News

April 28, 2011

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 26, 2011

This Friday, April 29th, join Fernando Baron, Ricardo Gomez, and Brittany Fiore-Sifvast for a coding pizza party. Help code a slew research papers on information and communication technologies for development, as part of an ongoing iSchool study — ICTD Narratives Study, 2000-2010 — that explores a decade of ICTD discourse. Results may be presented at the ICTD2012 conference next in Atlanta.

April 25, 2011

In this TASCHA Talk, Chris Coward and Melody Clark will reflect on their experiences at the Santiago Forum. You will hear two different perspectives. Chris attended the first two forums and has been a longtime follower of telecenters through his research. Melody comes from the library field and for her this was her first encounter with the telecenter community. The “talk” will begin with opening thoughts from Chris and Melody, to be followed by discussion.

April 19, 2011

Two TASCHA researchers, Ricardo Gomez and Elizabeth Gould, received a Literati Network for Excellence “Outstanding Paper” award for The cool factor of public access to ICT: users perceptions of trust in libraries, telecenters, and cybercafés in developing countries.

April 18, 2011

Adding to Melody and Maria’s update on our crisis informatics project in Chile, I wanted to share this newspaper clip from La Prensa, the local newspaper for the Maule region. The article highlights our local partner, ATACH, and provides a nice overview of the project, how the research will be conducted, and why it matters.

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 […]

April 11, 2011

As part of our TASCHA Talk series, George Sciadas will bring us on a guided tour of information society statistics and analysis. George will describe, synoptically, the evolution of quantitative research in ICTs from the early days and the preoccupation with access through major milestones such as the digital divide, e-commerce and the ICT sector, to its present state of affairs internationally. This domain provides the common ground for multi-disciplinary research including the quest for “impacts.”