Tag Archive for 'Education'

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Gapminder Statistics Viewer Goes Offline.

Published on 2010/7/16 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

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.

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East African Development

Published on 2009/9/30 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

At the midpoint of my service I took a vacation to visit Uganda where a fledgling American-Ugandan startup incubator Appfrica had been working with local NGOs and the regionally famous Makerere University to enable computer science graduates there to find opportunities to build in their country. In the past month, they’ve been rightly and brightly acclaimed by the BBC and New York Times, TED, among many others in the tech community. I’ve also watched hugely successful, grassroots technology Bar Camp “unconferences” in Kenya and Ghana.

Tanzania, despite being admirably peaceful, has not yet achieved much in the ICT field. The reaction to the recent fiber installation has been muted. Its labor market is different too. Where only 10% of Uganda’s Makerere Computer Science graduates get jobs, Peace Corps Tanzania hasn’t been able to hire a single qualified ICT manager for its offices in six months of desperate searching. It is clear Tanzania is still scaling up its labor pool where the other countries nearby are ready to be leveraged. To me this means that Education has a lot of untapped potential. It is a very big country. Its education system was long neglected by colonialists, was always several orders of magnitude smaller than neighbors, and it is often hamstrung by bureaucracy but it is just now starting to explode.

Even through their short 2yr careers volunteer colleagues teaching A-Level have seen amazing improvements in students. Though many are failing, these are indications quality are starting to trend up. There have been challenges, like the Ministry’s poor scheduling that has resulted in empty colleges more than half the year but last week new syllabi were released which leaves me with hope that they at least realize the problems.

I intend to come back to USA for at least the next four months but after that I’m not sure. I’d like to help and work on these issues if the right opportunity appears. Judging from the relative noise on Twitter TZ vs. Twitter .UG, .KE, ICT4D members, there is so little work being done here, esp in TZ, I think my unique cultural experience and connections might enable me to foster something pretty neat.

By the way, here is one of the few neat TZ projects–NoPC, a British thin-client+cell net initiative for secondary schools instead of Teachers Colleges.

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