News: Blog

October 4, 2011

Innovation hubs and co-working spaces are flourishing. Community technology centers and libraries can ride this trend. Physical space offers important, often overlooked, value for people coming together around technology.

September 25, 2011

Despite the title, Tufte’s keynote for the Tech@State event on data visualization was the same that he gave at a one-day workshop I attended in 1999. It was a brilliant talk then, and it’s still good now. It could have been better if Tufte addressed implementation. The how. The practice of creating good infographics for decisionmakers.

September 23, 2011

A few snippets from the “Mobile Technology and New Media: Trends and Opportunities” panel at the September 23 Tech@State event. No analysis. Just stuff I wanted to remember.

July 12, 2011

Last month I attended a conference on Youth, Partnerships, Employability: From Innovation to Scale, hosted by the International Youth Foundation. I moderated a session on “The role of technology in helping youth at risk gain access to information, skills and resources.” This session centered on a presentation by Javier Lasida who had conducted an evaluation […]

April 28, 2011

Over the past few months, the survey analysis working group of the Global Impact Study has been planning for and implementing the user and venue survey data analysis. This working group, comprised of Mike Crandall, Chris Rothschild, George Sciadas, and Araba Sey, is working with the University of Washington’s Center for Statistical Consulting in the data analysis phase of the study. The Center for Statistical Consulting is helping to run the data, as well as advising the working group on options for statistical analyses.

April 18-21, 2011 was very busy and productive for us here at the Global Impact Study. We held two workshops – one on survey data analysis and one on our project-wide data integration plan. During the survey data analysis workshop, we reviewed initial user survey data to identify three high-level reports that we will produce this spring: a user profile report, a report on services offered at public access ICT venues and how people are using them, and a report on perceived impacts of using public access ICT.

The 3rd Global Forum on Telecentres was held 5-7 April, 2011 in Santiago Chile.  After having been to the first two events (WSIS Tunis in 2005 and GK3 Kuala Lumpur 2007) there was both a continuation of some topics (sustainability anyone?), and some new ones (employability, climate change, indigenous peoples).  Unfortunately, from my perspective, the […]

April 18, 2011

Man under a tree, a photo by jschinker on Flickr.
Spent some time scanning Flickr today for images with Creative Commons licensing that relate to our work. Some of these images possess visual elements that I like, in others the “content” i…

In my last post I contrasted training (as technical proficiency) with education (as creative, critical thinking) in the context of a Krugman column which argued that middle class jobs are being hollowed out by technology progress which eliminates jobs that can be routinized, including legal and health analysis, which were thought to have required too […]

At TASCHA, we talk a lot about computer skills training: how to operate a mouse, surf the Internet, save a document to enhance digital literacy among community members for the purpose of promoting social and economic development and inclusive communities. Because our work has focused on economically poor people (a contested term of course–feel free to […]