1. No category

Seminar on How To
Promote ASEAN Spirit
ASEAN-COCI
17-20 March 2009
Grand Mercure Fortune, Bangkok, Thailand
PREPARED BY:
Chong Youn Bao
Dk Siti Nuraini Pg Haji Tajudin
Mazriyani Haji Abdul Ghani
Rodziah Haji Yussof
of
BRUNEI DARUSSALAM
Abstract: How to Employ ICT to Promote ASEAN Spirit & Generate
Awareness and Understanding about ASEAN
Introduction To Brunei Darussalam
Brunei Darussalam is a Malay, Islam Monarchy and an independent sovereign Sultanate
governed on the basis of a written constitution. Brunei Darussalam is situated on the
north-west of the island of Borneo, 287 miles [442 kilometres] north of the equator. It has
a total area of 5,765 square Km with a coastline of about 161km along the South China
Sea.
Brunei Darussalam is divided into four districts namely Brunei-Muara, Tutong, Belait and
Temburong. The capital, Bandar Seri Begawan is siuated in The Brunei-Muara district.
Brunei Darussalam is currently ruled by Ke-bawah Duli Yang Maha Mulia Paduka Seri
Baginda Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Mu‟izzadin Waddaulah ibni Al-Marhum Sultan Haji
Omar Ali Saifuddien, Sa‟adul Khairi Waddien, Sultan dan Yang Di-Pertuan Negara
Brunei Darussalam. His majesty is the 29th Sultan of Brunei Darussalam.
ICT Development in Brunei Darussalam
The rapid development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and related
technology during the last few decades has made significant impact in transforming
many aspects of our daily activities. In fact ICT has a great influence towards the way
people think and adapt to the digital age as it helps to provide effective and excellent
services.
The government of His Majesty the Sultan dan Yang Di-pertuan of Brunei Darussalam
realizes the importance of information, Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure
and services to accelerate socio-economic development and has invested heavily in
infrastructure development over the last 10 years. Under the National Development Plan
(RKN) 2007-2012, the focus will not only be on the provision of basic ICT infrastructure
but also enhancing human capacity, integrating ICT effectively and advancing eBusiness.
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ICT Organization in Brunei Darussalam
There are several bodies involved in the implementation and development of ICT in
Brunei. The important organizations are as follow:
1. Ministry of Communication
The Ministry of Communication was set up in the year 1984, soon after Brunei
Darussalam gained its independence with the vision “Towards a Sophisticated
Society
and
Excellence
in
Communications
for
Enhancing
National
Competitiveness.” Their objectives focusing on ICT are: to create a series of
incentives for the local ICT industry and to develop local ICT players capable of
implementing e-government projects. Hence, the Ministry seeks to engage and
collaborate closely with relevant agencies and hence it will continue to deregulate
services and liberalize the communications sector.
2. Ministry of Education
The Ministry has devised ten-year strategic objectives (2006 – 2015) prioritising
human resource development in order to meet Brunei Darussalam‟s need for an
educated and marketable workforce. The education system also aims to inculcate
sound moral values as a strong foundation in an era of rapid progress and change.
To meet future challenges in an ever-changing world, the Ministry has developed a
vision of „Quality education towards a developed, peaceful and prosperous nation‟.
We believe this vision will realize the nation‟s aspirations and produce citizens who
are committed and capable of contributing towards the continued growth, stability
and prosperity of the country.
3. Brunei Economic Development Board (BEDB)
BEDB is a statutory board established by His Majesty The Sultan and Yang DiPertuan of Brunei Darusslam in November 2001 to be the leading economic
development agency for Brunei Darussalam. The aim of BEDB is to create
employment and business oppurtunities; BEDB is constanly analyzing new areas for
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economic development and welcomes investor proposals or enquiries on partnership
and investment opportunities in Brunei Darussalam.
4. Brunei Darussalam Information Technology (BIT) Council
BIT is formed in order to establish and provide ICT leadership and direction at the
national level. The role of BIT will be providing the linkages and interactions of ICT
development in the public and private sectors thereby creating synergy to move the
country to the forefront of ICT development.
5. Authority for Info-Communication Technology Industry of Brunei Darussalam
AITI is established on 1st January 2003 as an independent statutory body to regulate,
license and develop the local ICT industry and manage the national radio frequency
spectrum.
6. Telekom Brunei Berhad (TelBru)
1st April 2006 marked the corporatisation of Telekom Brunei Berhad (TelBru) which
means the separation of service provider and regulatory functions previously held by
Jabatan Telekom Brunei.
Telekom Brunei Berhad (TelBru) as the successor company will be the service
provider in delivering info-communication services and Authority for Infocommunications Technology Industry of Brunei Darussalam (AiTi) is responsible to
license, regulate and develop the local ICT industry and manage the national radio
frequency spectrum.
7. DST Communications Sdn Bhd
DST Communications Sdn Bhd is a provider of world-class mobile communications
services for the business, local and foreign communities of Brunei Darussalam.
Since its inception, it has grown from an AMPS type analogue telephone service
provider to introducing GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) services, to
recently adopting 3.5G HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) services,
putting it on par with the world's top network operators and service providers. This
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also includes the provision of international roaming facilities to more than 70
countries in four continents.
DSTCom's progress is also marked by the continued increase in the number of
customers throughout Brunei Darussalam - a base of around to 300,000 customers,
being served by more than 460 skilled and dedicated employees.
8. BMobile
In September 2005, B-Mobile Communications Sdn Bhd became Brunei‟s first 3G
mobile service provider. Being a joint venture between Telekom Brunei Berhad
(TelBru) and QAF Comserve, BMobile has access to resources, expertise,
technologies and infrastructure to thrive in the industry.
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Usage of ICT in Brunei Darussalam
The usage of ICT in Brunei has been increasing ever since ICT was introduced in Brunei
Darussalam. The following are some of the statistics on the usage of ICT in Brunei:
Internet service providers – TelBru and DSTCom
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ICT Implementation in Brunei Darussalam
There are many initiatives that are being developed and performed in order to improve
the implementation of ICT and to use it effectively and efficiently. They are as follow:
1. e-Government
e-Government is the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to
deliver government e-services to the citizen, government employees and businesses.
Brunei e-Government vision is "To be an e-smart government in line with the 21st
century civil service vision". The mission is "His Majesty's Government aims to establish
electronic governance and services to best serve the nation”. Currently, the focus of eGovernment is to implement projects that are citizen-centric in nature.
2. e-Education
Brunei
e-Education
vision
is
“Transforming
Brunei
Darussalam
to
a
more
knowledgeable, thoughtful, multi-skilled, competitive and smart nation upon the
teachings of Islam”. The mission is “To enable access for all to e-Education by providing
a strong foundation in ICT thereby promoting excellence in human capacity building”.
One of the program under e-Education is e-Learning. This E-learning system will allow
universities and colleges to start distributing learning materials electronically,
implementation of a Learning Management System, instructional design facility,
provision of authoring tools, notebooks and digital contents.
Another program under e-Education is e-Library and Virtual Library. e-Library is one of
the Ministry of Education‟s digital library initiatives introduced in May 2005. It aims at
improving the infrastructure of the university library‟s information management systems.
The components of the project are: the digitization of the university information
resources and publications; the upgrade of library management systems; and the
implementation of the university library digital portal.
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Virtual Library System or VILIS Brunei Darussalam aims to serve the informational
needs of the country‟s teaching and learning communities. It‟s a digital library offering
services beyond library catalogue and library building. It will provide UBD‟s Library with
relevant information infrastructure and application software to fully utilise e-initiatives and
deliver its e-commerce agenda.
How to Employ ICT to Promote ASEAN Spirit & Generate
Awareness and Understanding about ASEAN
ICT has become one of the important driving forces for modern development nowadays.
The advent of ICT brings all the citizen of this planet close together and has a quicker
access to all the information and benefits that the world may have. With reference to the
world Internet users and population statistics, it is estimated that about 650.4 million of
Internet users are coming from Asia followed by Europe with estimation rate of 390.1
million users [1].
Globalization and other trends in today‟s society claim for more flexibility in time and
space, and it concerns people both in working life and in private life. With means of ICT
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opportunities may give citizens access to services almost 24 hours a day and offers
thereby new opportunities for organizing and living everyday life [2].
The use of computers, the Internet and other related technologies are becoming more
and more ubiquitous. Technological literacy or the ability to use ICT effectively and
efficiently is thus seen as representing a competitive edge in an increasingly globalizing
job market. As a result of the current issue, ICT is now commonly implemented in
schools and higher institutions with means of helping the individuals to prepare for the
workplace environment as most government offices and business organizations are in
demand of ICT based.
There can be a generation gap in how youth and adults view the value of online activity.
Adults might think that the implementation of ICT in lower institutions or particularly
among youth generation might spoil their way of thinking and for kids spending time
online might be dangerous or even making them lazy. The primitive way of thinking may
not be applied today as an individual must realized the impact of spending time online is
essential for young people to pick up the social and technical skills they need to be
competent citizens in the digital age. In fact, youth are learning basic social and
technical skills that they need to fully participate in the contemporary society.
Youth nowadays even known to social networking activities and this has become a
major trend among the youth such as using Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, Flicker,
YouTube, and others. Social networking often involves grouping specific individuals or
organizations together with means of connecting with people in different locations and of
different age who share interests. With reference to the Social Networking Statistics and
Trends, more than 60 million active users accessing Facebook with an average of
250,000 new registrations per day since January 2007. Whereas YouTube ranks as the
number one for all online video websites ranked by market share of United States Visits
and about 52% of users range from 18 to 34 years old share videos often with friends
and their colleagues [3]. Based from this, it shows that social networking activities are
the most common and current activities done online.
With the existence of social networking among the young generation might help to boost
the ASEAN spirit by starting a networked ASEAN group community where all people
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from various age generation may involve in the group discussion or networked forum
which based on developing ASEAN content. It is beneficial to have such networked
forum where all participants particularly targeted on ASEAN countries to exchange their
culture, language and updated news about their country through the group discussion. In
addition, through this less costly media access tools try to unite the ASEAN people
together and in a way has a quicker access to all the information and benefits that the
world may have.
With the readiness of ICT technologies such as the availability of computers and internet
access in most schools and higher institutions nowadays, we can make learning
environment more interactive and fun. As in Brunei, the Ministry of Education (MOE) is
making every effort to fully utilize ICT in every aspect of teaching and learning activity
through the e-Education project. As mentioned by the acting minister of MOE during the
opening ceremony of the Second Regional Workshop on ICT Integration Training for the
Next Generation of Teachers [4], “the e-Education project includes the provision of
schools' ICT infrastructure, provision of ICT being integrated into the curriculum, teacher
training, pedagogy and the need to train all the teachers to acquire basic competency
and skills in ICT by providing them with International Computer Driving License (ICDL),
ICT courses and the use of the Interactive White Board”.
Studies have not only shown how interactive whiteboard (IWB) have a positive impact on
engagement, interaction and motivation in whole class teaching but as a catalyst for a
paradigm change to whole class instruction. As one of the Ministry of Education eEducation Project, the main strategic objectives of the IWB for interactive teaching and
learning are to transform teaching and learning into an engaging and active process and
to foster a conducive and motivating environment for teaching and learning with IT.
Currently, 244 IWB have been installed in all government educational institutions that
include primary, religious, secondary, vocational, technical colleges and higher
institutions [5]. By leveraging on this technology, the information/content of ASEAN can
be included as part of subject lesson.
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Other than promoting ASEAN spirit through web centric based, we may come up with
plan of having ICT ASEAN Youth Camp. This ICT ASEAN Youth Camp can be of
various activities to promote the usage of ICT among youth and of developing the
ASEAN content such as writing essay competition, interactive culture games
competition, software or applications development competition and others. With such
ICT activities held not only build the confidence of an individual, it also aim to allow them
to utilize ICT appropriately in their learning as well as provide the mind-boggling
educational experiences for students through the use of important productivity software
that will be required by students in future careers. These activities also encourage the
youth to have a social network among the ASEAN participants and in fact they will learn
and share each other countries‟ culture, language and spirit.
One complication that leads to the unawareness of ASEAN among youth might be the
lack of youth representatives from ASEAN. As mentioned in the previous section, there
can be a generation gap between youth and adults, in terms of how they both see and
manage things. The world is changing rapidly towards a more technological society and
thus the current youth generation may have experienced things that the previous
generation may have not undergone. So there can be more youth representative from
ASEAN who can organize activities and events that may be more interesting to the youth
in ASEAN countries. There should be a combination of youth and senior members in
ASEAN committee that will narrow the generation gap and thus leads to the mutual
understanding between the two different generations.
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Aside from that, there can be more seminars and trainings on ASEAN related content. In
education prospect, there can be more ASEAN exchange students and teachers. In this
way, they will be able to learn about the culture and structure of a particular country, this
may includes the organization, development and implementation of ICT; with this
knowledge and information, they will be able to study and actually implement these
knowledge into their own countries.
Challenges in Implementing ICT
There are several challenges that need to be considered before actually implementing
ICT. One of the major challenges is the Digital divide. Digital divide refers to the gap
between people who are able to access to digital and information technology effectively
and those who may have limited or none at all. The existence of this challenge may due
to the fact that there is a lack of budget for developing and implementing ICT, which is
quite common in some countries. Without the resources, it is impossible to make plans
for implementing ICT.
In Brunei there are cases of digital divide; one of the examples will be implementing ICT
in rural areas. This problem actually relates on how to reach, within a reasonable time,
the needs of the poor, uneducated and those who live in rural areas. The solution to this
problem can be the setup up of community center in each of the rural areas; this
community center can be facilitated with computers with access to the Internet. In this
way the people in the rural areas will have access to the ICT. The community center can
have few sessions of training or activities in a week that will teach the people who are
unfamiliar with the ICT facilities. After the people gain basic knowledge of using ICT, the
community center may slowly introduce ASEAN into the content of the training sessions
or activities. The introduction of ASEAN may start from the basic look up of ASEAN
community in the Internet through search engines. In this way, the people will be
influenced and be aware of what ASEAN organization is all about. The youth group who
always have more curiosity will eventually find out more about ASEAN and what impact
ASEAN have on each members (countries) of its organization.
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On the other hand, after implementing ICT, there can be problems of employing licensed
software which may require some payments to the license and maintenance of the
software. This payments can varied differently depending on the services provided by
the software, but in reality the more expensive the software is the better the support
given by that software. Thus to solve this problem, FLOSS can be used.
FLOSS stands for “Free Libre Open Source Software”. It is software which grants the
users the right of able to study, change, and improve its design through the availability of
its source code. FLOSS can be free to distribute, free licensed and free of cost. Thus
FLOSS plays an important part in helping those who have tight budget concerning the
use of software. Since there is the availability of the source code of FLOSS software,
people will be able to modify the source code to improve the performance of the
software and distribute them to others. In this way, the software will be developed
towards perfection with the help of everyone who contributes ideas and effect into it.
People will also be able to modify the FLOSS software to suit their own means, e.g. A
Malay language only supported Graphical User Interface (GUI) can be modified to
support multiple languages such as Thai, Chinese, and English etc.
The usage of FLOSS in ICT can be a great leap towards cutting down the budget for
using licensed software. It may not be common in most places, but it will surely have its
important status in the near future. During 3rd March 2009, Universiti Brunei Darussalam
(UBD) held a FLOSS workshop that invited teachers from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos
for a 3 days session of training and presentation by the lecturers of UBD. These
teachers were given training and presentation of using Open source software. An IBM
was also invited to give presentation on Open source software and shared his
experiences in using and applying this software. Thus this can be a good example of
sharing and distributing the knowledge of FLOSS not only locally but also to people from
other countries.
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Conclusion
In summary, the fastest and implementable means to promote ASEAN spirit is through
social networking. What is required is to put proper content and sites so it is easily and
readily available whenever people want to access it. With the fast moving advancement
of ICT technology, language is no longer a barrier as technology will help to translate
their words, to help express what we think globally and share anything we want to. In
terms of cost, social networks is cost-effective because most networks are free to join. It
is also hope that social network can help to deliver ASEAN message as “one vision, one
identity and one community” to all the ASEAN member communities especially among
the youth.
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References
[1] (Internet Coaching Library, 2009). Internet World Stats: Usage and Population
Statistics. Retrieved from http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm on Friday, 13
March 2009.
[2] (Kajsa Ellegard & Elin Wihlborg) ICT-applications as tools for flexile everyday life –
methodological considerations for making ICT- related activities seen in everyday life.
Retrieved from
http://72.14.235.132/search?q=cache:_zWNcsj1mwJ:www.crito.uci.edu/noah/HOIT/HOIT%2520Papers/ICTapplications%2520as%2520tools%2520for%2520flexile%2520everyday%2520life.pdf+I
CT+implementation+in+daily+activities&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk on Friday, 13 March 2009.
[3] (SlideShare Inc, 2009). Social Networking Statistics and Trends. Retrieved from
http://www.slideshare.net/onehalfamazing/social-networking-statistics-and-trendspresentation on Friday, 13th March 2009.
[4] Brunei on Track to Fully Utilize ICT in Schools, 13th May 2008. Retrieved from
www.psctlt.org/edLAB/resources/BruneiITCSchools.pdf on Monday, 9th March 2009.
[5] Enhance Teaching – Engage learning: The use of Interactive whiteboard among
Teachers in Brunei Darussalam. Retrieved from
http://www.moe.gov.my/43seameocc/Abstracts/Microsoft%20Word%20%20BRUNEI_Darussalam_Haji_Abdul_Rahim.pdf on Sunday, 15th March 2009.
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