Education – Integra LLC

Slums, Youth and the Mobile Internet in Urban India: An Anthropological Case Study for ICT4D

Photo Credit: www.dailycontributor.com

Omar, 19 years old and living in an urban slum in India, is an early mobile internet user who repairs mobile phones in his brother‘s store. “This is magic in my palms,” he says valuing the weight of his mobile phone, not only in his hands, but in his day-to-day life. “God knows what I would do without this. I download songs and listen to them all day, I download movies and watch them in the night when I get back home, I play games in between servicing client, I change my internet plans as and when I come across a great one that gives me the most for the least.”

Omar is certainly not the only teenager in his slum who is fascinated with mobile technology. It’s this appreciation for ICT and its various uses for finding comfort — a way of managing and building personal technology infrastructures as an important element in conducting one’s own life — that Microsoft researchers wanted to portray in a new report, Anthropology, Development and ICTs: Slums, Youth and the Mobile Internet in Urban India. The report aimed to bring awareness to the ICT for development (ICT4D) community of the important insights that be gained from anthropological studies within an understanding of what drives a specific user population to adopt technologies in specific ways: even if the latter is only for entertainment purposes.

Researchers observed how twenty underprivileged teenagers living in a slum used ICT in their day-to-day lives by employing a variety of qualitative methods, including open-ended interviews, observations of community life, and semi-structured baseline surveys. They focused their findings on:

1) Investigating everyday entry points for internet use

2) Identifying ways the internet is understood, accessed, used and shared in multiple ways among the user population

3) Qualifying the social paths sustaining the persistence of internet use among teenagers in a constrained infrastructural environment — specifically that of an urban slum.

The report offers a fascinating anthropological view of how ICT could, and perhaps should, be seen by the ICT4D community:

“If constrained technology environments such as urban slums or how youth use ICTs are legitimate interests for ICTD research, such concerns could pave way for a subtle yet vital exchange between the domains of anthropology and development with the aim to expand a utilitarian notion of ICTs and their role in human progress.”

With so much focus being given to ICT for education initiatives, this leads us to wonder: Should technology be introduced into communities where ICT has not yet been adopted? Or is it better that we first observe how technology is already being used, such as use of mobile phones, and structure our education programs around these pre existing uses? The report suggests the latter and encourages ICT4D developers to consider all of the ways technology is already being used even if it doesn’t have the direct effects that we anticipate or fit a preconceived definition of “development”.

“Indeed, this may require us to broaden our view of how we think about what underlies a good ICTD research project and how we view a range of human behaviors as incremental to development. Rather than using the internet to search for educational material, the youth in our study search for music and Bollywood teasers. These are hardly developmental in any conventional sense, but more akin to behaviors of youth in any part of the globe! No doubt what begins as entertainment can lead to more serious activities.”

The report is certainly a welcome and valuable resource to developers in the ICT4D community. The full report can be accessed here.

April 23, 2012/by actualize

Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Addressing the Digital Divide in Latin American and Caribbean Schools

Photo credit: Katie Marney/The McGill Daily

Are schools in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) network ready? If so, what does it mean for improving the equity and quality of education in that part of the world?

This is a complicated question, no doubt, and one that is going to be asked more frequently with the introduction of the new Broadband Partnership of the Americas which promises to provide connectivity to schools that generally have been considered disconnected from the rest of the world. Moreover, this question seemingly ignores the unique cultural context and infrastructure of each country within the LAC region. Providing internet access in schools is just one important variable in a complex equation that the Information and Communication Technology for Education (ICT4E) community struggles to understand when attempting to integrate technology into the classroom. Does connectivity + ICT devices + digital content = better education? Many would vehemently argue no when considering differences in quality and methods of delivery.

But the LAC region on the whole appears to have a different equation altogether and one that seemingly receives less attention than other “developing” parts of the world, such as parts of Africa that tend to be the testing ground for many new ICT4E initiatives. When Latin America is mentioned in the ICT4E community, many often think of recent projects like OLPC deployments in Peru or Seeds of Empowerment’s initiatives in Argentina and Uruguay. But these are mainly device-based programs and, without increased internet coverage in the region, many of the valuable open educational resources and distance learning opportunities available through internet access remain out of reach.

Internet Access in Schools from the World Economic Forum

According to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) new 2012 Global Information Technology Report, a comprehensive assessment of the preparedness of economies to leverage the networked economy, LAC’s Internet access in schools ranks well below its developed neighbors (see map on the right). This is just one of many factors, along with education quality, level of adult literacy, and rate of secondary education enrollment, that the WEF considers when determining the “network readiness” of a country.

“Network readiness”, as defined by a complex framework which translates into the Network Readiness Index, is comprised of four subindexes that measure the environment for ICT; the readiness of a society to use ICT; the actual usage of all main stakeholders; and, finally, the impacts that ICT generates in the economy and society. The report found that LAC’s network readiness ranking is lagging far behind “developed” countries for a number of reasons:

“Although the region is vast and heterogeneous, three shared reasons for this lag can be identified: these countries all exhibit an insufficient investment in developing their ICT infrastructure, a weak skill base in the population because of poor educational systems that hinder society’s capacity to make an effective use of these technologies, and unfavorable business conditions that do not support the spur of entrepreneurship and innovation. Addressing these weaknesses will be crucial for improving the region’s competitiveness and shifting its economies toward more knowledge-based activities.”

Network Readiness Index from the World Economic Forum

Addressing the weaknesses in the educational systems throughout the LAC region creates a complicated question when considering the role that ICT4E plays: How can technology be used effectively to improve an education system if the current system’s weaknesses and lack of technology expertise prevent technology from being integrated into the classrooms in the first place? Obviously, a country’s network readiness — or even ICT4E readiness — is complex and addressing it requires a multifaceted approach. For schools in the LAC region, improving internet access and expanding broadband technologies will address at least one aspect of the digital divide in education.

More information about ICT4E policies in LAC:

A database of ICT for education policies around the world — including the LAC region — from the GESCI
Public policies for the information society: a shared vision? from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean

April 14, 2012/by actualize

Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Workforce Development, Youth Development

USAID’s EQUIP3 Introduces Youth ICT Employment Training & Placement Toolkit

Photo Credit: www.camara.ie

USAID’s Educational Quality Improvement Program 3 (EQUIP3) has released a new digital toolkit that will empower local partners to successfully implement youth employability programs. The Youth ICT Employment Training & Placement Toolkit provides guidance and support to partner institutions in the design of these programs and presents profiles of jobs in three sectors — ICT, health, and agriculture — which were identified as growth industries with a high potential for employing youth in Africa.

EQUIP3, a program led by the Education Development Center (EDC), partnered with the International Youth Foundation (IYF) to assess the labor markets, consult with numerous stakeholders in Kenya and Rwanda, and identify viable youth livelihood opportunities in the three sectors. By gathering quantitative and qualitative information on the needs, interests, and capacities of employers, youth, and others, these assessments identified specific ICT-related occupations that offer significant entry-level employment or entrepreneurial opportunities for disadvantaged youth in the target countries.

The Kenya and Rwanda country assessments found numerous employment and entrepreneurial opportunities for youth who have basic to advanced ICT skills, such as in hardware maintenance and repair, network maintenance, multimedia production, and database management. Through these findings, the development team identified the agriculture and health sectors as those which ICT skills have the most potential. In the agricultural sector, for instance, youth can use ICT skills to increase the efficiency of farms, shops, and suppliers. In the health sector, opportunities for youth exist in supporting health management information systems, among other opportunities.

The toolkit can be accessed online, in PDF, or in printed form for those without access to the Internet. Each sector profile provides program managers with detailed information on how to establish training programs that will impart to youth the skills required to secure formal employment or to start their own businesses.

Each profile includes:

A brief job description
The employment outlook
The “big picture” training considerations (recommended training location, target beneficiaries, average length of course, maximum class size)
Desired training outcomes
Student prerequisites for training (e.g. English level, critical thinking skills, basic numeracy skills)
Qualifications to look for in trainers
Specific curriculum and resources
The technology resources needed to provide training
Optimal instructional methodologies
Internship and job placement strategies
Additional resources, including links to online resources

The development team worked with NGOs and the government in each country to identify the needs of out-of-school youth, investigate job opportunities in the private sector, and identify pre-existing training materials. The research and consideration for country context that has gone into the design of the toolkit has made it a promising resource in providing youth with the skills necessary to participate in the emerging job market of technology-based positions. Moreover, the development team designed the toolkit to be able to evolve with the emergence of new open source resources and different ICT-related employment opportunities within the three sectors’ value chains to enhance the curriculum and ensure the project’s sustainability.

And this is just the beginning — consider it the 1.0 version of this training resource. The development team is looking to expand the toolkit to encompass other sectors and are already investigating examples of ICT usage in Senegal, Kenya, and Rwanda.

April 10, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Education, Education Partnerships, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Where is the NEPAD e-School Initiative Now?

Image from ypia.org.za

Many in the aid and ICT4E community know NEPAD — the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) — and probably remember the launch of the e-School Initative, first announced during the Africa Summit of the World Economic Forum in June 2003. As part of the overarching objective of the NEPAD program to enhance Africa’s growth, development and participation in the global economy, the e-School component involves a complex implementation strategy involving a multi-country, multi-stakeholder, and multi-stage approach to introduce ICT use and support to 600,000 schools across Africa. But now, close to ten years after the initiative was first introduced, what progress has it made?

That’s what participants and leaders of the NEPAD e-School Initiative discussed when they gathered in Accra, Ghana earlier this week for the two-day NEPAD e-School Regional ECOWAS Conference. Reverend Emmanuel Dadebo, Head of the Teacher Education Division of Ghana Education Service, led the discussion and press event, emphasizing the project’s need for a business plan that promotes private sector investment by introducing a new Private Public Partnership (PPP) model.

The conference comes after five years of discussion and debate concerning the key findings made during the initial phase of the e-School Initiative — the “NEPAD e-Schools Demo”. The purpose of the Demo was to accrue a body of knowledge, based on real-life experiences of implementing ICT in schools across the African continent, in order to inform the rollout of the NEPAD e-Schools Initiative. The program was implemented in six schools in each of 16 countries across Africa through partnerships that involved private sector consortia, the country government and the NEPAD e-Africa Commission (eAC), which is responsible for the development and implementation of the NEPAD ICT program.

Photo Credit: computersforcharities.co.uk

Though various stakeholders and members of the aid community consider the Demo successful in some ways, like introducing ICT hubs into rural communities, most agree that it remains unsustainable in its current form. A report released by infoDev and the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) back in 2007 entitiled “The NEPAD e-Schools Demonstration Project: A Work in Progress”, highlights the realization of this challenge within the early stages of the Demo and stressed the need for dialogue between all stakeholders:

“The expectations that implementation of the Demo would occur within a few months of it being announced in the participating countries, and, that a Business Plan would be developed to address sustainability and future rollout, were not met, and explanations for the delays were not effectively communicated. The disappointment and cynicism that resulted in some of the participating countries underlines the oft-learned rule of project management: Communicate! Communicate! Communicate!”

Like many development projects of this kind, and on such a large scale, lessons like these take time to learn and often come from trial and error. Shafika Isaacs, the founding executive director of SchoolNet Africa and a member of the monitoring and evaluation team for the report concluded saying this:

“Never before has there really been a program that mobilised national government participation and leadership at the official continental level in the way the NEPAD e-Schools vision has. Further, it has brought the private sector into partnerships that, while experiencing growing pains, has mobilised resources in a way that few other projects have been able to do. And there is much yet to learn about doing this in an optimal way.”

Exactly how much has been learned between 2007 and now, has yet to be seen. Several news articles have claimed that the program has already benefited several schools in Ghana and according to a statement given in Accra at the e-Schools conference, Ghana will launch the next phase of NEPAD e-Schools later this year. The program’s methods of monitoring and evaluating these benefits and ensuring effectiveness and transparency are unclear. However, with more buy-in from the private sector and the introduction of a new business model, it’s clear that some progress is being made and a more sustainable future for the e-Schools Initiative could be within reach.

March 30, 2012/by actualize

Basic Education, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Youth Development

6 Ghanian schools set for e-schooling

Six schools have benefitted from the first phase of the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) e-school initiative in Ghana. This initiative aims to equip young people with the skills and knowledge they need to participate in the global economy.

Six schools in Ghana to receive e-schooling. (image: futurechallenges.org)

The selected schools were Wa Senior High School, Ola Girls Senior High School, Walewale Senior High School, Acherensua Senior High School, St Augustine’s Senior High School and Akomadan Senior High School.

According to a statement issued in Accra on Tuesday, Ghana will launch the next phase of NEPAD e-schools later this year.

A Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model was built into the e-school initiative to help tackle challenges and constraints in the NEPAD demonstration project. This is in a bid to improve on key lessons learnt from the first phase of the initiative and best practice worldwide.

A two-day Public-Private Dialogue Forum is scheduled to take place in Accra as part of the launch from March 26-27, and is expected to attract over 100 participants to discuss a new e-school PPP model.

Segun Adekoye

March 26, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Education, Education Partnerships, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Attention ICT Innovators: Have you Considered Peace Corps?

No, I don’t actually mean you should commit to 2 years of service in the Peace Corps (though if you have the time, “life is calling” as the PC recruiters say), but what about joining forces with them? With over 9,000 volunteers, 40% of which focus on education and another 12% in business and ICT, and spanning the globe in about 76 developing countries, isn’t that a resource worth exploring?

I’ve been thinking about this lately since there seems to be a growing amount of speculation about how new innovations in information communication technologies (ICT) are being introduced into classrooms throughout the developing world without enough, or any, teacher training to ensure sustainability. Take for example the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program. It drew a lot of criticism after it first released the XO 1.0 laptop for lack of teacher-focused training programs on how to use the devices and it is soon to become even more controversial with the release of the much talked-about XO 3.0 tablet.

Amidst reading the numerous critical blogs and some rather heated debates, I’ve started to wonder: What on-the-ground research is being done to assess the need for some of these new innovations in a specific country in the first place? What resources, particularly people, are already available to help introduce and support the teacher training needed for local teachers to deem the technology useful and relevant within the unique cultural context?

In Cambodia, where I recently served as a Peace Corps Volunteer at the Prey Veng Regional Teacher Training Center (RTTC), the Khmer have a saying: “Don’t take the straight or winding path. Take the path your ancestors have taken.” And new innovations in ICT can be seen as just that — a long winding path of new and confusing devices, unfamiliar to an aging population of school officials and teachers that think they have fared well enough as educators without the help of new gadgets.

Last month, leading experts and stakeholders in the field of mobile learning discussed how people’s perceptions of mobile phones are impeding progress in mobile learning in the recently released UNESCO Mobile Learning Week report:

Perhaps due to the intellectually-light and entertainment-heavy content that has been optimized for mobile devices over the past decade, the primary social challenge is convincing people that phones are NOT a barrier to learning.

Even in American classrooms, mobile phones can often be thought of as a distraction, most commonly used for texting and watching YouTube videos, rarely ever thought of as a valuable teaching aide that teachers could already be using if they had the training or interest to explore its potential on their own.

And mobile devices are just the tip of this growing iceberg of ICT, OER, FOSS, and a plethora of other acronyms used in this field. So once the need and appropriateness of a technology is determined useful for a particular country and educational environment, who might be able to help train teachers how to use and develop it? Who has three months of intensive language training and culture-sensitivity seminars, works and lives with the locals, has a wide range of connections within the school system, and strives to understand the complexities of the education system? That’s right — the tech-savvy Peace Corps Volunteers.

Now that’s an assumption and generalization that all PCVs know and care about what’s going on in the ICT4D field and have any interest of being involved in such endeavors — dealing with stray dogs and gastrointestinal diseases is a challenge enough. But why not reach out to the volunteers in your ICT-destined country and give them a chance to use some of those international relationship building skills that they spent hours cultivating during training.

And Peace Corps is just one of several organizations that send volunteers into the developing world. VSO UK and VSO International, Volunteer Service Overseas organizations, are quite similar to Peace Corps volunteers in regards to their culture and language immersion and 26% work in the education sector. The interactive map below shows where Peace Corps and VSO volunteers are currently serving and the program sectors that they work in. Almost every country has volunteers working in the education sector and some have already launched information technology-related projects:

View Volunteer Programs in Education and ICT in a larger map

February 23, 2012/by actualize

Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

How ICTs Can Empower Blind Students: Souktel’s New Audio Service in Palestine

Lately there has been a lot of talk about how mobile phones can improve the access to and quality of education in the classroom. But how has the technology affected students with special needs?

Souktel, an organization that designs and delivers mobile phone services for finding jobs and connecting aid agencies with communities in need, announced Tuesday that it has developed a new mobile audio service that is empowering blind and low-literacy communities. The voice messaging system allows users to record messages online and send them to multiple phones easily and efficiently. The messages can then be retrieved by the recipients through using a voice-activated service or touch-tone audio menu, allowing easy access to information for the visually impaired and illiterate.

As part of Souktel’s mission to give low-income communities the information they need to improve their lives, Nureddin Amro, founder of the Siraj al-Quds School in East Jerusalem for both blind and sighted students, is now able to use this innovation to record messages online and send them to the mobile phones of students, staff, and parents. “It saves a lot of time and money,” says Amro, “I love using it. We sent a message just yesterday [to several hundred people] announcing the launch of a new program and the services and activities that will start February 1st … And I’ll send another one out tomorrow to advertise the beginning of second semester.”

Nureddin, visually handicapped and an innovator himself, has pioneered a new integrated-education approach to teaching visually impaired students, allowing them equal opportunities in school and providing them with the necessary skills to becoming accepted and integrated into their communities. Recognized for his advocacy for disabled students’ rights and groundbreaking work at the school, Nurredin was named an Arab World Social Innovator by the Synergos Institue in New York, the organization which funded the Souktel project.

Using mobile phones in education is certainly not a new idea but mobile learning, commonly referred to as mLearning, is such a new opportunity for many schools within developing countries that searching for documented examples of it’s application to aid blind students yields few results. Computer-based technology, or eLearning, has already provided tools that are helping visually impaired students. In fact, Nureddin’s Siraj al-Quds School is already using ‘talking computer’ technology which uses an assistive learning computer program designed for blind students.

But through identifying more cases where Souktel’s services can be used, as well as exploring new creative ways in how mlearning can be introduced to help, not only blind students, but all students with special needs, these new technologies promise to aid education and informing low-literacy populations. “In almost every developing country, illiteracy and disability are massive challenges,” says Souktel president Jacob Korenblum. “When a large percentage of the community can’t read, they can’t get the basic information they need for daily life: Where to find a doctor, where to find emergency food supplies.” For Souktel, mobile audio services have become a growing part of its work and will be a major focus for 2012.

February 2, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Education, Education Partnerships, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Learning, Freedom and the Web: Mozilla’s eBook Explores and Offers How-Tos

Mozilla published a book last month that offers a glimpse at how open-source technology is shaping the field of education. The book entitled Learning, Freedom and the Web written by Anya Kamenetz and some of the 400 participants of the first Mozilla Festival held in Barcelona in 2010, explores possible answers to the questions: How can the ideas of the open source movement help foster learning? What are the most effective ways to bring learning to everyone? How does openness help the spread of knowledge?

The book contains session notes from the festival, quotes and blogs from leading experts, key-findings from current projects, as well as several how-tos including how to create your own ebook. The format of the book itself follows the ethos of the minds which collaborated to create it so that printed copies are available for purchase but it can also be downloaded as a PDF for free or accessed in an easy-to-use web version that includes video clips.

Exploring ideas such as the concept of industrialized education, the future of the physical library, and the quality and sustainability of open content, contributors include promising new ideas and tools that can be used to develop and share educational resources. For people who are unfamiliar with these concepts or are interested in developing their own open educational resources (OER), the book’s easy-to-follow instructions and format make it a great introduction to open-source technologies and their applications.

Helpful how-tos include difficulty level, amount of time to develop, who they involve and benefit, as well as steps. Topics include:

Creating an open education resource
Contract grading
Adopting an open textbook
Creating your own how-to
Creating your own ebook
Creating your own festival
Teaching and learning with Wikipedia

Learning, Freedom and the Web, both the book and the festival, might well serve as a barometer for the level of involvement and development of this new open source movement. When faced with the question of the movement’s future, authors leave the reader with a need to contribute and collaborate. “What really keeps a community going? Shared work, shared goals, shared fun, shared vocabulary, and shared rituals. There doesn’t have to be one ultimate unified vision. The idea of what learning will mostly look like in ten years, 50 years, or 100 years remains fuzzy, and that’s by design, because one definition of an improved future is one that has a greater diversity of choices than in the past.”

January 31, 2012/by actualize

Basic Education, Education, Education Partnerships, Higher Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Microsoft to bridge digital divide through African school partnership

Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it was partnering with the British Council in Africa to deliver their Africa Digital Schools Project aimed at assisting in “bridging the digital divide”, in six African countries.

The aim is to bring new technology to African schools as part of a boosting of education experiences through Microsoft’s technology (image: Education In Africa)

Called “BADILIKO,” the Swahili word for change, the aim is to bring new technology to African schools as part of a boosting of education experiences through Microsoft’s technology.

According to a statement, each company contributed $1-million as well as technical expertise to accelerate the implementation of this innovative project that seeks to embed ICT in learning.

Microsoft and the British Council stressed that the Africa Digital Schools Project will “enrich e-learning while improving ICT skills among teachers and students to boost their competitiveness in a global village.”

The $2-million seed money availed byMicrosoft and British Council will be spent on the establishment of eighty digital hubs across the six sub-Saharan countries.

It is hoped that 100,000 learners will be provided with digital tools which they will utilize to boost academic work and social skills that benefit the wider community.

Mark Matunga, the Microsoft Regional Education Manager, East and Southern Africa, says that greater uptake of ICT in learning dovetails with the software giant’s vision of bridging digital divide in Africa.

”Educators should embrace technology to pass knowledge to students and boost their aptitude in relevant areas of study. We are encouraging more teachers to be trained in ICT skills.”

Janan Yussif

January 26, 2012/by actualize

Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

ICTs in the Classroom: 8 Recommendations from Zambia

A new report by Aptivate and the Centre for Commonwealth Education (University of Cambridge) suggests that there are practices that can be utilized to make ICT use in classrooms more effective. The study, conducted in part by iSchool.zm, an online multi-media eLearning package designed to cover the whole of the Zambian school curriculum, examined underprivileged school communities in Zambia.

The project entitled Appropriate New Technologies to Support Interactive Teaching in Zambian schools (ANTSIT) was funded by the UK government’s Department for International Development (DFID), and provided a detailed report including recommendations for introducing future ICT4Ed projects in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Future ICT4Ed programs can benefit from the researchers’ recommendations detailed in the report:

Purchase classroom sets, including a teacher laptop and student laptops, and don’t forget storage and transport needs

Provide training to teachers on the ICT tools and how to use them creatively, incorporating them into a participatory teaching approach

Use ICTs with non-ICT resources, such as mini blackboards, a cheap and invaluable teaching aid

Choose cheap netbooks (e.g. the Classmate netbook) over Android-based tablets which may be promising in the future but currently make keyboard-based entry activities difficult

Don’t mix multiple ICT devices within a single class if cost and maintenance problems are an issue

Invest time in setting up and configuring computers well so that tech problems don’t interfere with lesson planning or class time

Consider resource sharing between student computers through local wireless networks

Enable ICT ownership through microfinance

During the 6-month project, a team of researchers conducted over 30 visits to two under-resourced Zambian primary schools. Through observing classes and working with local science and mathematics teachers, the team was able to analyze and compare the effectiveness and applicability of a variety of mobile technologies in the classroom. Netbook, tablet and laptop computers, e-Book and wiki readers, digital cameras and mini-projectors along with Open Educational Resources and Open Source software were all considered when determining the most appropriate and versatile resources for creating an environment supportive of learning through active participation.

“Based on our understanding of ICT use in schools and of successful pedagogies such as interactive teaching plus collaborative, project- and enquiry-based learning, and given limited resources, what does an effective ICT-enabled Zambian school look like?”

The team worked with participating teachers not only to create lesson plans utilizing assigned ICTs, but also to ensure a participatory and interactive learning approach which research shows is key to ownership, sustainability, and replication. The report concluded that considering the often outdated and passive pedagogies used in many Zambian schools, the ‘most appropriate’ device is largely dependent on the particular classroom circumstances and the teaching goals and methods used by the teacher.

In addition to the full report, researchers from the Centre for Commonwealth Education, Bjoern Hassler and Sara Hennessy, created a video clip summarizing their findings that they presented at the “Mobile Technologies for Education: The experience in the developing world”, an event sponsored by Cambridge Education Services and co-hosted by the Humanitarian Centre and the Centre for Commonwealth Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. The event was part of a themed year on ICT4D (ICT for Development) run by the Humanitarian Centre in partnership with technology company ARM.

January 24, 2012/by actualize

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