The world of educational technology is clearly a favorite subject of mine, particularly as it applies to developing contexts. We have seen an almost litany of attempts, some seemingly well-intentioned and others not so much, to avoid the dirty work of teacher training in favor of automation or some sort of teach by numbers approach (see any number of posts we have done on this). We have seen some naive approaches to student surveillance and lax approaches to protecting the data that emerges as a result. All of this is, more or less, an effect of neoliberal policy designed, overtly or not, to pull back or disinvest from commitments to the public sector at the national level, in favor of privatization or whatever the market will bear. In some communities, this means a repurposing of education towards a more market orientation. In other communities, particularly developing nations, this is a process a bit more fraught with danger.
Read MoreSteer clear of the bridge: Bridge International Academies in Kenya, neoliberalism, and lazy shortcuts to meaningful education
Returning to a favorite subject of mine, discussed here and here in past posts, is the ongoing Bridge Academy debacle throughout the continent, but particularly in Kenya, which has now turned legal.
“Lawyers for the for-profit chain secured a temporary court order preventing Wilson Sossion, General Secretary of the Kenyan National Union of Teachers (KNUT), and the union or its “agents,” from publicly criticizing Bridge “pending” a court hearing. Bridge accuses Sossion of putting a “malicious post on twitter about the institution.” Sosson accused Bridge of recruiting the “richest of the poor at great cost of those families.”
Read MoreCelebrating Two Major Panoply Digital Achievements: Doctor Doctor!
This is a special blog post to highlight that two members of the Panoply Digital team have recently achieved significant milestones. Co-Founders Michael Gallagher and Ronda Zelezny-Green are now officially PhD holders! They met before launching the consultancy since they shared Associate Professor Niall Winters (Oxford) as a supporting PhD supervisor on their different but related mobile learning PhD projects.
Read MoreTo monitor, evaluate, and communicate in Kathmandu: training on ICT for Women's Business Associations in Nepal
Panoply Digital is busy with developing a training curriculum for upcoming workshops for our partner the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) and their partner network afield. We are doing several such two-day training events in the upcoming months with the first one being Kathmandu, Nepal in a few weeks with subsequent trainings in Argentina, Kenya, Jordan, and more.
Read MoreIn Solidarity with the 21 January International Women's Marches
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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Measuring the Information Society Report 2016: IDI and Relevant Findings
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).
Read MoreWhat Panoply Digital is Reading: Bridge International vs. Kenyan Teachers; Ericsson Mobility Report, and Opera State of the Mobile Web in Africa
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.
Read MoreThe Latest Gender and Mobiles News: The Sharing Economy Meets M4D & The Digital Gender Audit
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.
Read MoreTracking, 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.”
Read MoreMobile takeaways from non-tech projects: from gers in Mongolia to migrants in Thailand
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.
Read MoreSITUATING MOBILE IN “THE JUNGLE”: THOUGHTS FROM MY 24 HOURS IN CALAIS (PART 2 of 2)
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.”
Read More3 great reasons to attend the ICT4D London Meetup on 31st May
Panoply Digital’s Lauren Dawes and Ronda Zelezny-Green are co-organisers of the London ICT4D group, which organizes regular events and ICT4D meetups for London’s ICT4D and digital development community. This month's event, held at the GSMA office on Tuesday 31st May, is a pretty special one - and we have three great reasons for you to attend.
Promoting advocacy with technology - a Center for International Private Enterprise initiative
In a previous blog, Michael wrote about the work we have been doing with the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) for almost a year now - developing a training programme to teach partners of CIPE’s network how to better communicate and carry out their advocacy efforts via the use of technology.
Read More"There's an app for that!"... Or When UNESCO Jumped the Shark with Freedom of Expression Advocacy
As a student and practitioner of the capability approach, one of the first things that I read towards my PhD on the topic of gender and mobile learning was an article by Ingrid Robeyns titled Three Models of Education: Rights, Capabilities and Human Capital.
Read MoreOpen Learning Campus: Theory + Pragmatism
Revisiting the world of education ahead of some workshops we are doing in Nigeria and Cambodia where we discuss using open learning as a professional development strategy, (along with some modules on secure communication, online research, and developing an online presence), I wanted to highlight an organization that has done some good work in this area.
Read More5 ways to include women in a mobile-enabled energy solution
One of the best things about working on M&E for mobile and ICT programmes is the way you get to work across many different sectors – while I am, like the rest of the wonderful Panoply Digital team, an mEducation specialist by training, I’ve been lucky enough to work across mHealth, mEducation, mAgri and mobile money, to name a few, getting to learn about these different areas and understand the mobile for development sector from a more holistic viewpoint.
Read MoreThe World Bank's Digital Dividends
Almost 8 years ago I started working at the GSMA’s ‘Development Fund’, better known nowadays as Mobile for Development. We were a modest team at the time with only five of us based in the GSMA’s Kingsway office (affectionately known as Mumbai due to its lack of air-conditioning) although quickly grew to many more.
Read MoremHealth: Global Projects, Software & Critical Perspectives - An ICT4D Meetup
This Meetup is co-hosted by Ronda Zelezny-Green and Lauren Dawes of Panoply Digital, along with Chisenga Muyoya and Chris Foote. Occasionally, we will include additional event information on this site to make the e-invites more concise. We hope you will come out to the ICT4D Meetup to be hosted at the GSMA HQ in London on Tuesday 26 January from 6:30pm.
Read MoreData Collection, Communication, and Campaigning Tools: Logic and Antecedents
This post is inspired an upcoming workshop we are running in Washington, D.C., along with additional installments in Phnom Penh, Lagos, and Caracas in the coming months. All of these workshops revolve around the use of free or inexpensive tools and technologies that can be used to conduct research, communicate that research efficiently, and develop advocacy campaigns as a result of that research.
Read MoreHappy New Year and a few things I'm watching in 2016!
Happy New Year one and all! I thought I would kick off the year with my ‘3 Things I’ll be watching in 2016’. Note – these are my things to watch! I’m not necessarily claiming them as new trends to watch (some more than a lot of coverage over the past years) but more what has piqued my interest recently and where I am seeing momentum gathering.
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