ICTs in Education: Can Digital Dividend Replace Digital Divide? Commonwealth of Learning CC BY SA September 2005 | Page 1 of 12 ICTs in Education: Can Digital Dividend Replace Digital Divide? WITFOR CONFERENCE, Gaborone, Botswana, 1 September 2005 ICTs in Education: Can Digital Dividend Replace Digital Divide? By Sir John Daniel, Paul West (Commonwealth of Learning), Susan D'Antoni (UNESCO-IIEP) and Stamenka Uvali ć -Trumbi ć (UNESCO) Introduction The themes of this WITFOR [World Information Technology Forum] conference include Building the Infrastructure and Education and I shall concentrate on those two themes this morning. My title is ICTs in Education: Can Digital Dividend Replace Digital Divide. This session also highlights collaboration between international intergovernmental organisations. I am giving a practical example of such collaboration because I have prepared this keynote address with three co-authors. First is Susan D'Antoni of UNESCO's International Institute for Educational Planning. Through the virtual forum that she has organised on virtual universities and similar events that she is planning for the future, Susan is helping to create a global community of practice in online learning. Stamenka Uvaliæ-Trumbiæ, my former colleague at the UNESCO Secretariat in Paris, heads UNESCO's unit that deals with reform, innovation and quality assurance in higher education. Most recently she has guided the joint work of UNESCO and the OECD on the development of guidelines for the quality assurance of cross-border higher education. The third co-author is Paul West, a South African colleague at the Commonwealth of Learning who guides our work in knowledge management. One of Paul's objectives is to help people in developing countries use online learning to expand the scope, scale and impact of education and training. For this reason he is particularly interested in discovering how the range of technologies that are used in developing countries can contribute to the learning experience.