Osofisan calls for research on scam mails

WORRIED by the wrongful attribution of all scam mails to Nigeria, immediate past president, Computer Professionals (Registration) Council of Nigeria (CPN), Prof. (Mrs.) Adenike Osofisan, has called for research into the origin of scam letters, insisting that they do not all originate from Nigeria.

Speaking at a public forum organized by the Lagos State chapter of Nigeria Computer Society (NCS), recently, she called on the government to fund research into this area to determine where these letters may be coming from.

“About 20 per cent of these mails are not from Nigeria and we know where but we need to do research and established where they are coming from. Recently, I was in the United States and we did a small research and traced some scam letters to a house in California, yet it was supposed to be coming from Nigeria,” she said.

Prof Osofisan who was speaking on using Information Technology (IT) for instruction delivery, said the controversy between Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and IT is a misinformation as without IT there is no communication saying communication is subsumed in IT.

“Information that you cannot communicate is not information.
IT is the product of the marriage between computer and telecom industry, so telecommunication is already taken care of in that word called IT,” she said.

She called for a reorganization of the educational process saying that IT allows activities to be unbundled and geographically distributed and that Students located in an area can be served by multiple institutions not necessarily located in the same place or even in the same country.

Prof Osofisan also said there is no reason a student cannot offer courses from different institutions and at the end of the day the student can acquire quality education.

“Since the schools are not of equal strength, wherever an institution has strength students from other institutions can be allowed to take courses there,” she said.

The veteran lecturer also said the overall state of higher education in the country is in disarray as there is a dearth of skilled academia, social-economic, geographical and cultural barrier for people who wish to pursue higher education but with innovative use of IT these challenges can be curbed.

“Education is the driving force of economic and social development of any country. Knowing this, it is important to make quality education accessible and available to all and this can only be done through IT.

“IT has the potential to remove the barrier that accompany the problem of low rate of education in any country and it can be used as a tool to overcome the evils of cults, quality of teachers and poor quality of education as well as overcome time and distance barrier,” she said.

IT, she said, could afford everyone to learn everyday and same time be used in the process of education as, informative, situational, constructive as well as communicative tools.

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