CPN completes design on national IT education blueprint

Part of the blueprint includes syllabi for computer education in both primary and secondary schools, which is to be unveiled by the Minister of Education, Dr. Igwe Nwachukwu.

The president of CPN, Adenike Osofisan, who revealed this in an interview with our correspondent in Lagos, said the blueprint was necessary in view of the critical position that ICTs occupied in everyday life, where they have become a tool used by all.

CPN, she noted designed the blueprint as part of its oversight functions as the body set up by government Act to regulate the Nigerian IT industry.

Osofisan stated that there was a need to look at reviewing the national IT education curriculum with the view to making it more relevant to current realities. She said IT education was one of the areas that needed to be reviewed due to its very volatile nature.

Besides, she said that the entire framework of the IT policy should be reviewed to make it more focused on achieving national IT development goals.

Meanwhile, CPN is to work with various law-enforcement agencies towards a greater regulation of the IT sector. According to Osofisan, the need had become necessary in order to ensure greater professionalism in the industry. She said many individuals and organisations were involved in IT services today without going through the requisite training and that CPN wanted to check this trend.

The CPN president also revealed that the organisation would hold a national IT assembly in order to foster greater compliance with the CPN Act and promote the achievements of the government's national economic development goals.

She said, "The need for the IT assembly became imperative because of the need for all the critical sectors of the economy to put their intellectual resources together and partner with government towards the realisation of the vision of making Nigeria a giant economy by year 2020."

According to her, the event, which starts on Thursday in Abuja, would be an annual event where topical issues would be discussed.

Sharing the mobile phone experience

Meanwhile, two new phones offering call-time tracking, multi-phonebooks and more have been introduced into the Nigerian market by Nokia.

The firm said the phones were an answer to conditions in many developing markets around the world, where mobile phones were often shared among families and even entire villages.

The phones, Nokia 1200 and Nokia 1208 have the industry's first call-time tracking application and multi-phonebooks to make phone sharing simpler and more efficient.

The call-time tracking feature helps the consumers and village phone entrepreneurs to manage airtime costs by enabling them to pre-set a time limit on individual calls. The call automatically ends when the pre-set limit has been reached.

The firm said the easy-to-use multi-phonebook allowed consumers to set up personal phonebooks unique to that user and save specific contacts to that user's phone book.

The Nokia 1200 and Nokia 1208 each come with five available phone books, making it possible for an entire family to share a phone, and for each of the family members to manage their own phone books.

The Area Manager, Nokia Nigeria, Fady Khatib, said, "The sharing of a mobile phone allows many consumers in entry markets to experience the benefits of mobility firsthand - an experience that might otherwise not be possible."

The Nokia 1200 and Nokia 1208 also come equipped with additional features tailored to entry markets such as flashlights, localized languages that enable the setting of the user interface in either Yoruba, Igbo or Hausa and a teaching mode that allows non-experienced users to quickly learn how to master the phone.

The seamless keypad protects the phone from dust, another reality of rural mobile phone use. The Nokia 1200 phone is offered with a monochrome screen, while the Nokia 1208 features a colour VGA screen.

In another development, the United Kingdom based mobile phone manufacturer Meridien Mobile, has inaugurated its brand of GSM phones called 'Fly' in Nigeria.

The head of the Meridien Mobile group in Nigeria, Ajith Anirudhan, said at the entry of the brand into the Nigerian market was based on the growing demand for high quality phones with rich features.

She said, 'Fly' was being launched with a variety of exclusive and differentiated mobile phones.

The Nigerian market, she noted, needed to have feature-rich phones as users were getting more used to mobile phones and have been demanding better ones as replacement for the phones they used in the past.

She stated that a major emphasis of Fly phones would be their affordability.

The Fly phones initially inaugurated by the group in Russia in 2003, have been a great success and hves since expanded into East and Central Europe and India.

Anirudhan said having since emerged as a key player in the telecom field, the firm has carved a credible market in a short span of time. She added that the promising results thus achieved have encouraged the firm to pursue its growth strategy for Nigeria.

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