MobileActive.org

Mobile technological tools are being used today to collect basic information in the health, world climate, geophysics, ecology, and other sectors to exchange information, and to access scientific computing among many services. The potentialities of this mobile technology need to be spread out on a larger scale in the academia in particular, and in the society as a whole so that its benefits can become widely accessible for further development. This is an issue that needs more attention and promotion, especially in less developed areas of the world.

We define in this book Mobile Science (or “m-Science” in short) as the term that comprises sensing, computing and dissemination of scientific knowledge by the use of mobile devices. This includes (i) data gathering, (ii) the analysis and process of data, and (iii) the access to on-line services and applications directed to nurture scientists and scholars (such as mobile access to ejournals, podcasts, web lectures, webinars, virtual conferences, mobile collaboration tools, m-Learning, etc).

Based on information extracted from the Web of Science (Thomson Reuters) database of scientific publications spanning from 1980 to 2009, the worldʼs scientific product ion has grown from about 400,000 to 1,200,000 publications in the last three decades. This increment of interest in science, together with the recent technological developments in mobile technologies, is making m-Science a completely new field of interest and research development. This book aims to engage the scientific community, engineers and scholars worldwide in the design, development and deployment of the newest mobile applications.

Our goal is to provide a broad overview of some of the common education challenges facing the developing world and the range of different technologies that are available to help address them. We look closely at the different enabling conditions that frequently shape the success or failure of technology interventions in education and derive a set of seven basic principles for effective technology use. These principles can provide guidance to decision-makers designing, implementing or investing in education initiatives. In doing so, we look both at the primary and secondary, as well as at the higher levels, of education systems.

Using the World Bank classification of low-income and lower-middle-income countries we focus our attention on the world’s poorest countries from Sub-Saharan Africa to South and West Asia to the Caribbean. We conclude ultimately that, if smartly and strategically deployed, modern information and communications technology holds great promise in helping bring quality learning to some of the world’s poorest and hardest-to-reach communities. The strategy for doing so need not emulate the trajectory of educational technology use in wealthier developed nations. Indeed, in some of the most remote regions of the globe, mobile phones and other forms of technology are being used in ways barely envisioned in the United States or Europe. Necessity is truly the mother of invention in these contexts and often leads to creative and promising ends for teachers and learners.

In this paper, we look at how the massive open online course (MOOC) format developed by connectivist researchers and enthusiasts can help analyze the complexity, emergence, and chaos at work in the field of education today. We do this through the prism of a MobiMOOC, a six-week course focusing on mLearning that ran from April to May 2011. MobiMOOC embraced the core MOOC components of self-organization, connectedness, openness, complexity, and the resulting chaos, and, as such, serves as an interesting paradigm for new educational orders that are currently emerging in the field. We discuss the nature of participation in MobiMOOC, the use of mobile technology and social media, and how these factors contributed to a chaotic learning environment with emerging phenomena. These emerging phenomena resulted in a transformative educational paradigm.

Mobile telephony has diffused more rapidly than any Indian technology in recent memory, yet systematic studies of its impact are rare, focusing on technological rather than social change. We employ network surveys of separate groups of Kerala residents in 2002 and again in 2007 to examine recent shifts in mobile usage patterns and social relationships.

Results show (1) near saturation of mobiles among both the professionals and nonprofessionals sampled, (2) a decrease in the number of social linkages across tie types and physical locations, and (3) a shift towards friends and family but away from work relationships in the core networks of Malayalis.

We interpret these findings as support for the bounded solidarity thesis of remote communication that emphasizes social insulation and network closure as mobiles shield individuals from their wider surroundings.

This report tackles ICT4D under three key headings: information, communication and participation. While not ignoring negatives, the report primarily explores, through the lens of Cambridge activities in ICT4D, the positive impacts and ongoing challenges of ICT4D: its ability to provide access to valuable information, to create meaningful two-way dialogues, to reach remote and excluded communities, and to empower the excluded to participate in their own development and societies.

There are still significant barriers preventing people in the Global South from accessing ICTs. But with the ongoing, rapid growth in mobile phone use and network connectivity across the world, the parameters are changing. We need to keep adapting to this environment in order to succeed. We must also ensure that the poorest and most disadvantaged are not left behind.

We have also seen challenges and progress that still need to be made in harnessing ICTs to achieve positive and lasting development outcomes. Technology can only ever be one ingredient in this process, but it can be a potent one. A key strength of ICT4D lies in the potential for participation, especially as technologies become more and more interactive.

This document presents the conclusions of the study “Leveraging ICT for the BoP” sponsored by AFD-Proparco, Ericsson, ICCO, France Telecom-Orange, and TNO and conducted by Hystra and Ashoka from October 2010 to June 2011.

This study aimed to learn from “what works” in terms of full projects (as opposed to technologies) combining both an economically viable model and socio-economic impacts on their end-users, in the field of ICT for development (ICT4D). This work is thus based on the screening of existing projects led by various types of actors (social entrepreneurs, NGOs, private companies…), in 4 sectors of “development” where ICT has already shown it could play a key role: healthcare, education, agriculture, and financial services. 15 of the most ground breaking market-based business models, with a proven scale and results on the ground showing that ICT can be a lever improving the living standards of the BoP, are analysed in depth in the report to support the main conclusions.

We explore the potential of using camera phones and pico projectors in rapid creation and presentation of digital content in a development context. A camera phone based content authoring application was designed and deployed with three different user populations in the domains of classroom education and health care.

Our findings show that despite the variations in education levels, cultural background, and technology exposure, users successfully created and presented different forms of digital content using the camera phone and pico projector.

The world is experiencing a major shift from an economy and society based on mass production to one based on knowledge creation. The book examines the range of educational experiences, practices, and issues and presents them in a way that can be used by decision makers crafting ICT policy in education. The book begins by considering the broader technological, economic, and social trends that have been sweeping the globe and moving toward an information economy and knowledge society. It examines the dramatic increase in capabilities and use of ICT and their related social and economic impact – positive and negative – in both developed and less developed nations.

The cases analysed in this publication are taken from different regions of the world – Africa, Arab region, Asia and Latin America – illustrating the global dimension of the changes that ICT bring to education systems and policies. The wide diversity offered by the selected countries - Jordan, Namibia, Rwanda, Singapore and Uruguay – in terms of economic and educational development, suggests that the issues at stake are not limited to a particular group of privileged countries. ICT can have a transformative effect on education regardless of the economic conditions, in very advanced school systems as well as in poorly resourced ones. The choice of the policy mix varies according to particular circumstances but the vision and the potential of ICT to transform education is universal. This is the key message that this publication attempts to articulate.

The dissemination and use of information and communications technologies (ICT) in schools has come to be seen by education policy-makers as a significant opportunity. They are attracted to the prospect that ICT can improve student achievement, improve access to schooling, increase efficiencies and reduce costs, enhance students’ ability to learn and promote their lifelong learning, and prepare them for a globally competitive workforce. As the power and capability of computers have increased, as they have become interconnected in a worldwide web of information and resources, as they provide a conduit for participation and interaction with other people, as they have become linked to other devices, and as their costs have come down, policy-makers, particularly those in developing countries, have come to see ICT as a viable, and even dramatic, way of responding to the multiple challenges that they face.

Once policy-makers consider making significant investments in ICT, a host of questions emerge: How many computers are needed in a school? Where should they be located? How should the network architecture be structured? How should the computers be distributed equitably? What additional resources are needed to support their use? What kind of training do teachers need to take advantage of these resources? How can they use them in their teaching? Are these uses effective? Are these even the right questions?

The position taken in this book is that while these questions represent important implementation issues, they are not the questions that should frame ICT policy. ICT can have a greater impact when the policies and programmes designed to implement them are crafted in the broader context of social and economic goals and when they are implemented in support of coordinated change of all the components of the education system, aligned to a vision of economic development and social progress – that is, when ICT policies and programmes support educational transformation.

Fueled by renewed enthusiasm about the potential of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) for development, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are implementing ambitious projects with mobile technology components in the developing world in a phenomenon commonly referred to as “Mobiles-for-development” or “M4D.”

A participatory approach that responds to the needs and realities of local communities is widely recognized as a necessary component of a successful M4D intervention. However, project failure-especially in sub-Saharan Africa- remains the norm, pointing towards the need for more thorough enumeration of best practices and more rigorous impact evaluation on the part of field-based practitioners. This thesis calls for greater attention to be given to the role of human capacity, which is a precondition for participation in M4D interventions but which also tends to be deficient in rural, poor communities. A greater focus on capacity would entail both assessing capacity- in terms of physical resources and human capabilities- at the local level and including capacity-building in project activities when necessary.

This study employs the human development and capabilities approach and the case study and participant observation methods to examine the efforts of the American NGO Tostan to integrate mobile technology into its non-formal education and empowerment program in rural Senegal. The findings of this study underscore the decisive role played by local capacity and intent and by effective, locally based intermediary organizations, conceptualized in this paper as grassroots support organizations (GSOs), that support the acquisition of the human capabilities needed to harness the empowering potential of mobile technology and other ICTs.

At the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000, world leaders adopted the Millennium Declaration, committing nations to a new global partnership to reduce extreme poverty and address pressing challenges of hunger, gender inequality, illiteracy, and disease. The year 2015 has been affirmed as the deadline for reaching these Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets.

The goal is to show how an integrated approach to community-level development can translate the international MDG agreements into ground-level breakthroughs throughout rural sub-Saharan Africa. Villages are located in deeply impoverished rural areas that were considered hunger hotspots—with at least 20% of children malnourished. Sites were selected to reflect a diversity of agro-ecological zones, representing a range of challenges to income, food production, disease ecology, infrastructure, and health system development.

The Millennium Villages Project is a ten-year initiative spanning two five-year phases. The first phase focuses on achieving quick wins, especially in staple crop production and disease control, and on establishing basic systems for integrated rural development that help communities escape the poverty trap and achieve the MDGs. The Project involves the coordinated community-led delivery of a locally tailored package of scientifically proven interventions for agriculture, education, health, and infrastructure. Over the first five-year phase, interventions are delivered at a modest cost, totaling approximately $120 per capita per year, of which MVP brings about half to complement funds from the host government, the local community, and other partners. The second five-year phase will focus more intensively on commercializing the gains in agriculture and continuing to improve local service delivery systems in a manner that best supports local scale-up.

The mobile learning toolkit is the result of research into mobile phone use and user needs within the African context, however it has been developed for use in all developing contexts. It is intended as a “trainer’s toolkit” that can help deliver a wide range of training activities both inside and outside of the classroom.

The mobile learning toolkit is an open source resource that can be used in the delivery of all kinds of training in any context. It has been designed to be as inclusive as possible, with most of the methods requiring only low end devices (basic mobile phones with voice calling and SMS capability). In this way the toolkit can be used to deliver interactive learning experiences to participants right to the Base of the Pyramid (BoP).

Within this brief an applied project was conducted in collaboration with the ILO in Geneva. The ILO is currently launching a worldwide training programme called my.coop (Managing Your Cooperative), which aims to teach contemporary principles of managing agricultural cooperatives to people in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The goal of this applied project was to identify mobile learning opportunities within the delivery of this training programme in the African context. The result is a mobile learning toolkit that contains an overview of mobile learning, 15 mobile learning methods and a selection of tools that can be used to facilitate these methods. Each method includes a general step-by-step guide plus a customisation to the my.coop training programme.

The mobile learning toolkit is an open source resource that can be used in the delivery of all kinds of training in any developing context. It has been designed to be as inclusive as possible, with most of the methods requiring only low end devices (basic mobile phones with voice calling and SMS capability). In this way the toolkit can be used to deliver interactive distance learning experiences to participants even at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP).

While researchers are often depicted as either ‘social scientists’ or ‘technologists’ often their educational and ideological backgrounds are much richer than the two simple terms might imply.

This paper describes the methodology and approach of a qualitative researcher with a computer science background in investigating how information technology changes communications and information management practices within the health ecosystem constitutued by a health subsidy program in southwest Uganda.

Deploying and evaluating a new technology is a major challenge in ICTD research. Introducing new technologies can be hampered by a lack of cultural insight, poor or delayed feedback, and limited evaluation procedures, among other factors. 

This short paper offers a model for introducing technology in developing regions that mitigates these factors. We call these steps the “Huzzah method,” inspired by a quotation that rightly derides technology that is introduced from afar and poorly evaluated.

The paper also includes selected portions from other work on Tangaza, whose design, implementation, and analysis followed the Huzzah method.