The folksong jukebox: Singing along for social change in rural India

In designing digital literacy content for marginalized demographics, we need to garner local resources to structure engaging and meaningful media experiences. This paper examines the socio-cognitive implications of a novel edutainment product in rural India on learning, stemming from an e-development initiative funded by Hewlett-Packard. This product encapsulates a multiplicity of media forms: text, audio and visual, with social-awareness folk themes endemic to the locality. It uses the karaoke 'same language subtitling' feature that won the World Bank Development Marketplace Award in 2002 due to its simple yet innovative application that has proven to have an impact on reading skills. The product strives to combine cultural regeneration, value-based education, incidental literacy and language practice through entertainment. The paper investigates how this product addresses engagement and empowerment simultaneously, based on elements such as emot

Integrating Web-based e-Learning in TVET to Enhance the Literacy and Socio-economic Condition for Sustainable Development of Bangladesh

The purpose of the research is to use the technologies to shift the emphasis from teaching to learning. The ultimate goal of Web-based e-Learning is to bring the learning to the learners, not to bring the learners’ to learning. The teaching-learning phenomena of developed countries have changed from Brick to Click approaches (e-Learning). However, Web-based e-Learning is still new paradigm in developing countries like Bangladesh. Web-based e-Learning is absent in technical and vocational education and training (TVET) system. TVET in Bangladesh is depriving from the benefit of Web-based e-Leaning. Thus, the aims of the research are to illustrate the residence with mode of internet use and internet services with level of education; to explore the current literacy rate (%) by different economic classes in rural and urban areas; to identify the physical facilities of TVET classrooms; and to assess the infrastructural conditions of TVET institutions for providing the suggestions to Web-based e-Learning integration in Bangladesh. The researchers have visited 45 TVET institutions and observed 210 live classrooms in Bangladesh. The infrastructural conditions of 30 TVET institutions in urban areas were also observed with the structured questionnaires to get the results for applying the concept of Web-based e-Learning integration. The expected outcomes of the research are, once the e-Learning system can be introduced in TVET in developing countries like Bangladesh, there will be a breakthrough in the education system. More students will be enrolled, outreach will go further, better learning material will ensure quality output, ICT based technology will be adopted in the process of and finally bring an integrated benefit to the society.   Keywords: Web-based e-Learning, TVET, Literacy rate and Socio-economic development

Custom Silicon for Low-Cost Information Dissemination among Illiterate People Groups.

In this work, we present an Information and Communications Technology (ICT) device that improves the quality of life of the poorest people in the world by enabling information access through Very Large Scale Integrated chips. Identified as agrarian farmers that subsist on less than $2 a day, the world’s poorest people face many challenges that make developing an ICT device difficult. We argue that prior devices do not adequately overcome the unique problems of: cost, power, connectivity, usability, robustness, and illiteracy. We show that while many of these constraints need to be addressed, cost represents the greatest fundamental challenge to widespread use and adoption of ICT devices. To address this challenge, this thesis presents a custom silicon chip design referred to as “Literacy in Technology” (LIT). LIT enables an audio computer ICT device to overcome the constraints through a number of techniques: A high level of integration of the components on a single die reduces its cost and form-factor. LIT’s power management system ensures long lifetime through energy consumption reduction by exploiting unique characteristics of Carbon-Zinc batteries, common in the developing world. Its Hybrid Switch Capacitor Network addresses off-chip component cost by using only inexpensive capacitors, further reducing cost. LIT’s unique memory hierarchy, a large on-chip cache backed directly by NAND Flash combined with a simple and low area core, reduces cost by not requiring DRAM or NOR Flash. LIT’s power-on-reset and brown-out-detection overcomes Carbon-Zinc battery’s high hysteresis resulting in higher robustness. LIT further reduces cost through overloading the functionality of PCB traces as both a human input interface and as information transfer from device to device. We show how LIT and its unique solutions allow us to develop an ICT device targeted towards developing regions at a total estimated electronics cost of less than$6. Furthermore, LIT reduces recurring costs through lowered energy consumption and increased robustness when compared to previous ICT devices. Although many of our novel technical contributions were motivated by strong price elasticity in developing regions, the techniques developed are equally applicable to rugged, low-power systems targeted at mainstream applications.PhDElectrical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/102429/1/zhiyoong_1.pd