News

October 8, 2010

Joe and I are overhauling the Technology & Social Change Group website. I took a step back this week to think about what’s most important for this first version, and how we’re going to transfer over our existing content. I’ve dubbed TASCHA website 1.0 the “does-not-suck version” in order to keep us focused on the basics, pull together all of our content, and push discussions about feature requests to the point in time where we have something up that works and something concrete to react to.

October 7, 2010

This past summer, Mike Best, the Principal Investigator of the Collaborative Knowledge Sharing in-depth study, presented a paper at the 19th annual Asia Media Information and Communication Centre (AMIC) conference in Singapore. The paper, written on preliminary findings from Mike’s in-depth study, Connecting in Real Space: How People Share Knowledge and Technologies in Cybercafés, was very well-received and prompted vigorous discussion with conference attendees, earning “best paper of the session” accolades.

October 2, 2010

TASCHA Talk: Melody Clark will discuss her experience as a graduate research assistant at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Libraries program. In addition to talking about her personal experience, Melody will also provide an overview of the goals and priorities of the Global Libraries program, as well as some challenges they face working in developing countries. She will also introduce some interesting questions for discussion related to public libraries and technology use in developing countries, and how these questions could offer possibilities for future research.

September 29, 2010

Research teams in Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, and the Philippines have recently begun implementation of the user and venue surveys. A total of approximately 1000 public users and 250 operators of public access ICTs will be surveyed across approximately 250 randomly selected public access locations throughout each country.

Most low-cost, easily implementable ICTD innovations are designed for developing-country contexts. Examples include mobile money, SMS (e.g. Ushahidi, Frontline SMS), and e-skills training programs. This interactive session focuses on the factors that facilitate or mitigate the transfer of these innovations to communities facing economic and social challenges in richer countries.

September 23, 2010

The research team for the Non-Instrumental Use study began pilot testing of survey instruments in Brazil on September 16. Throughout the trip so far, the researchers have had the opportunity to explore different public access venues and identify possible challenges they may encounter in the study’s implementation.

September 21, 2010

Public access venues provide an arena for people to connect with their friends and family. Given that more than 9% of the population in the Philippines (over 8 million Filipinos) are working abroad, this in-depth study will explore how public access venues in the Philippines are used by families left behind by Filipinos working overseas.

September 16, 2010

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, gathering resources, printing out stuff to read. Waiting for the right time to pull it all together into a tidy package. Well forget it. Instead I’m going to dribble it out bit by bit.

September 10, 2010

The Global Impact Study is excited to announce the release of our public access ICT venue database. Utilizing the inventory data collected in Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Lithuania, and the Philippines, the web database offers multiple search options, three different visualizations of the data, and is part of the Global Impact Study’s commitment to open research.

August 29, 2010

TASCHA research seminars offer students an opportunity to gain practical research experience with one of our many projects investigating the design, use, and impact of information and communication technologies in communities facing social and economic challenges.