Selected publications (.pdf)

"Education Change, Leadership and the Knowledge Society" 
Global e-Schools Initiative (GeSCI)  

Survey of ICT in education in the Caribbean
Volume 1: Regional trends & analysis
Volume 2: Country reports
infoDev 

Using technology to train teachers:
Appropriate uses of ICT for
teacher professional developmen
t
 
infoDev (Mary Burns, co-author)

Project evaluation:
Uganda rural school-based telecenters

World Bank Institute
(Sara Nadel, co-author)

The Educational Object Economy:
Alternatives in authoring &
aggregation of educational software 

Interactive Learning Environments
(Purchase or subscription req'd) 

Development of multimedia resources 
UNESCO (Cesar Nunes, co-author)

Real Access/Real Impact
Teresa Peters & bridges.org
(hosted for reference; RIP TMP) 

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Monday
Sep122011

nine eleven and sustainable ICT in schools 

Prompted by remembrances of the Sept 11 2001 attacks on the New York and Washington DC served up by radio and other media (I don't have a TV, thank goodness), I'm led to recall _where_ _I_ _was_ on that fateful day: In Jinja Town in Uganda, about 100 KM east of Kampala, delivering a workshop to school principals on sustainability strategies for their school-based telecenters. My colleagues there at that time were the redoubtable Meddie Mayanja (!) and the formidable Tony Bloome (!). With the Ugandan school heads, we clustered around the one TV set to watch replayed footage of the Twin Towers crashing down. At that distance, frankly, it was difficult to grasp what was really happening. Instead of a dream within a dream, we experienced a dream within reality. I walked around Jinja, which _still_ featured burnt-out houses and wastelands from the purging of Indians and others that had happened 20 years before. At some point, I think, Tony and I went rafting on the Nile. Eventually I caught my flight home, passing through Heathrow and discovering a world that had been upended in my absence. 

The school heads at our training workshop were remarkable. The program--VSAT-enabled school-based telecenters--launched and it was successful in the short term. Then the VSAT provider went bankrupt ("who are you callin' 'sustainable'?") and connectivity was shut down. Eventually, however, because the school heads, the students and their parents all saw value in the Internet connection, things began to re-emerge in sustainable forms with a new, local ISP. Today, the original 20-something broadband-supplied schools have increased 4x, at least. And all (or almost all) are running sustainably. (!)

 

 

Tony Bloome and a school head confer