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Delivering a Library of Books with Every E-Reader: How Worldreader is Improving Literacy in Africa

Worldreader, a market-oriented, not-for-profit NGO, is making subsidized e-readers available in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and already seeing improvements in literacy rates. That’s just one of the many positive results that Dr. Jonathan Wareham, a member of Worldreader’s board of directors and Vice Dean and professor of Information Systems at ESADE – Ramon Llull University in Barcelona, Spain, discussed last week during a presentation at the World Bank headquarters here in Washington, DC.

Dr. Wareham and others at Worldreader are concerned about the growing book famine in Africa. According to a World Bank study conducted in 19 sub-Saharan African countries, only one of those countries, Botswana, “had anything close to adequate book provision in schools”. Using e-reader technology which can hold more books than most school libraries have in such countries — and with no added distribution costs — Worldreader has launched several pilot studies in schools in Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda. As of now, over 75,000 e-books have been distributed wirelessly to over 750 students.

The pilot study in Ghana, called iREAD, which received financial and research support from USAID, compared the rise in literacy rates over the course of one year for three groups of students: a group given e-readers without training on how to use the devices, another that was given out-of-classroom pedagogical interventions, and a control group without e-readers. Literacy scores for students with e-readers and no training improved 12.9% vs 8.1% of the control group, and students with e-readers and additional training improved 15.7% vs 8.1% of the control group.

Results from the study have proven the efficacy of the technology with the programs to support it and Worldreader plans to expand the Uganda initiative by doubling the number of students with e-readers within the next year. Besides improving student literacy scores, the project team also expects to see improvements in adult literacy rates since many of the students share the devices with their families and communities.

Unlike device-based projects such as the One Laptop Per Child program, Worldreader doesn’t produce its own e-reader — so far, it only distributes Amazon’s Kindle. Dr. Wareham describes Worldreader as device agnostic. “There’s no real need to be publicly aligned with either Apple, or with Amazon, or with Android — it doesn’t matter. What matters is bringing literature into the classrooms and as the devices converge and the prices drop, there will be more options to choose from.”

Also unlike most device-based projects, Worldreader invests manpower and on-the-ground support to ensure project sustainability. With the approval and support of government officials and the Ministry of Education in each country, the project so far works with teachers, students, and community leaders to provide training on how to use the the devices and make certain that the technology is fully understood and valued. Though high breakage rates and incidents of theft remain a concern for project implementation, Worldreader believes that providing more training on how to care for the devices, building relationships within each community to promote the device’s educational value, and discouraging theft will help to lower these rates.

Worldreader is looking to build on the success of the pilot studies by partnering with other organizations to expand to an estimated total of 10 projects in 2012. Dr. Wareham said that scaling remains to be a major challenge for the project but plans are underway to provide organizations with what he termed “Worldreader-in-a-box” — kits that will enable training programs to be developed where Worldreader project implementers are not able to go. In addition, the organization is working to expand an ePub platform that allows local authors’ works to be published and accessed on e-readers, creating opportunities for local authors and offering literary works that can help to foster national identity.

February 28, 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

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Women in Development

Girls in ICT Portal: ITU Inspires Next Generation of Women

Pictures of leading women in information communication technology (ICT) from around the world scroll across the main page of the UN International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) new Girls in ICT Portal, launched just last month. Profiles like Sara Adams, Senior Software Editor at Google Germany, are accompanied by inspirational stories of each woman’s entry into the largely male-dominated field, just one of several ways the website aims to inspire a new generation of girls to explore career opportunities in ICT.

ITU, the United Nations specialized agency for ICT, created the new portal as part of it’s new 3-year campaign, “Technology Needs Girls”. Susan Schorr, Head of the Special Initiatives Division at ITU, discussed the vital role that successful women in ICT can play during a brief presentation at the World Radiocommunication Conference 2012, currently being held in Geneva.

“It’s very important for women and girls to have role models,” Schorr said. “We have already over 20 profiles of women spanning the globe from practically every region around the world and representing all kinds of ICT career paths because our message is that a career in the ICT sector can take many different forms.”

The Girls in ICT Portal also features an ICT studies and careers database. Users can search over 400 programs including scholarships, contest and awards, trainings and internships, online networks, tech camps, and Girls in ICT Day activities, even refining the search by geographical region. Because the portal is targeted towards young women from around the world, the website can also be read in Arabic, Spanish, French, and Russian.

In addition, a number of studies and white papers surrounding the prevalence of women in ICT can be found in the Trends, Analysis, and Profiles section of the website. Over 100 regional and private sector organizations active in the ICT sector are also featured which include a link and brief description of each.

Along with the web portal, ITU is planning to promote the new “Technology Needs Girls” campaign through two major events: An advocacy event in New York on International Girls in ICT Day, April 26, and the World Telecommunication and Information Society Day 2012 (WTISD): “Women and Girls in ICT”. Aiming to raise awareness to the possible uses of ICT in bridging the digital divide, these two events will focus on encouraging young women, educators, and the industry itself to promote education and careers paths in ICT for girls.

“Technology can help people,” said Doreen Bogden, ITU’s Chief of Strategic Planning and Membership at the World Radiocommunication Conference. “What we find is that girls often pursue careers where they think they can make a difference [by] becoming a doctor, becoming a teacher. We believe the same is true for ICT. It can make a difference, it can change people’s lives, and it can empower people.”

February 16, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

One Tablet Per Child: Walter Bender Discusses Future of OLPC

While listening to Walter Bender, founder and executive director of Sugar Labs, speak last week at USAID’s Mobiles for Education (mEducation) Monthly Seminar Series in Washington, DC, it was difficult to decide if he was more interested in discussing the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)program’s new XO 3.0 tablet, or the educational philosophy that has spurred its development.

By the end of his presentation, however, it was clear that both are inherent to launching an effective and sustainable program utilizing the new technology. As former co-founder of OLPC, Mr. Bender now focuses his time and energy on developing and improving Sugar, an open source desktop environment which promotes learning through connectivity, collaboration, and what Mr. Bender calls “off the grid accessibility”, the ability to take the computers into virtually any learning environment.

And the new tablet promises to do just that. Upon first look, the tablet doesn’t seem much different from the original laptop besides being thinner since there’s no keyboard. The lack of keyboard is a feature that Mr. Bender seemed torn about saying that keyboards are needed for developing writing skills but that the device should evolve with the introduction of new technologies, tablets being the big new innovation in mobile computers.

The easily recognizable bright green and white rugged exterior is still present but now the 8-inch screen is protected by a green silicone cover. The child-friendly tablet was designed with the same consideration for durability, cost, and conservation of power that has made the OLPC program so well known, but now it features solar panels on the inside of the cover to power it in addition to the power adapter and hand-crank powered battery from the previous laptop.

Of course, the education-specific user interface of Sugar still remains and can be baffling to anyone not already familiar with it’s icons, a wide array of small visual representations of each activity that doesn’t resemble Microsoft’s or Apple’s familiar icons. But in Sugar’s design lies Mr. Bender’s philosophy and aim: a simplicity so intuitive that children can understand it as well as modify it and create new programs for their own use.

As exciting as the introduction of the new tablet was for the small group of attendees at the seminar, Sugar was the focus of the discussion and one that Mr. Bender talked passionately about. Designed on OLPC’s principle of “Low floor, no ceiling”, it’s designed for inexperienced users, providing a platform, or low floor, on which to explore, create, and collaborate without any limits to its possibilities.

Exploration is key to Mr. Bender’s philosophy. Designing Sugar and the computers from a “constructivist” perspective, he referred to Swiss developmental psychologist, Jean Paiget, and his learning theory of “learning by doing” when discussing the intuitiveness of the system. “We want to raise a generation of independent thinkers and problem solvers, “ he said after displaying a picture of students taking apart and fixing one of OLPC’s laptops. “Every deployment has students who repair computers and they are designed so that students can fix them themselves.”

Already deployed in over 30 countries, the largest and most well known example is Uruguay with the largest saturation of one laptop per each of 395,000 children in primary school from grades 1-6. Now in its third year, Mr. Bender highlighted a few examples of how kids are becoming empowered through the technology and developing their own programs. Kids like 12 year old Augustine who created his own program called Simple Graph, one that creates just that. Mr. Bender said that innovations like this are examples of how students are becoming self-sufficient. “These are key indicators that something different is happening, something good.”

Walter Bender giving an example of how to create your own program

Photo Credit: Chrissy Kulenguski

But this portfolio assessment, one that emphasizes qualitative over quantitative results and what Mr. Bender calls a powerful and primary assessment tool, is one of several points for criticism of the OLPC program. Others include not providing enough, or any, teacher training and support when introducing the laptops and not being able to meet the original goal price of $100 per laptop that was set when the program first started.

More recently, a new low-cost competitor, the Aakash tablet, has entered this developing market. The Android-based computer has gained a lot of attention since it was first developed by the Indian government as part of the country’s aim to connect 25,000 colleges and 400 universities in an e-learning program and made available at subsidized prices. In accordance with OLPC’s open source philosophy, chairman Nicholas Negroponte already offered full access to OLPC technology at no cost to the Indian team of developers.

Sharing ideas and new innovations is also one of Mr. Bender’s learning goals for the OLPC program: to have students learn through “doing, reflecting, and collaboration”. He believes that the new XO 3.0 tablet has a prominent role in the emerging market of mobile computers for education. Though what that role will be exactly in the coming years of new innovations and innovators, has yet to be seen.

February 15, 2012/by actualize

Mobile Money, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Mobile money technology: not easy, but why?

Close up of mobile phone with "Send Money" as the option displayed on the screen In recent months, unflattering headlines in response to technology related challenges. When the technology platforms through which mobile money services are delivered experience downtime, customers are unable to transact and agents are unable to earn a living. Understandably, both quickly become distressed. Recent headlines have brought attention to this problem, but to be clear, it’s neither new, nor limited in scope to a couple of deployments: for years, the world has read about M-PESA’s downtime in Kenyaon Twitter, and countless other services have faced similar challenges to varying degrees that, because they are smaller, haven’t attracted the same headlines.

Why is it so difficult to install and operate a reliable mobile money technology platform? This is not a question that can be answered in a blog post, but I’d like to highlight some key issues and invite readers to contribute in the comments.

Throughput and reliability
To begin, it’s worth clarifying the complexity of the problem at hand. A mobile money technology platform must meet the performance objectives of disparate industries: telecom systems that are optimised for throughput, and financial systems that are optimised for reliability. So “mobile” suggests throughput, and “money’ suggests reliability: operating a platform that delivers both is anything but straightforward.

Customization
In many cases, operators have a specific set of business requirements and aren’t willing to settle for a vendor’s off-the-shelf platform: they want a customized solution. Vendors that routinely concede to operators’ requests for customization are left with the daunting task of managing multiple versions of their platform. To put this in context, imagine every one of Visa’s member banks demanded a solution that would allow them to implement a unique purchase process and feature-set: it would be chaos. Mobile money technology vendors who find themselves in this situation, albeit at a much smaller scale, are faced with a difficult task – and it’s often compounded by their scarcity of resources.

Planning for the peak is costly
Some of the technology challenges faced by operators today have their roots in decisions made years ago, before it was clear what scale mobile money might achieve. In one prominent case, a software application and system configuration that was designed for a limited pilot made a rapid pivot and was rolled out nationwide. Inevitably, there were scale issues.

But even with time to plan, coping with scale is tough. Operators must anticipate the peak transaction volume their platform must be capable of processing (this is significantly different from a monthly transaction forecast) and design, invest, and manage accordingly. To be clear: this is expensive, and if scale is never actually achieved (remember that for most mobile operators, mobile money is still a much more speculative play than their core business), investment will have been wasted.

Dependencies
No money platform operates entirely in isolation. Every platform has dependencies, and this can cause reliability issues. As an example, if a mobile operator’s SMSC has insufficient capacity at a given second, messages cannot be delivered and transactions cannot be completed.

People

Finally, it’s worth noting that technology is ultimately administered by people (at minimum, people still get to control the on/off switch!) We’ve written at length about the challenges of attempting to scale with a small team, and these challenges are equally relevant when it comes to technology: small problems are multiplied when operators do not have a skilled and experienced hand to liaise with vendors in case of an issue.

February 14, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Open Education 101: Changing What You Know and How You Know It

If new developments in information communications technologies (ICT) are the bridge for the digital divide, what is the content — and, more importantly, the quality of it — that is going to be delivered?

This question, at the heart of developing any ICT4Education program, seemed more relevant and crucial yesterday while listening to US Under Secretary of Education, Martha Kanter, give her keynote speech at the Open Source Higher Education event at the Center for American Progress here in Washington, DC.

Kanter clearly understands the potential value and opportunities for open educational resources (OER) as well as the government’s role in facilitating and monitoring their use. A long standing advocate for open education and government policies to make it sustainable, she and a panel of experts from several universities and OER interest groups discussed how these resources can impact the affordability and access to education in the US.

Giving a brief description of the current OER field, External Relations Director at MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), Steve Carson, used The Hewlett Foundation’s definition of OER as “high-quality, openly licensed, online educational materials that offer an extraordinary opportunity for people everywhere to share, use, and reuse knowledge.” MIT’s OCW Consortium, a community of over 250 universities that offers roughly 17,000 courses in 20 languages, is just one of several examples of how institutions and education professionals are using this technology to build networks and pool information and resources that can be continually reviewed and revised, essential to setting high standards for the quality of the materials.

But how are OER programs and policies affecting the developing world? Sally Johnstone, Vice President for Academic Advancement at Western Governors University, spoke about a few exciting new initiatives such as the UNESCO/Commonwealth of Learning (COL) Guidelines on Open Educational Resources (OER) in Higher Education, a new framework for using OER in appropriate ways. UNESCO has also created an OER Wiki allowing the global OER community to share and collaborate on developing new resources, as well as an innovative OER Platform for sharing resources between teachers, learners, and education professionals.

In addition, Johnstone mentioned OER Africa, an revolutionary initiative and first of it’s kind in the region which was established by the South African Institute for Distance Education (SAIDE). Focusing on agriculture, health education, foundation courses, and teacher education, the program supports and develops digital materials to increase equitable and meaningful access to knowledge, skills and learning across the African continent.

It was clear by the end of the panelist’s discussion that open education is changing the way that classes and textbooks are being developed and accessed in America. However, some issues still need to be addressed such as creating standard quality evaluation techniques and developing policies for a sustainable market. The US government has already taken a step in this direction when the Department of Labor and the Department of Education created an education fund in January 2011 that would grant $2 billion to create OER materials for career training programs in community colleges.

Perhaps with more government initiatives such as this, as well as guidelines that encompass both OER and ICT technologies, open education will create more networks and cross more borders to make education accessible on a global scale. When discussing the government’s role in open education, Under Secretary Kanter quoted president Obama from a speech he gave at Macomb Community College in Michigan in 2009. “Even as we repair brick and mortar buildings, we have an opportunity to build a new virtual infrastructure to complement the education and training community colleges can offer. We’ll support the creation of a new online – and open-source – clearinghouse of courses so that community colleges across the country can offer more classes without building more classrooms.”

February 9, 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

Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Mobile Learning Week: Paving the Way for Policy Development

Nearly 200 mobile technology experts and international education leaders met at the first annual UNESCO Mobile Learning Week last month, December 12-16, at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris. This was the first such UNESCO meeting in which mobile technology took center stage.

Ministry of Educations’ officials, along with other experts from the fields of mobile technology and education, discussed the potential uses and benefits of mobile technology within the field of education in developing countries which has been informally debated and discussed the world over, the technology’s limited accessibility often hindering sustainable policy-changing actions. The meeting was prompted in part because of the growing access to mobile networks now available to 90% of the world’s population and 80% of the population living in rural areas, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in its “The World in 2010” report.

These figures have certainly gained the attention of top-policy makers. Discussions on how to use mobile technologies to transform educational processes will contribute to the anticipated Guidelines on Mobile Learning Policy which is currently being developed by UNESCO and due to be released in 2012. The guidelines will help to develop the future of mobile learning beyond the UNESCO global movement of Education For All (EFA) goals.

The weeklong meeting was split into two events. Leading officials in the ICT field gathered for the International Experts Meeting on Mobile Learning which was limited to selected attendees. Following the meeting, representatives from Nokia, Pearson Foundation, SK Telecom, ISTE, iLearn4Free, ICTP, Microsoft, Commonwealth of Learning, Alcatel-Lucent, Orange, Intel, Ericsson, KERIS and the Mobiles for Education (mEducation) Alliance showcased recent developments in mobile technologies and projects on mobile learning from the field during the UNESCO Symposium on Mobile Learning.

Several keynote speakers at the symposium identified and discussed major challenges to implementing policies and innovative ideas for creating sustainable solutions. Stephane Boyera, Lead Program Manager of the World Wide Web Foundation, stressed the importance of considering the sustainability, scalability, and replicability of mobile learning initiatives during his presentation, “Mobile Technologies, Education and Socio-Economic Development”. He indicated that the main obstacles to development are directly linked to policy makers’ understanding of specific cultural needs.

Dr. Paul Kim, Chief Technology Officer and Assistant Dean for Stanford University School of Education, spoke about the contextualized innovations in education and mobile empowerment design in his presentation, “Future Trends in Mobile Technology Development: What Can We Expect in the Next 5, 10, and 15 Years?”

The event achieved UNESCO’s goal of promoting the potential contribution of mobile technology to education and promises to lead to positive changes in policy development. Working papers that were developed during the event are due to be released sometime in early 2012.

January 18, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Energy, Environment, Environment, Environmental Compliance, Natural Resources Management, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Pollution Prevention

Join the World’s First Social Energy Marketplace Today!

At a recently ended Web 2.0 Summit held in San Francisco California, a Berlin-based startup called Changers announced the release of a portable solar charging system that aims to reduce global warming by shifting society to the use of a currency backed by the sun. The Changers Solar System gives the user a way to harness the sun’s energy, liberates the user from the grid, recharges all kinds of devices, helps the user to socialize his/her energy production, and enables him/her to compete with others to earn Changers Credits that can be spent in the Changers Marketplace.

The Changers Starter Kit which is open for a pre-order beginning now as you read this piece, includes the revolutionary Changers Kalhuohfummi solar battery and the Changers Maroshi solar module and costs $149. The Changers Kalhuohfummi is a simple, one-button device that communicates with Changers.com. Inside is advanced intelligence that accurately measures how much energy it captures and stores in the built-in battery, ready to charge any smartphone or tablet. The Changers Kalhuohfummi solar battery is powered by the Changers Maroshi flexible solar module, which generates up to four Watts per hour — enough to charge the Kalhuohfummi battery in four hours. The Changers Maroshi solar panel, which is produced in Colorado, USA, can be attached to any window or sunny surface.

The Director of Communications, Hans Raffauf explains how the technology works:

http://youtu.be/Ee9WW2J8FdE

The system helps you to:

Capture the Sun: Produce your own energy. The Changers personal solar charging kit enables any of us to produce and consume renewable energy. Now, anyone can start producing energy and know exactly how much CO2 they’ve saved. Find a sunny spot, plug it in, and start harnessing the natural energy of the sun. Pretty soon, you’ll be much more aware of where you get the best sunlight and how to optimize your energy production and consumption.
Charge your Device: Change your thinking. Plug in your Apple iPhone/iPad/iPod, Android, Kindle (or any of 1,000 other devices) and charge it using the energy you captured. The Changers Kalhuohfummi will recharge your device as fast as a regular charger and radically change the way you think about energy. Now, you’re a Changer – an autonomous producer and consumer of your own renewable energy.
Become Part of a Movement: Tell the world. Upload your energy production statistics to the Changers community to visualize your actual CO2 savings. See how much energy you’ve produced and compare your score with others. Share your experience and contribution via Facebook and Twitter. Your pioneering actions will inspire others to follow.
Get Rewarded: Turn your green behavior into Changers Credits. The amount of energy you produce is automatically converted into Changers Credits, which can be spent at retail partners on the Changers Marketplace who share your commitment to a greener planet.

To know more and become social with green energy use go to Changers

November 8, 2011/by actualize