Tracking, Monitoring, Surveilling: Context Matters with ICT for Children in Asia

Reading a recent UNICEF post from Suman Khadka titled Star Wars: Force For Change supports digital monitoring systems in Cambodia, I found myself reflecting a bit on visibility in terms of tracking, monitoring, and surveillance. The project that Khadka describes involves “the technology for a digital tracking system which converts the paper-based method to an Inspection App. The app can complete the equivalent of a 20-page form — a process that previously took multiple days — in just one day.”

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Edtech and neoliberalism revisited: Bridge International Academies blowback in Uganda and Liberia

It seems like we had just written about Bridge International the other day and the dangers of locking whole educational systems into for-profit industries and their paint by number pedagogies and school in a box systems. And here we are again as Uganda’s education minister just announced that the government is closing 63 schools at sites operated by the Bridge International Academies (BIA) due to national standards being ignored and the “life and safety” of some 12,000 children were endangered because of poor hygiene and sanitation.” Yes, they do have educational standards (even a teacher training curriculum!) in Uganda and they are not for you to ignore, Bridge. I am looking for corroborating reports or further detail about what the poor hygiene and sanitation refers to, but I can’t imagine it is positive.

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A load of trash.......A brief look at e-waste

Recently I watched two non-ICT4D related, but fascinating documentaries: Cowspiracy – a film exposing the impact of humans’ consumption or animal products on the environment; and The True Cost – discusses the effects of fast fashion on the developing nations that the western world outsources production to. First of all, I would encourage anyone to watch the two films. As with all documentaries, they are not without bias, however, they present some interesting data and facts that are not often discussed or debated in mainstream media – and they should be. 

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Terrorism, Facebook and media ethics: 'do no harm’?

Regular readers of this blog site will know that the Panoply Digital team are no strangers to adding a touch of the personal to our blog post; we’re a small team who are friends as well as  colleagues, and our work will always have a human element because we work in a field we are passionate about and with people we care about. This particular blog post has a deeply human element, more so than other ones I’ve done; I’ve written in the past about my love for Bangladesh and my deep connections there, and so last month’s terror attack in Dhaka cut very deeply. My partner and I knew some of the victims personally;  others were friends, family and colleagues of people we know. It’s also been a month of trying to reconcile the Bangladesh I know and love with this new side of Bangladesh that I don’t recognise - and indeed, the vast majority of Bangladeshis don’t recognise either; everyone I have spoken to is deeply and profoundly shocked, to their very core. Without wanting to sound glib about such a terrible event, one of the things that I have been musing on in this past month is the role that social media, and particularly Facebook, played in the attack.

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