Department
of Information Systems
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NOTICE OF RESEARCH SEMINAR
No: 2004.3
Date: Wednesday, 21 April 2004
Time: 12h30-14h00
Venue: Leslie Commerce, Upper Campus, Room 6.14
Speaker: Professor Dewald Roode
Topic: It's not the Digital Divide - it's the Socio-Techno Divide!
SPEAKER
Professor Roode obtained a masters degree in theoretical physics and a masters
degree in mathematics at the University of Potchefstroom. He completed his
education by obtaining a PhD at the University of Leiden in The Netherlands.
He took early retirement at the end of 2001 from the University of Pretoria, where he was Director of the School of Information Technology, but is still an extraordinary professor in the Department of Informatics. Since 2003 he is also a visiting professor in the Department of Information Systems at the University of Cape Town, and as from 2004, also an honorary professor in the Faculty of Business Informatics at Cape Technikon. During his academic career he has supervised twenty two doctoral theses, and many masters dissertations. This has led to a large number of articles in International Journals, and regular papers at International Conferences. At UP, UCT and CTech he continues to work with and supervise doctoral students and conducts his research work mainly in co-operation with his students. Professor Roode serves on the Editorial Boards of a number of Journals in the field of Information Systems, has been a member of the programme committee of the European Conference on Information Systems since 1996, is chairman of Technical Committee 8 on Information Systems of IFIP, a member of the Steering Committee of the World Information Technology Forum (WITFOR) and Programme Chair of WITFOR 2005, which will be held in Botswana in August 2005.
Professor Roodes experience includes working at the Atomic Energy Board, Rand
Afrikaans University, Sperry UNIVAC, University of Pretoria, and co-establishing
the Management Advisory firm Haasbroek, Roode and Venter, and the training and
consulting company INBEKON.
TOPIC
The term digital divide was perhaps popularized by Don Tapscott in his 1996
book The Digital Economy. Since then numerous efforts to bridge this divide
have been made by technological determinists. Most of these have been dismal
failures. It is argued that there is a second order divide that has to be
addressed: the divide between technological approaches that focus almost
exclusively on providing access to digital communication technologies, and
approaches where the focus is on people and their developmental needs. The
difference between these approaches creates a socio-techno divide. An analysis
of this divide is presented which illuminates the issues that need our attention
and indicates an agenda for constructive engagement of ICT for development in
the Third and Fourth worlds.
A finger lunch and refreshments will be provided. Please RSVP to
Aayesha.Patel@uct.ac.za for
catering purposes. For further information on the seminar, please contact: Ms.
Aayesha Patel on 650-4028; e-mail
Aayesha.Patel@uct.ac.za