Travelling ICT training…

Sounds like the the E-tuk tuk went so well in Sri Lanka that UNESCO is working to launch similar projects. Here is a new press release about the “Mobile CMS”  for the Caribbean. This time it’s housed in a bright yellow converted shipping container, and will be rolling out in Jamaica:

“The Mobile CMC called iSt. Lab, which is abbreviation for “High Street Laboratory”, is a mini high-tech mobile unit configured in a garbage disposal wheeled bin consisting of laptop computers, radio transmitter, electronic community newspaper, wireless Internet access and other peripherals.

The goal for the iSt. Lab is to move across the Island to inner-city, rural and otherwise marginalised communities delivering a myriad of creative multimedia workshops to people who have never used a computer before and also those who want to increase their skills in using ICT to support their personal and community development.

Report on mobile phones and social change

some of you may have already seen this, but I just stumbled upon and thought I’d share. A recent report published by Vodafone and the UN Foundation on mobile phone use by NGOs and other activists…

From the UNF website:
“This second publication in the series—Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in NGO Mobile Use—examines innovative uses of mobile technology by groups working to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals. The report identifies emerging trends in “mobile activism” through 11 case studies, and highlights the results of a global survey of NGO usage of mobile technology.”

Might be a nice summer reading assignment

Appropriating phones for teen dating in the middle east

Following our discussion on Chipchase-envy, here’s another fascinating piece of anthropological-mobile use research:

“Hiyam Hijazi-Omari and Rivka Ribak wrote a paper called “Playing With Fire: On the domestication of the mobile phone among Palestinian teenage girls in Israel”. In their research, they analyzed mobile phone practices among Palestinian teenage girls in Israel. The Paper constructs a detailed account of mobile phone use among Palestinian Israeli girls who, at the time of the fieldwork (2003-2006), used mobile phones given to them by their illicit boyfriends, unbeknownst to their parents.

You can link to the research paper, or see some commentary about it here where I initially found it, on Global Voices Online.

The good and the bad

The good news is I stumbled across another great website on the topic of mobile phones for social change. Similar to MobileActive.org which Prof. Bar had introduced us to a few weeks ago, this one is called ShareIdeas.org. It features case studies and “how to” guides.

The bad news is that even though mobile phones have enormous potential for social change, and development, and reconciling the digital divide, we must be aware of its potentially serious health risks…

The Independent (among most other news outlets today) has the story: “Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, a study by an award-winning cancer expert has concluded. He says people should avoid using them wherever possible and that governments and the mobile phone industry must take “immediate steps” to reduce exposure to their radiation.”

Yikes.

Trading chalkboards for networks in South Africa…

“Sahara Computers has increased its ongoing contribution to the South African education sector with confirmation of a long-term, multi-phase project to fully digitise schools in Gauteng…

Earlier this year the minister of education voiced government’s desire to see all teachers equipped with mobile technology to use in classrooms throughout South Africa. The common objective is to make learners and institutions ‘technologically-ready’ to manage changes in teaching styles and approaches in the foreseeable future,” says Naidoo. “Sahara is leading by example as far as corporate investment and contribution to this process is concerned.”

One of these trends is the integration and use of specialised white boards that are networked to a notebook or mobile solution managed by a teacher. The pre-loaded software and anticipated applications and programs will make it feasible for a teacher to run various lessons simultaneously and allow important information to be downloaded and stored automatically and securely as reference material.

The company anticipates that by 2015 many schools will have converted to a virtual environment in which lessons are conducted through notebooks and electronic transmission from devices like electronic white boards through to personal storage devices and PCs.”

Full article here

“LifeLines Education”

Here is an example of a new project involving mobile phones which aims to assist teachers in West Bengal. It’s called “Lifelines Education”.

Some excerpts from a recent article in OneWorld.net:

Using an innovative mix of telephony and internet, this phone-based service helps teachers working in remote areas with critical instructional aid while also linking them up with a network of educational experts.

…Covering 13 panchayats, 164 villages, and 571 schools, the LifeLines Education has been a boon for Bhattacharya and thousands of other teachers.

…LifeLines Education is an extension of OWSA’s LifeLines for Agriculture service that has been functioning with considerable success in north and central India since 2006.

“Voice is the most powerful medium to leverage information service delivery in communities where literacy and language are barriers. We wanted to help the rural farming community by linking voice to web technology, thus giving ordinary people the chance to get answers to questions that are key to improving their lives” said Naimur Rahman.

I like the idea of supplying information through voice/phones as that helps resolve problems of local language content on the web, and cuts out the need for any software/PC training which often stands in the way of a person seeking information. This may be a good example of “appropriate technology”

I would be interested to know what kinds of questions teachers will have when calling the “educational experts”, and if those experts really don’t mind taking the time out of their day to answer the call. The article doesn’t go into any of those details, though it does allude to a similar program for Agriculture which has been successful.

Girl-Powered ICT

I know it’s not about developing countries, but this NYTimes article caught my eye as we get ready for our next class discussion on ICT and gender empowerment. Interesting to know that most web created content for the 12-17 age group (in the U.S.) is created by females. Here’s an excerpt:

The “girls rule” trend in content creation has been percolating for a few years — a Pew study published in 2005 also found that teenage girls were the primary content creators — but the gender gap for blogging, in particular, has widened.

As teenage bloggers nearly doubled from 2004 to 2006, almost all the growth was because of “the increased activity of girls,” the Pew report said.

The findings have implications beyond blogging, according to Pew, because bloggers are “much more likely to engage in other content-creating activities than nonblogging teens.”

But even though girls surpass boys as Web content creators, the imbalance among adults in the computer industry remains. Women hold about 27 percent of jobs in computer and mathematical occupations, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In American high schools, girls comprised fewer than 15 percent of students who took the AP computer science exam in 2006, and there was a 70 percent decline in the number of incoming undergraduate women choosing to major in computer science from 2000 to 2005, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology.

Sobering up from the ICT euphoria

It seems that the Economist is on a roll this week, not only for publishing the m-banking article Uri blogged about, but also for somehow knowing that this week we are testing “the evidence” of ICTs4dev.

The Economist features these two VERY relevant articles on Technology & Development (”The Limits of Leapfrogging” & “Of Internet Cafes and Power Cuts“). I highly recommend reading them.

Consider this passage for example:

It is all too easy to forget that in the developed world, the 21st century’s gizmos are underpinned by infrastructure that often dates back to the 20th or even the 19th. Computers and broadband links are not much use without a reliable electrical supply, for example, and the latest medical gear is not terribly helpful in a country that lacks basic sanitation and health-care facilities…

Sound familiar? I couldn’t help but think the articles could have come straight from the pages of Cynthia Hewitt de Alcantara’s “The Development Divide in a Digital Age” which we read this week.

(photo credit: The Economist)

“Social Networking for Social Change”

If you hadn’t heard of it already through this NYTimes article, a new darling of ICT and development seems to be a website called “Babajob,” which was recently launched in India. It is an example of how new media can be used not only as a “medium” for publicizing or galvanizing the need for a change in society, but as an end solution to a problem in and of itself.

Babajob uses the social-networking revolution popularized by Facebook and MySpace “to people who do not even have computers…to connect India’s elites to the poor at their doorsteps, people who need jobs but lack the connections to find them. Job seekers advertise skills, employers advertise jobs and matches are made through social networks.”

Babajob is conscious to build in a mechanism to reach those who are not “wired” or are not familiar with computers (ie- the majority of the population it seeks to assist). As the home page plainly explains: “We know that many of the people who might be hired through babajob.com may not have access to a computer or phone, and so their accounts can managed by a friend, relative, NGO or even a cyber-café operator – called a mentor…Whenever someone is hired, their mentor earns Rs 200.”

The interesting element for me is that it tries replicate online the process by which Indians hire in real life: through chains of personal connections.

Here’s a pretty comprehensive interview with one of the enthusiastic founders of the project: