Subject: National Internet Resources as the Most Important Component in Building an Information Society

Subject: National Internet Resources as the Most Important Component in Building an Information Society.

Gainullina Farida Kutdusovna

City Information and Diagnostic Centre at the Department of Education of Kazan Administration

Head of the Internet Technologies Laboratory

Tel. (84

(84

E-mail: *****@***ru; *****@***ru

Plan

Implementation of documents, adopted at the 32nd Session of the UNESCO General Conference and the World Summit on Information Society (Geneva, December, 2003) Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s speech at the World Summit on Information Society (Geneva, 10 December, 2003) Reasons for creating national Internet resources Virtual Tatar Gymnasium (Appendix 1. Conception of creating VTG) Regulatory and legal framework E-library in the framework of VTG Online education in VTG Conclusion

1. At the 32nd Session of the UNESCO General Conference and the World Summit on Information Society (Geneva, December, 2003) basic documents for building an Information Society were adopted.

According to the Declaration of Principles, elaborated at this conference, building an Information Society is a global challenge in the new Millennium. In the documents of the conference it is emphasized that the essence of general conception is to build an open society, “where everyone could create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable development”.

The Declaration made a point of the fact that “knowledge, information and communication are at the core of human progress, endeavour, and well-being and that, although the dramatic increase in the volume, speed and ubiquity of information flows, which has been made possible through new information and communication technologies, have already brought about profound changes in peoples lives, and are creating enormous new opportunities, they have yet to benefit the vast majority of the peoples of the world”. And information and communication technologies can further the dialogue between peoples, countries and civilizations.

2. Kofi Annan, UN Secretary-General, in his speech at the World Summit on Information Society (Geneva, December, 2003) noted that “we live in the epoch of historic changes that affect our life. Technologies introduced the information epoch. And it depends on us, what this information society will look like. We cannot be passive observers of these changes, but we should become creators of our life”. In his speech Secretary-General also mentioned problems facing the information society. One of them is the gap in information content. “The most part of information on the web-sites, - Kofi Annan stressed, - simply does not meet the needs of people. About 70% of world web-sites are made in English and this sometimes suppresses local voices and opinions. All the mentioned problems will not disappear themselves with time. They are to be solved”.

3. Developing this idea, Mintimer Shaimiev, President of the Republic of Tatarstan, at the 3rd World Congress of Tatars, stressed that “the new XXI century imposes strict requirements on nations and countries. We are to meet them in an adequate way and to prove that we can on equal terms carry on a dialogue with other nations.

Globalization process in all countries of the world provides nations and countries with great opportunities never seen before. Suffice it to mention satellite TV or the Internet, which offer great perspectives for communication between Tatars that have spread all over the Eurasian continent. That is why we should use these advantages of globalization, and at the same time preserve our national roots. We should move on, not isolating ourselves from the rest world. We must remain Tatars, while being citizens of our countries and citizens of the world”.

Kazan, capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, will celebrate the 1000th anniversary from the date of its foundation. It is one of the most beautiful cities of the world, in which the history and culture of the East and the West are closely intertwined, where people of different confessions and nationalities live together for ages in peace and harmony. Tourists and guests of the city are astonished at the European and Asian look of the city, its unique architecture, which combines traditions of oriental and western town-building. That is why on the threshold of celebrating the anniversary of the city, when active work is carried out on organization of the celebrations, representation of historic, national and cultural heritage of the Republic in the world information space acquires primary importance.

About 7 million Tatars living all over the world have no access to the sources of national culture.

How could this situation be improved and equal access to cultural values provided for all representatives of the nation? It can only be done by introduction of educational e-programs and creation of relating resources in the Internet. At present it is the only alternative possible.

To implement the documents, adopted at the 32 nd Session of the UNESCO General Conference and the World Summit on Information Society, we suggest carrying out a number of projects, directed at creating common national educational and information environment.

These projects have been wanted for a long time by millions of our countrymen in Russia and abroad.

A number of educational projects have already been launched in Tatarstan, but so far they are carried out in the framework of Republic programs on development of education and preservation the language.

One of such projects is, for instance, “Millennial Kazan – gate to the East”, a pedagogical public e-library, in which there will be e-versions of all old Tatar manuscripts, kept in different cities of Russia.

In order to improve content and represent in the Internet the eventful historic past and rich cultural heritage of Tatar people more completely, International Competition of Internet Projects “Stars of Tatnet” is held for the second time among Tatar sites.

4. The most promising project now is the project of creating Virtual Tatar Gymnasium (VTG), an educational establishment of online learning, which includes a public database and knowledge base in various subjects in Tatar.

Making such a specialized server of Virtual Tatar Gymnasium will help to accumulate information resources in history and culture of Tatar people and to integrate them into global information networks. It is a large-scaled project of great importance.

The stakeholders include:

World Congress of Tatars City Information and Diagnostic Centre at the Department of Education of Kazan Administration “Omet”, City Fund of Development of Languages and Cultures National Library of the Republic of Tatarstan Institute of Advanced Training for Teachers of the Republic of Tatarstan Ulyanov-Lenin Kazan State University: “Journalism” and “Calculus Mathematics and Cybernetics” Departments (Theoretical Cybernetics Sub-Faculty) “Magarif” journal and “Magrifat” newspaper Tatar gymnasiums of Kazan “Bancorp” Information and Financial Corporation

First of all, the Virtual Tatar Gymnasium project is aimed at reproducing the existing Tatar national educational tradition, which at the same time is one of the forms of modern national life. Research and educational work is planned to be carried out in the framework of the Virtual Tatar Gymnasium. Every person may take part in research projects of VTG or enter its classes in due course, and get substantial help in preparing term papers, degree works in subjects taught in VTG.

Before starting to elaborate the VTG conception we analyzed dozens of sites about Tatarstan, sites in Tatar, sites of other regions (Tatar diasporas), educational and library sites. While making the conception we tried to take into consideration different groups of users with similar interests, i. e. to make segmentation of users. The general view of VTG conception was built taking into account monitoring and analytical material, obtained during the team-work with the stakeholders: need of information and services, expected level of their participation, age, socioeconomic status, available facilities for access to information and services.

As a basis for Conceptual model of national gymnasium we took documents and ideas, implemented at Marjani Tatar gymnasium #2. Though Tatar Virtual Gymnasium is supposed to be a collective idea, here one can realize ideas of not only Tatar educational establishments, but also of any other national establishment: Chuvash, Mordvinian, Jewish and others.

The main purpose of creating VTG is to preserve rich spiritual, historic and cultural heritage of Tatar people and to find new perspectives of Tatar national educational tradition.

The main purposes and functions of Virtual Tatar Gymnasium are:

creating national information and educational resources of the region; offering opportunities of online and interactive learning of the Tatar language, literature and history of Tatar people for all persons interested; shaping public opinion and drawing attention to the problems of preserving and rational use of national and cultural resources in educational purposes; preparation of proposals for copyright protection legislation; organization, financing and support of research and educational projects; propaganda and organization of ethnic interactive (online) virtual tourism; designing educational e-programs and training programs of various level of detailed elaboration.

Materials of Virtual Tatar Gymnasium will cover a wide range of questions connected with Tatarstan, Tatar people and forthcoming anniversary of the City. They will include:

·  General information, geography, population of the Republic

·  History and culture of Tatar people

·  The Tatar language. History of the Tatar language and manuscript graphics; Tatar dialects. Study of the Turkic language

·  Public life and spiritual culture of Tatar people

·  National traditions in fine and decorative arts

·  Folk poetry

·  Folk music. Famous Tatar composers and performers. National musical instruments. Words of Tatar songs.

·  Life, customs and ceremonial traditions of Tatar people

·  Tatar folklore (folk songs, riddles, sayings, proverbs, legends, fairy-tales, munajats, baits)

·  National cuisine. Cookery. Recipes

·  National costume and traditions

·  Science and art in Tatarstan. Outstanding scientists, writers, artists, Prize winners and others

·  Multinational Republic. Peoples of Tatarstan, their languages, culture and customs

·  Opinions about Tatarstan existing in other regions. Recollections and impressions of Tatarstan by representatives of Tatar diasporas

·  Links to the sites of world museums, city museums, school museums

·  Links to Internet resources in Tatar

·  Links to the sites of Tatar diasporas abroad

·  Calendar of field and memorable dates

And other important and interesting materials.

Virtual Tatar Gymnasium will also include:

·  Interactive web-forums in the Internet, virtual teleconferences, telecompetitions, telediscussions, competitions in history of Tatar people

·  Competition of children’s drawings “My Republic, my dear city”

·  E-magazine (e-newspaper) in Tatar

·  Dialogues with residents of the City, Republic and foreign Internet-users, and Tatar diasporas via the Internet

·  Dispute-club

·  Guest-book

5. Regulatory and legal framework is one of the important issues in creating Virtual Tatar Gymnasium.

In order to take into account all requirements and possible restrictions, before the work on the project started, regulatory and legal framework was analyzed, in compliance with which VTG is now being created. Special attention was given to regulatory and legal acts, regulating the questions of disseminating information; its confidentiality; copyrighting and copyright protection (logotypes, images, data content); use of services by foreign and Russian partners; conclusion of contracts between the stakeholders.

A lot of problems arise in respect of copyright. Sometimes even if we agree with the author of a textbook upon publishing it in our e-library, the public house starts to assert its rights to it. Publishers account it for the fact that such publication in the Internet may lead to the reduction of sales, though research of German specialists showed that e-libraries only promote sales.

In spite of that our projects are not commercial and are not to be replicated, public houses often refuse to give us e-versions of school-books, and designers of educational sites have to scan these school-books. All this considerably complicates our work.

We get so far no profit from these educational sites. This is due to the expenses in this sphere of work. Money come only from budgetary financing in the programs of development and preservation of language, and project grants.

Unfortunately, Russian programs of building an Information Society, for example “E-Russia”, do not provide for making national web-recourses, and, consequently, for their financing either.

So, these projects are financed at the expense of regions, as a comprehensive program of creating educational web-resources for Tatar-speaking users has been needed for a long time. That is why “The Program of Education Development in Kazan for the period of September, 2000 – August, 2005” in the section “Informatization of Education in the Republic of Tatarstan in 2” provides for creating national information and educational resources (NIER) on the basis of Roman and Cyrillic alphabet.

It is necessary to represent national cultural values in the world information space and to preserve the Tatar language in the changing conditions of today. And in the period of preparations for celebration of anniversary of Kazan it gains even greater importance.

6. Implementing documents, adopted at the 32nd Session of the UNESCO General Conference and the World Summit on Information Society, in particular the documents concerning the digitalizing cultural and scientific heritage and providing access to it, we started to make the “E-library”, as a part of VTG. The e-library will include:

·  Instructional literature, popular scientific literature and fiction in Tatar

·  School-books in Tatar

·  Encyclopedias

·  Reference books

·  Explanatory dictionaries in Tatar

·  Dictionaries (Tatar-Russian, Russian-Tatar, English-Russian)

·  Links to the dictionaries in the Internet

·  Links to e-editions in Tatar

·  etc.

In his report at the 3rd World Congress of Tatars Mintimer Shaimiev, President of the Republic of Tatarstan, said: “We should use resources of the Internet as widely as possible. Making an e-newspaper in Tatar (Roman and Cyrillic alphabet), Russian and English languages will provide with great opportunities of disseminating information from Tatarstan to all the parts of the world. This will also provide new opportunities for the development of Tatar culture and a more close communication between Tatars”.

The main aim of e-library is offering an opportunity of learning the Tatar language irrespective of the basic level.

At present several school-books in Tatar for primary schools and manuals for self-tuition have been published in the prehensive Tatar-Russian and Russia-Tatar online dictionaries, which, unfortunately, are not available now, are most wanted for the majority of Tatar Internet users. That is why we started making such dictionaries. And this is not an easy matter. Thus, for example, we have not yet worked out means that will allow full rendering of the words’ real sounding with the help of Roman and Cyrillic alphabet, so that every person in any part of the world could read a Tatar text.

For example, there is still no opportunity to send messages by email in Tatar, for there is no common standard of the keyboard layout. Today many sites use Cyrillic alphabet without original Tatar letters, i. e. misuse the language. In other cases one needs to load additional programs for identification of Tatar script. That is why now programmers are to provide us with a common standard. And for this purpose we recruited leading experts of mathematics and computer engineering department of Kazan State University.

7. The project of Virtual Tatar Gymnasium also includes online learning, which is based on the combination of web-technologies and email, and provides for organizing lectures and practical training, either for a group of learners in a remote telecommunication class-room or for individual learners, who receive instructions on their personal computer at home, which has an Internet email address.

The learner uses web-technologies to work with the lecture material, glossary and supplementary literature.

Email is used to make the learning process interactive, and it provides two-way communication between the learners and the tutor.

Besides that in VTG students may independently learn basic subjects of the curriculum, do sums, communicate with their virtual teacher and receive advice via email on various subjects: history, geography, literature, Russian, Tatar, English, etc.

VTG is open for teachers, students and their parents as well as for everyone, who is interested in Tatar culture and history. At the pages of VTG site a teacher can find instruction material, share his experience in use of training computer programs at school, and also a large set of materials on using the Internet in learning process.

Online learning in VTG also includes online competitions, subject-classes and subject-courses, online seminars and teleconferences.

8. Undoubtedly, to achieve a success in creating Internet resources in Tatar and to carry out such large-scale projects as: “Virtual Tatar Gymnasium”, “Millennial Kazan – gate to the East” and “E-library” we will have to recruit highly professional specialists and obtain substantial financing and legal assistance from the Republic and City administration.

Now these projects are at their initial stage of elaboration and there will be many modifications in them, but it is clear that creating national information and educational resources is one of the main aspects in building an Information Society.

These projects will allow implementing other key principles of the Declaration of Principles, which include:

·  multilingualism in cyberspace

·  development of information infrastructure for education, science, culture and communications.

Nowadays the processes of political and economic integration acquire particular importance, and the Internet, which becomes more popular and widely available, may, like Olympic Games, be one of the uniting factors in the world community.