Monthly Archive for July, 2010

Living and teaching ICT in rural Tanzania and coping with fiberless internet speeds means some minor, but scholastically disappointing sacrifices on the contemporary internet.  It is the same internet: all the same material is out there, of course, but if it is flash or video based, it is often not worth the load time. YouTube videos require twenty minutes of preparation to provide a minute of tutorial enlightenment.

It would have been deflatingly tricky to tap some of the Gapminder resources in discussions with teacher friends or students. This, even though it features charts that can elucidate profound life realities like the explosive 3-5% year-over-year income per person growth across the East Africa Community, the HIV epidemic across continents and time and HIV concentration.

As of last week, teachers around the world, with or without stable internet, can now use Adobe AIR-based Gapminder Desktop to show off and explore the enlighteningly bubble-based development statistics visualizer from the favorite Swede teacher-economist Hans Rosling. It should work on most kinds of computers after installing Adobe AIR (~20mb) and The Gapminder Desktop (~10mb).

Some of my most popular lectures training teachers in Tanzania took advantage of visual technologies to offer a fresh lens to my students’ world through tools like Google Earth (as a sidenote, it can cache, or store away map and terrain data to use offline). I was fortunate to have a satellite internet connection and a digital projector but as EDGE wireless cellphone internet and netbooks become the standard for teachers going abroad, there should be no reason not to grab this tool and keep it in mind when such a visual aid is needed in the moment. If you’re leaving your computer but have access to a color printer, the Gapminder PDFs of the World gap “map” is worth noting too.

So we can’t solve the broadband gap for video just yet but now there is a new tool to share some of the best insights of data.