Following the still hard to fathom inauguration of President Trump on the 20th January 2017, Panoply Digital was inspired to see the international solidarity of people in the women’s marches that unfolded as a resulting protest. We hope we as a worldwide community can translate these marches into political, social, and legal apparatuses that ensure we don’t have the need to do this again in subsequent generations - despite history indicating we will. At the very least, we are thrilled at the prospect of these marchers leading the fight against injustice; these are the people we want out front. Panoply Digital stands in support, and wishes to make a brief statement about what these events mean to us.
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Well just when you thought 2017 had gone morally bankrupt, ICT4D is here to save your soul with a bit of #ICTDEthics! Our latest Meetup has all the trappings of a development worker's new year resolutions, with a bit of an academic twist.
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Developing capacity and expertise isn’t always about doing; reading and research need to be a part of the equation. I outlined a few of the reports we were reading in a previous post. Recently I was reviewing the Measuring the Information Society Report 2016 from ITU (ITU is the United Nations specialized agency for ICTs).
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As we approach the end of the year, we at Panoply Digital are working our projects and spending some time in research, reading, and reflection. In the interests of sharing, I wanted to share the reading and research part as it affects many of us working in international education and ICT4D.
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This month's London ICT4D meet up is looking at M&E for ICT4D - how to do it, how not to do it, and how to use ICTs for M&E. We're got 3 great reasons on why you should attend!
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This past week, I’ve been in Nairobi for workshops with the GSMA Mobile for Development Utilities team and their grantees. And thinking about M&E, lean data, and the use of technology to collect data - and ensuring women are included in that.
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Picking up where I left off in a previous blog post on learn to code initiatives, today we have a few more entries into the rather large field. Yet these aren’t initiatives focusing on learning to code as an end in itself, but rather as building capacity for actually doing something. Before diving in, we need to be critical about learning to code initiatives. We need to know how they empower (or not) teachers, how they teach (or not) critical thinking skills, how they prepare (or not) students for an undefined future. Coding is great but I don’t see it as an end to itself. And these initiatives seem to agree with me.
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I’ve long been a big fan of the great work Souktel do and the latest offering from them only validates that further. At the recent MERLTech conference, Souktel introduced their latest release – a new suite of integrated messaging apps
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For the past five years or so, Panoply Digital co-Founder/Director Alex Tyers and I have been producing the Gender and Mobiles newsletter. It started out initially as the Gender and Mobile Learning newsletter but we quickly found that there was not enough content being written in that area to fill our coffers. This evolution benefited us and our readership greatly as we have been able to highlight a wider range of fascinating stories that illustrate the increasingly complex relationships between women, men, girls, boys and mobile phones.
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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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In July 2016 and on behalf of the GSMA (the corporate hat I wear!), I traveled to Myanmar with my friend and colleague Ramat Tejani for the first time. We were there to conduct a mobile telecoms policy training workshop with Myanmar government, private sector and multiple civil society stakeholders. However, before the work began, we took a mini-vacation and I saw a few potential opportunities for digital development in this relatively recently opened country.
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In this post, I wanted to highlight a few projects in development, some foregrounding and some backgrounding technology, in the Asia Pacific region and discuss some takeaways from these projects that are applicable to almost all development projects. If you are looking for projects in the Asia Pacific region, I generally recommend some of the content being generated by the UNESCO Asia and Pacific Regional Bureau for Education office out of Bangkok, particularly the ICT in Education group, as they give a good snapshot of activity in the region. So much so that the projects I am discussing here are taken directly from their newsletter.
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Here at Panoply Digital, it’s been a busy few months with lots of exciting work happening all over the world. As for me, this summer I’ve been busy doing user testing for an IVR-based edutainment service for adolescent girls in Bangladesh, working with Praekelt Foundation and BRAC. I wrote a blog post a year or so ago about user testing a mobile product with women, and I thought it might be time for a quick update, based on what I’ve experienced this time around.
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Last week, I was in Lusaka hosting user feedback workshops for Praekelt’s TuneMe service. TuneMe is a mobi-site targeted at youths and not only provides sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) information, but speaks to them in a relatable and personal way, moving beyond the clinical and avoiding any patronising 'do this, don't do that’ tones.
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The tragedy of what is occurring in Calais can be read in various media outlets online, so I will not take time here to rehash the details. What I will do in the second and last of a two post series is highlight some of the opportunities for mobile that I saw while volunteering. In my first post, I focused on my experience working in the donation processing warehouse in support of the refugees. In this second post, I will share the power and potential of mobile for refugees based on my visit to “The Jungle.”
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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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In April 2013, the Uhuru Kenyatta government, also referred to as the Jubilee Coalition, announced plans to realize a campaign promise to provide every Kenyan child with a solar laptop. The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) promise was initially met with “jubilation.” Yet, by the time the Uhuru government marked 100 days in office, a growing chorus of condemnation directed at the initiative had emerged in the blogosphere, and in online and print newspapers. Fast forward three years and multiple failed tenders later and the laptops have been turned into tablets and they have finally arrived after being manufactured in China. Hooray?!
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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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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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A rather belated post for the week but I just returned from the UK where I defended my thesis at University College London on mobile learning in higher education. In that defense, I was critiqued on a whole range of issues but one question that particularly stuck was how would I know (mobile) learning if I were to see it. What does it look like, particularly in a mobile context? How do we know it when we see it and how does it render differently in different regions? How do we design for it?
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