, Humanities, the University Library, and the new Archives. MSU has been designated by UFH as the major partner for cooperating with the development of the Archives of the African National Congress. In spring 1998, the chair of the Department of Sociology will arrive for developing linkages with MSU and for post-graduate training for completing his Ph.D. degree, and we intend to incorporate him in the training program as well.

UFH is in the early stages of e-connectivity, and access to its website externally is very slow. However, the Vice Chancellor, the Faculty, and the Library are eager to move ahead quickly, especially in accessing the ANC Archives through its website. Already, MSU has agreed to mount the UFH website as a mirror-site of the MSU or H-Net servers in order to speed access of users in Asia, North America, and Europe. As the most historical HDI in the nation with a long history of anti-apartheid resistance, UFH is likely to be accorded the resources needed to build its electronic capacity and external linkages quickly.

2) University of the Transkei (UNITRA) also has signed a linkage agreement with MSU and is proposing to begin collaboration in health science, rural development, social work, oral tradition archives, and electronic connectivity. As the sole higher education institution in South Africa’s second poorest province and one long handicapped because of its founding as a homeland university, UNITRA has a special mission to establish its independence and to service the needs of the rural poor. Under the vigorous leadership of Vice Chancellor Moleah, UNITRA is on a course of reform and redirection. MSU is to be the chief U.S. partner in this effort.

In connectivity, UNITRA’s internal links are excellent. Its external connectivity has not yet been updated, but that is expected soon. Therefore, with internal high quality fiber-optic links, UNITRA faculty, Library, and the several development and oral tradition institutes can immediately utilize training in web connectivity in this summer program. MSU also has agreed to mirror the UNITRA website on the MSU or H-Net servers in order to speed access of users in Asia, North America, and Europe.

3) University of the North (UNIN) has signed a broad linkage agreement with MSU for activities in a wide variety of fields. This university is of special importance since it serves the Northern Province, the poorest in all of South Africa. UNIN is committed to this task, and also is seeking to discard its homeland past and move to become a major land-grant type of university, oriented to the needs of the rural poor. MSU collaboration is underway with post-graduate training in agriculture and history, library assistance, collaborative research in agriculture, and plans have been made for broader cooperation with the Northern Province in youth programs for agriculture. In two visits to MSU, Vice Chancellor Ndebele has reiterated his desire to make MSU his chief partner for collaboration in the United States in a broad variety of fields across several faculties.

UNINs connectivity has been weak but is developing quickly, its e-mail now works, and website development is important for breaking the relative isolation of this campus from the rest of developed South Africa and for accessing the broad variety of bibliographical and development (including environmental protection and co-management) resources on the Web. The Vice Chancellor, who also is the chair of the national Committee of University Principals, has indicated its desire to cooperate with MSU in this type of connectivity project.

4) University of Durban-Westville (UDW) MSU has signed a series of four Fulbright-Hays Faculty Fellows at UDW. In 1992, Vice Chancellor Jairam Reddy visited MSU to invite the faculty and departments here to consider linking with UDW as a progressive South African institution which could form a mutually beneficial linkage with MSU. In response to his invitation, four MSU faculty have spent Fulbright-Hays-supported years there, and a number of MSU and UDW faculty have visited each other’s campuses to develop links there. In March 1997, the Acting Vice Chancellor of UDW, Prof. Marcus Balintulo, with External Affairs Director Prem Singh, signed a proposed memorandum of understanding for establishing a framework for cooperation between MSU and UDW and collaborative projects are underway throughout the University. UDW is an important institution to support because, more than any other non-African university, it has implemented affirmative action to achieve a student body of at least 70% African, a level no other South African university has even approached.

In working with UDW, we also intend to pursue cooperation with the South African Eastern Seaboard Association of Tertiary Institutions (ESATI), Durban. ESATI includes the UDW as well as the University of Natal at Durban and Pietermaritzburg, University of Zululand, Mangosuthu Technikon, M.L. Sultan Technikon, and Technikon Natal. The Executive Director of ESATI, Dr. John Butler-Adam visited MSU in October 1996, and Wiley and Kornbluh visited ESATI in March 1997. Dr. Butler-Adam is interested to sign a framework agreement with MSU to facilitate cooperation within the consortium, including with UDW. ESATI has a strong interest in MSU collaboration in connectivity in order to link with its member institutions and to form a bridge for them with the outside world.

5) University of the Western Cape (UWC) The University of the Western Cape is a strategically located and high quality university. It is one of the five most productive research institutions in South Africa and has ambitious programs to build its contributions to the new South Africa under vigorous leadership. Although it is in the Cape Town area, its connectivity has been underdeveloped but is growing rapidly. Because of its standards of research excellence, we believe UWC will make an important contribution to South Africa and should be included as one of the leading HDIs. The Program at MSU

During the two weeks at Michigan State, participants will divide their time between two important activities. In order to take advantage of the Internet’s potential for creating networking among African countries and between Africa and the rest of the world, basic familiarity with the Internet and a command of the skills to use electronic resources effectively are needed. The Internet workshop will allow the participants to acquire these basic skills. Once acquired, these skills facilitate a strategic use of the Internet to accomplish concrete tasks such as political education and network building. The other sessions of the workshop will address the institutional and policy contexts for the development of Internet resources in Africa, and finally the ways in which electronic resources can be used for greater ends, in this case civic education, community development, and the creation of democratic networks. Professor John Metzler, Coordinator of Outreach for the African Studies Center and a scholar of Southern Africa will host the participants during their two week stay at MSU and will provide continuity between the various aspects of the program.

The Internet workshop

The Internet workshop will be under the direction of Mary Duff-Silverman, Education Coordinator for the African Internet Connectivity Project. Ms. Duff-Silverman has a strong background in computer technology, art history, and African studies. For the last seven years she has been providing tutorials for MSU faculty and students in the rapidly changing computer technology for classroom and research. Having directed last summer’s workshop for West African librarians and archivists, she has experience in working with African participants of uneven backgrounds. The staff of H-Net will be available at all times to assist the participants.

Given the relatively advanced levels of connectivity in Southern Africa, we anticipate that the participants from this region will come to MSU with some familiarity and experience using resources such as electronic mail, discussion lists, and basic Internet usage. This workshop will provide an opportunity to review familiar material, provide a comprehensive overview of the most recent developments in electronic resources, and allow the participants to develop their own pedagogical materials for workshops in their own countries. We anticipate that we are training trainers, but our experience with the West African participants suggests that policymakers who will determine the future of connectivity in their home countries can benefit greatly from basic familiarity with Internet applications. This portion of our workshop will provide the basic skills and understanding necessary to move on to discussions of the institutional structures and commitments necessary to develop electronic resources in Southern Africa.

We anticipate providing theoretical and hands-on instruction in the following:

• Familiarity with discussion lists and their uses, including the various H-Africa lists;
• Knowledge of the World Wide Web;
• Sufficient ability with HTML to create a WWW home page;
• Basic acquaintance with distance learning technology;
• Basic proficiency in preparing web-based instructional materials, including linking to useful sites, placing sample syllabi and bibliography on-line, and perhaps developing some interactive multimedia exercises and simulations;
• Advanced knowledge of and experience in using on-line reference tools, bibliographies, and resources, including databases on Africa;
• Familiarity with processes and software used by American libraries in acquisitions, circulation, inter-library loan, and other areas;

Instruction and demonstration in these areas will be concentrated between 9 and 12 each morning. We expect to keep all of the trainees together for most sessions, but it may prove useful to divide the group occasionally into librarians and scholars by discipline. During the early afternoon hours the trainees will use the computer laboratories to develop their own experience and complete assignments, which will correlate directly with the equipment, networking and training which they will be doing upon their return. Graduate assistants will be available to them during this process.

Seminars and Roundtables

The morning Internet workshop will be supplemented by afternoon seminars and roundtables which address key issues not directly related to the technology of the Internet, but to its potential to foster institutional development and networking building within the African continent and beyond. These seminars will deal with the current levels of connectivity in the countries represented and the institutional and policy initiatives necessary for further development, as well as the potential impact of electronic resources on university education in Africa as well as the United States. Special visits to MSU’s Distance Education Center will complement these discussions. Afternoon sessions will also address legal issues concerning the Internet. Most importantly, afternoon sessions and roundtables will encourage the participants to conceptualize the Internet and electronic resources as means to an end. We will concentrate on strategies and action plans for putting the resources of the Internet to the task of fostering democratic networks and launching initiatives to increase citizen participation in the emerging democracies of Southern Africa. We anticipate that each country team will have the opportunity to assess the current situation of electronic resources in their country, develop an action plan for further development of electronic resources, and begin to plan strategically about how to utilize the Internet for educational and political purposes. In sum, these seminars and roundtables will provide an opportunity for dialogue with MSU library staff, the MSU Computer Center, and others involved with developing electronic resources for educational ends.

During their time at Michigan State, the participants will have opportunities to interact with Africanists and the African Studies Center, librarians and information specialists, editors of a number of the H-Net lists who will be in residence for other workshops, and other networks based in East Lansing. We will ask some of the participants to make presentations in the Brown Bag series of the African Studies Center on the informational situations in their countries.

The Week in Washington

The participants will spend the last week of their stay in Washington as the guests of Howard University and Michigan State’s Washington office. Their Washington stay will be organized by Professor Jean Toungara, who ran our successful program in Washington for our West African participants this past summer. During their time at Howard, participants will be involved in a series of roundtables on "Democracy and Civic Education through the Internet." They will meet with USIA staff as well as with staff from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers.

The participants will also visit key resources in the D.C. area. They will spend a full day at the Library of Congress to see the uses of computerization under the guidance of Marieta Harper, one of the coordinators of the National Digital Library Project. They will see demonstrations of the National Digital Library and its Internet access points such as MARVEL (Machine Assisted Realization of the Virtual Electronic Library) and THOMAS, a server for Congressional information. In the Cataloguing Distribution Services section participants will see the development of a CD-ROM product. A general tour of the LC will reveal how researchers actually use the online services of the library. They will also spend extended time at the National Archives and the Smithsonian where they will be exposed to a wide-range of new electronic resources.

Site Visits in Africa and the Intervening Year (1998-9)

The project staff will remain in close touch with the participants through the 1998-9 academic year and beyond through e-mail and the Internet. This will allow us to help with problem solving in the very open-ended environments which the participants will face and to learn from their experience in those settings. About six months after the return of the participants, three of the principal investigators and consultants on the project will travel to Southern Africa to meet with all of the participants, university officials, and education policy-makers. We will assist the participants in developing on-site training programs and in installing computer equipment that MSU is providing. We plan to recruit candidates for the 1999 workshops through consultation with USIA and the local universities. The trip will coincide with the completion of a third evaluation questionnaire (described below). It will permit us to finalize proposals for training and equipment for other regions of Africa and other parts of the H-Net service.

Civic Education and Online Connectivity

Not only can the Internet transform higher education, but also its unique ability to make information available quickly, easily, and on an interactive basis has the potential to encourage civic participation and democratic governance in new and exciting ways. Throughout the continent, African educators are committed to developing this wider potential for the net as they develop its uses within higher education. Thus, our seminars and training program will include substantial information and practical training on using the Internet to build community networks and encourage civic participation.

As a world-wide library, the Web offers active citizens, students and educators access to a wide range of materials useful both for the classroom and for practical political application. As teachers, civic educators can draw on online resources to develop classroom exercises. As citizens, the students who work through the interactive lessons in critical political thinking that we hope will evolve from our project will know how to use the Internet as a vital information and communication resource to build democracy.

The Internet has the potential to build democracy at every level of society, from grass-roots organization to the highest levels of government. This is especially true in the new democracies, where years of economic misrule have often left governmental and non-governmental institutions starved for traditional information resources. At the institutional level, it would be possible to train a corps of Internet research assistants to work for members of parliamentary bodies, for high officials in the bureaucracy, or in the offices of important NGOs. The information they gather could be placed into large, publicly accessible databases. Instead of closing databases by linking them to users via a proprietary network system, Web-based resources make it possible for all—citizens, activists, officials, and bureaucrats—to access useful information. This information, in turn, could be used at every level, from local to national and international, to provide government with the data it needs to govern and citizens with the information they need to assess the success and quality of their own governments. West German television played a crucial role in undermining the DDR’s state monopoly on information and thus undermining the credibility of a non-democratic government. Similarly, in the new democracies the democratization of access to information could act as a safeguard against tyranny. Further, because online resources can be made interactive, they can provide a means by which central governments can learn about their own citizenry.

At another level, Internet activity can encourage citizens to participate in their own governance, the very essence of democracy itself. Books like Ed Schwartz’s NetActivism: How Citizens Use the Internet (Sebastopol, CA, 1996) and Michael and Ronda Hauben’s Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet (Los Alamitos, CA, 1997) record how citizens’ groups have made use of the Internet at the grass-roots level:

"The development of the Internet and of Usenet is an investment in making direct democracy a reality. These new technologies present the chance to overcome the obstacles preventing the implementation of direct democracy. Current Usenet newsgroup s and mailing lists prove that citizens can do their daily jobs and still participate within their daily schedules in discussions that interest them" (Netizens, p. 243).

Asynchronous Internet discussions help counteract the "Bowling in America" syndrome, the fragmentation of political society in an age of mass media. By teaching our visitors the lessons learned over two decades of online networking in this country, including the H-Net experience, we will make it possible for them to start out ahead.

In order to help our visitors take the greatest possible advantage of the Internet’s potential as a tool for building democracy, we will cover the problem of online civic education from a variety of angles. One aspect of their training will focus on ways to use online resources in creating courses in civic education. In order to make it as easy as possible to transfer these skills to real existing participatory democracy, we also will cover some of the practical aspects of running newsgroups and e-mail lists. Being an effective and active citizen involves several kinds of skills, including highly-developed critical thinking and a broad knowledge of the world. Access to discussions with fellow-citizens, so that group plans for action can be formed and implemented, is also critical. Our training will enable participants to plan and to begin to implement online educational resources, databases, and discussion forums that will serve a variety of purposes, from enhancing local government’s access to information and connections with its own citizens to providing a communications and information infrastructure for groups in civil society and for scholars.

Evaluation

The evaluation of this project will take place in three different phases. The first will address the success of the technical sessions here at Michigan State. The second will involve an assessment of the degree to which participants have (or have not ) absorbed lessons and ideas about using this technical knowledge to encourage the growth of democracy and civil society in their own countries. This phase will seek to determine the degree to which the project has been an exercise in civic education and in providing civic education online. The final phase will assess how this new knowledge has been implemented in Africa and its implications for future, both for our participants and for those who benefit from the training and discussions in which they participate as a result of this grant.

In order to evaluate the success of the technical sessions at Michigan State, we will follow standard procedures for gauging the effectiveness of skills training. At the beginning of the workshops we shall distribute a questionnaire seeking to establish the entering computer and Internet skill level of our students. At the end, we shall present participants with a questionnaire where they will project what they will be able to do in their home countries and what they learned in. The results from these two questionnaires will be compared in order to judge how much progress the participants have made. The same types of questionnaires will be formulated for those participating in the second workshop and at the same intervals. In addition, we will ask all instructors and others participating in the workshops to respond to a questionnaire about their part in the program and to make suggestions for changes. The results of all these types of information-gathering will be compiled in a central report.

It is of course less simple to test for progress in synthesizing skills with ideas and content. However, since part of the thrust of this application is to allow participants to discuss and project how they will use online resources to improve participatory democracy in their countries, our questionnaires will address these issues as well. How do participants feel these sessions have improved their understanding of the contributions online efforts can make to democracy in their countries? What can we do to make sure that the right kinds of resources are available online for activists, citizens, and administrators alike? In addition to this section of the questionnaire, we will ask participants via e-mail to provide us with a status report six and 12 months from the termination of their participation in the MSU program. This will let us assess how the discussions here have helped encourage the development of new networks and resources in Africa itself. They may indicate how the thinking of our participants about these issues has evolved. These three levels of assessment—technical, civic educational, and at the level of implementation—will provide a good overall sense for the effects and benefits of our use of the grant money provided under this program.

Long-term Results

We will be reporting on the process and the results of these workshops (and of other activities of H-Net) in several different forums, including H-Net discussion lists and Web-sites, and will be inviting reaction from participants and discussion from the subscribers. The most important impact in the United States may be on the concept and practice of training in connectivity. The workshops for Southern African scholars and librarians will challenge and expand the repertoire of H-Net and provide useful models for training of groups without a strong background in computers and the Internet. We expect it to be an important component of the National Training Center that Michigan State is creating for communication, teaching, and research on the Internet. An online site will be established which will provide information about our program and curriculum for similar programs here and abroad. In this way, the pedagogical lessons we learn will be absorbed where they can be useful and improved upon by other bodies engaged in the same kind of efforts. Since this site will be developed by H-Net staff at MSU and by course participants, it will also provide a demonstration of the ways in which the provision of even a minimal level of technical expertise can have far-reaching and long-lasting consequences.

By far the greatest potential impact of this project will be on Southern Africa. The 24 participants will be in a position to play a critical role in using electronic instruments to further teaching, data collection, and research. In addition to their exposure to numerous aspects of the Internet and electronic resources at Howard and MSU, and the networks that they will have established here, we expect that they will remain in close contact with us and that they will become problem solvers and in valuable resources for academic and international communities. In time, these contacts will lead us to others, just as the H-Net community has grown from a small handful of subscribers to tens of thousands. This project also provides a unique opportunity for network building among the participants from Southern Africa and West Africa, as the two groups will be hosted simultaneously at MSU and Howard. Participants in the summer 1997 workshop reported that their interactions with the one South African participant were quite fruitful, and they recommend building bridges between francophone and anglophone Africa as well as overcoming regional boundaries.

In addition to positive long-term effects in North America and in Southern Africa, this project has the potential to have an international impact. The successful completion of this program will result in curricula and models that can be used and improved upon across the world. As the international academic community becomes more and more accustomed to using the Internet, there will be increasing demand for well-thought-out models for its use in the classroom and as a tool for democratization. With proper online publicity and proper framing, the lessons we learn in the course of these seminars will become a base on which others can build. This project has the potential to have a significant long-term international impact by demonstrating how apparently resource-poor areas can be enriched with information and linkage with colleagues abroad.