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The past 30 days in technology for development

Ending a culture of rape

Hilary Clinton is in Kinshasa, Congo, today, calling for an end to rape as a weapon of war. She blamed an unprofessional military and a trade in minerals that fuels violent militias. She was passionate and stirring as she talked about human rights abuses, and ending a culture of rape.

Online Contests

The Netflix PrizeWe have seen in recent years a growing prevalence of online contests. Here are three recent contest efforts that have impressed us.

mvrentchler - Can eBooks Satisfy? Creating Content for ICT-enabled Classrooms

In the USA, Ebook is only a FORMAT which is more appropriate for older age children and adults who are literate; have been technology trained and have that fluency; have access to the downloadng wireless networks; don't have vision challenges, or hardware accessibility challenges; accept the (current) inability to make a hard copy of the material and the limit of materials available; and the potential loss of notes made on study materials should the vendor decide to retract the download. I perceive the biggest immediate contribution for the Ebook FORMAT is to replace the heavy, back-breaking public school textbooks that require regular updating (new editions) and the costs associated to our public taxpayers.

Ban Condemns Suu Kyi guilty verdict

Ban Ki Moon added his voice to those of other world leaders in condemning the conviction of Aung San Suu Kyi. 
“The Secretary-General is deeply disappointed by the verdict in respect of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi,” his spokesperson said in a statement. “The Secretary-General strongly deplores this decision.”

Mike Trucano - Balancing Content, Technology, and People for Quality Basic Education

Absolutely, a critical point. On a related (and perhaps somewhat tangential) note: I do wonder about the cognitive effect of early stage attention to keyboarding, at the expense of writing by hand. Learning to write by hand is difficult. Might this difficulty may be important in some way to the develop of certain skills associated with literacy? (I am admittedly way out of my area of competence here, and I suspect it shows!) When learning Chinese (for example), the manual repetition required to learn each character is considered fundamental to the understanding of the meaning of each character and to learning the language.

Morning Coffee - 11 August 2009

Starting 5
Top Story: 

Title: 

SUU KYI GETS 18 MONTHS

Body: 

Burman opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been sentenced to 18 more months of house arrest for illegally sheltering a foreigner, a deranged American who swam over a mile in homemade water wings to show up at her house uninvited.

Kasi - Balancing Content, Technology, and People for Quality Basic Education

It would be nice to think of a unified and high-quality content broadcasting rather than interactive for the developing countries. Though cell phone is available and provides connectivity there are many pitfalls using cellphone in classroom (school) environment. Economically also it is not viable to teach individual student with centralized content and individual devices (whether cell or laptop)... the connectivity charges will make it nonviable. Think of uplifting the classroom rather than individual kid. Single device for a classroom of 20-40 students is more realizable than thinking of individuals.

Kasi - Can eBooks Satisfy? Creating Content for ICT-enabled Classrooms

Openness of the teachers is very important. Some teachers view e-learning as a competitor for them rather than assisting them. They welcome e-books with animation (to explain the physics and maths). For more than a year i was trying to sell a automated software for question paper generation and evaluating answers based on different criteria like...analytical, memory, imaginative etc.,etc., Teachers got offended and some made comments like "why don't u replace US with computers".... I could not sell even a single piece of the software. But could sell only the finance module of the whole education package. I strongly believe a good set of animation, textual and pictorial explanation of physics, Chemistry and maths will suffice for the next generation to come.

A Day Without Power


We started our second week of computer camp today. We had planned to spend some time with the kids exploring Maze (surprisingly enough, an activity where you go through a maze), and then finally have a small Maze tournament with the children racing each other to see who could complete the maze the fastest. However, the power at the school went out about 10 minutes after all the kids got settled.

Wayan - Balancing Content, Technology, and People for Quality Basic Education

Stylus would be nice, but I don't think the technology is there yet. Its certainly not going to give the same feedback as pencil & paper (visual clues, texture, etc). But I don't think we need to worry about children not being able to write. There is still so much written communication needed in the offline world.

Wayan - Balancing Content, Technology, and People for Quality Basic Education

Unconnected computers limit the places children can go. Unconnect them and you don't have to worry about porn or political speech. Simplistic, but often the choice.

Wayan - Balancing Content, Technology, and People for Quality Basic Education

While I love me some technology, I feel a personal unease with children leaning to read via eBooks. I feel they should tsart with paper books, all for reasons I understand are more romantic than real, but still valid none the less. Books make you realize the value of knowledge, where eBooks have yet to convey this. But eBooks are the key to get greater knowledge. There is no way we can replicate physical libraries with the speed and ease of electronic ones, but how might we achieve this when paper book publishers are so afraid of electronic media?

Edmundo - Can eBooks Satisfy? Creating Content for ICT-enabled Classrooms

Internet access in the developing world is truly a challenge given the limited availability, aside from bandwidth and transmission speed. In some of the remotest island provinces in the Philippines, TV broadcast either via satellite or cable coupled with mobile communications such as SMS and MMS as a response mechanism to make learning programs interactive are other options that ICT experts can assess impact of such convergence which addresses problems in reach and content delivery.

kumaresan Krishnan - Can eBooks Satisfy? Creating Content for ICT-enabled Classrooms

Idea seems to be good but there are so many factors and issues around it. Especially developing country need to address level of monetary,accessbility and utility of sources(e-books) by children and teacher.

Richard - Balancing Content, Technology, and People for Quality Basic Education

One more comment, Mike. You mentioned keyboards. Let's keep in mind the critical importance of learning to write well. While not so important in the earliest grades, communicating with others is a critical component of a quality basic education. In today's technology that means sooner than later students need to graduate from paper and pencil to a connected keyboard. Which makes me think that we should be thinking about diffierent kinds of technologies for different stages of learning.

Richard - Balancing Content, Technology, and People for Quality Basic Education

Interesting, Mike. While you may well be right, I haven't heard that preference for eBooks as a way to maintain the status quo. . I am much more concerned about those places that are trying to bring laptops and connectivity to everyone without having thought through how they will trian their teachers to make these things useful, where the content will come from and how to pay for it when they try to scale to everyone.

Richard - Balancing Content, Technology, and People for Quality Basic Education

Mike, I am surprised about your comment that "connectivity" is considered a negative by many teachers. It is true that I have seen teachers, at the univeristy level as well as in the lower grades, require their studnets to shut their laptops during their lectures. (They may simply seem to be taking notes.) But un-connected laptops can be nearly as diversionary as connected ones. My general impression is that teachers in the developing world,as well as students, highly value connectivity. Rwanda, for example has promised to bring broadband to every one of its schools by 2011.

Richard - Balancing Content, Technology, and People for Quality Basic Education

Mike, I agree and should have said a bit more about the beneifts of eBooks. At the right price point and with access to electrical power (not there yet) they can be a great substitute for paper books. This can be especially helpful once the basic skills of learning are more or less in place. I think the hybrid solution make a lot of sense. At the beginning elementary grades employ a simple, low cost but interactive tool like the TeacherMate. Bring in eBooks once reading has been established and then a tool for writing and exploring the Cloud can be added soon after.

Is 61% approval "deep-seated ambivalence?"

Former Bush Administration official John Bellinger has an interesting WaPo op-ed on the prospects of the United States joining the International Criminal Court. In the main, he's probably right: the United States is not likely to join the Court in the immediate future. But the argument with which he chooses to conclude his piece is deeply misleading:

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