This past week has been a whirlwind and this upcoming one promises to be just as busy as we have our final days of classes while we wrap up our trainings of the teachers and the UAC staff and prepare for our sad but inevitable departure this Friday.

UN Dispatch readers attending Netroots Nation are cordially invited to attend a panel I will be moderating on global poverty.   The panel is a major meeting of the minds of activists, policy experts, and policy makers about what can be done to take on global poverty.  I'm very excited about our line-up.
 
Friday, August 14th 1:30 PM - 2:45 PM Panel, 303

Time: Friday, August 14th, 1:30pm - 2:45pm
Room: 303

President Obama cam

From CNN:
The young girl whispered in a hushed tone. She looked down as she spoke, only glancing up from her dark round eyes every now and then. She wanted to tell more, but she was too ashamed. She was just 9 years old when, she says, Congolese soldiers gang-raped her on her way to school. ...

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

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.