Marc Bélanger, Labour Educator at the ILO's International Training Centre in Italy, argues for an active involvement by labour in the design of technology.

There is a powerful misconception which needs to be dispelled if we are to use technology humanely, especially for education. A technology is not just the tool that is being used - the fax machine, photocopier or microcomputer. This definition blinds us to the real activities and effects of a technology because it excludes the people who are involved with it. A technology is the combination of the tool and the groups which use it. It is a social process not a product.

By thinking of technology in this way - as a people process, as technology organising - we can bring to bear all our people-organising skills. We can not only use the technologies presented to us in the marketplace, but also involve people in the design of technologies which better fit our needs and circumstances.

There are a number of examples where technologies are being designed by labour organisations and allied organisations for educational purposes. One of the most important is the LearnOnline software being developed by the Trade Union Congress in Britain. The software project allows unionists and others to take courses via their microcomputers. The latest version of LearnOnline, which is being released this month (October 2001), is the result of five years of previous releases being used by over a thousand people. Its development shows that a technology is not just the bits and bytes of a software programme, but also the people who organise its design and use: the organisers at the TUC's National Education Centre, the programmers, and the people who use LearnOnline.

Another example of a union organisation involving itself in the design of a technology is the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC). In conjunction with Athabasca University, the CLC has been organising a series of workshops via computer communications. The workshops have dealt with issues such as planning for May Day activities and investigating the role of the labour movement in community-wide coalitions. By bringing together diverse groups of unionists to discuss and debate issues, the CLC and Athabasca University are learning the techniques for effective online labour education. The organisers of the project are working with unionists to produce a new pedagogy which can be used by any union which adopts computer communications for educational purposes. This pedagogy is just as much a technology as the software that the TUC's NEC is developing. It is the result of many unionists working together to design a technology for their particular purposes.

Another design project taking place in Britain is a virtual language learning environment by two English language lecturers from the University of Northumbria. The virtual classroom is designed to develop the English language and communication skills of workers and unionists.

There are other examples of unions using their resources to design online learning environments such as the Federazione Formazione e Ricerca, the training and research organisation of the Italian labour confederation, CGIL. In 2000, ETUCO (the European Trade Union College) organised a conference to discuss the results of its ETUE-net project and many labour organisations reported on their use of computer communications for education. What all these organisations have in common is that they are using their people organising skills to bring together tools such as the Internet and people to produce technologies which are designed especially for union educational needs. They are practicing the art of technology organising.

ETUCO has been particularly active in promoting the use of computer conferencing for labour education. It has conducted a number of face-to-face seminars on the topic as well as online seminars. ETUCO has also produced a computer conferencing Tutor's Toolkit and Trainers' Manual, amongst other resources.

The ILO's International Training Centre in Turin, Italy has also been working on how computer communications can be used for union education. The Centre's Workers' Activities programme (which uses its French acronym, ACTRAV) has been conducting online courses, designing CD-ROMS as resource materials for online courses and designing a new computer conferencing tool which can be used by unions in developing and emerging market countries. The development of the courses and course materials have been co-ordinated by ACTRAV programme manager Enrico Cairola. I have been designing the new conferencing system.

An example of ACTRAV's online courses is a health and safety course which was conducted for health and safety union officers in South America. Fifteen unionists from five countries participated in the conference. The conference organiser, Luvia Soto, met with the participants in a series of regional meetings in 2000. Later a two month online conference was conducted in which the participants discussed health and safety issues, studied a H&S CD-ROM which had been prepared for the course and learned new research procedures. After this online conference the participants applied what they had learned in local workplaces during a three month practice period. They then returned to the online conference for a two week workshop to discuss their experiences. The participants found the course so valuable that they have now started an online network to continue their work together.

ACTRAV works almost exclusively with unions in developing and emerging market countries. One of the lessons it has learnt is that currently available computer conferencing software is ill-suited to the conditions of many countries in Asia, Africa and Central and Eastern Europe. Current software is based on the Web and demands a constant connection to the Internet: people read and compose their messages while they are connected to the computer which operates the educational computer conferencing programme.

Consequently ACTRAV, in partnership with Canada's TeleLearning Network. has been developing a new computer conferencing programme. Called the Internet Course Reader, the programme allows participants to connect to the Internet and quickly download their conference messages. They can then read the messages and compose new messages while they are offline. When they re-connect they can send their newly created messages to the conferencing system. In this way people can perform hours worth of work and spend only a few minutes on the Internet.

Some current computer conferencing programmes, notably FirstClass, have offline readers but they are expensive. The Course Reader is being developed as an Open Source software project. That means it will be available free of charge to anyone who wants to use it. It also means the "source code" (the programming) will be available for people who want to add to it or change it. The hope is that union programmers will add to the Course Reader and submit their improvements for use in subsequent releases. The Course Reader is currently in beta testing (draft form for bug-finding) and will be released as Version 1.0 in November 2001.

The Open Source concept is a way many union organisations can participate in the design of a technology which would normally cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and therefore be unaffordable by a single labour organisation. It is democratic technology design action. It is another example of technology organising by unionists.

Despite all the good work being performed by unions using educational computer communications, the most important factor remains that unions are learning how to participate in the design of new technologies. This is much more important that the development of any single technology. Why? Because we are headed into a period of rapid technology change which will make the past twenty years (the period in which the microcomputer was deployed) look like a slowed-down film. Unions will need to understand how to confront the new technologies which are coming. And that can only be done if they know how to design them. Our slogan may very will be: Solidarity Design Forever!