News

March 29, 2011

TASCHA researchers, Maria Garrido and Beth Patin, visited Chile in February to participate in fieldwork for their study investigating the role of telecentres and public libraries in disaster management. The visit included focus groups with public access venue users and staff, interviews with government officials, and visits to telecentres and public libraries affected by the 2010 earthquake and tsunami. Maria, Beth, and their partners from ATACH made many interesting preliminary observations about how these public access venues adapted and responded to local community needs following the disaster.

March 28, 2011

Maria Garrido and Beth Patin visited Chile in February 2011 for the first week of a month of fieldwork for a TASCHA research project investigating the role of telecentres and public libraries in disaster management. During the visit, Maria and Beth worked with representatives from ATACH, TASCHA’s Chilean research partner, conducting three focus groups with…

If 10% of the people who come into a telecenter receive help with computers from the staff person, is that considered sufficient impact? I just returned from Chile with our infomediary research team and after visiting several telecenters, libraries and cybercafés I feel that the development field under-appreciates the benefits that come from the 10% […]

March 25, 2011

On March 3rd, Judith Yaaqoubi, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, discussed initial and revised instrument development for the Non-instrumental Uses in-depth study. Judith discussed the study’s background, as well as the structure of the study, the research questions that underlie it, and how they initially planned to collect data.

March 16, 2011

March madness is here and I have hoops on the brain. (Please excuse the gratuitous Husky hype: Cold Blooded.) Basketball is an incredible game. While it can be played alone, it is much better as a team. The social play is special. Boys & Girls Clubs have figured this out. Basketball and social play prominently […]

March 10, 2011

A research project focusing on community multimedia centres in Mozambique, RE-ACT, has adopted the Global Impact Study’s inventory data collection tools to build a list of public access ICT venues in the country. The project is led by Isabella Rega, who spent some time with TASCHA in September 2010 as a visiting scholar. Araba Sey recently visited some of the project’s researchers in Mozambique while doing field visits in Africa.

March 4, 2011

Global Impact Study research lead, Araba Sey, just spent one week in South Africa, to meet with the research team on the Mobile Internet in-depth study. During this visit, Araba had a chance to learn more about the public access to ICT landscape in South Africa, participate in research team meetings, and visit public access venues in both urban and non-urban areas of South Africa. Public access venues visited include cybercafes, public libraries, and schools.

February 22, 2011

On February 9, 2011, Global Impact Study Research Assistant, Michelle Fellows, presented a paper co-authored with Araba Sey at the 2011 iConference in Seattle, Washington. The paper, Loose Strands: Searching for Evidence of Public Access ICT on Development (pdf), uses a broad outcomes approach to review existing research on the impacts of public access to ICTs, including the extent to which public access ICTs are used and how they contribute to socio‐economic development.

February 18, 2011

TASCHA researchers Maria Garrido and Beth Patin are in Chile conducting crisis informatics research. Essentially they want to understand the role that community technology centers and libraries played in the aftermath of the Chilean earthquake/Tsunami. I haven’t been to the field with Maria in a while, but one of her great strengths as a researcher […]

February 15, 2011

TASCHA Talk: Drawing on his experiences in the academy, industry, and the philanthropic sector, Mohammed traces the trajectory of AnthroDesign from the intellectual adventure of a fledgling community of industry practitioners towards a key product-cycle domain as well as its re-absorption back into the academy as an area of study.