Cell Phones to Collect Pregnancy Data From Remote Areas in Liberia

Purpose: To report findings on knowledge and skill acquisition following a 3‐day training session in the use of short message service (SMS) texting with non‐ and low‐literacy traditional midwives. Design: A pre‐ and post‐test study design was used to assess knowledge and skill acquisition with 99 traditional midwives on the use of SMS texting for real‐time, remote data collection in rural Liberia, West Africa. Methods: Paired sample t‐tests were conducted to establish if overall mean scores varied significantly from pre‐test to immediate post‐test. Analysis of variance was used to compare means across groups. The nonparametric McNemar's test was used to determine significant differences between the pre‐test and post‐test values of each individual step involved in SMS texting. Pearson's chi‐square test of independence was used to examine the association between ownership of cell phones within a family and achievement of the seven tasks. Findings: The mean increase in cell phone knowledge scores was 3.67, with a 95% confidence interval ranging from 3.39 to 3.95. Participants with a cell phone in the family did significantly better on three of the seven tasks in the pre‐test: “turns cell on without help” (χ 2 (1) = 9.15, p = .003); “identifies cell phone coverage” (χ 2 (1) = 5.37, p = .024); and “identifies cell phone is charged” (χ 2 (1) = 4.40, p = .042). Conclusions: A 3‐day cell phone training session with low‐ and nonliterate traditional midwives in rural Liberia improved their ability to use mobile technology for SMS texting. Clinical Relevance: Mobile technology can improve data collection accessibility and be used for numerous health care and public health issues. Cell phone accessibility holds great promise for collecting health data in low‐resource areas of the world. Journal of Nursing Scholarship , 2012; 00:0, 1–8.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/93561/1/j.1547-5069.2012.01451.x.pd

Gold, power, protest: Digital and social media and protests against large-scale mining projects in Colombia

Colombia’s Internet connectivity has increased immensely. Colombia has also ‘opened for business’, leading to an influx of extractive projects to which social movements object heavily. Studies on the role of digital media in political mobilisation in developing countries are still scarce. Using surveys, interviews, and reviews of literature, policy papers, website and social media content, this study examines the role of digital and social media in social movement organisations and asks how increased digital connectivity can help spread knowledge and mobilise mining protests. Results show that the use of new media in Colombia is hindered by socioeconomic constraints, fear of oppression, the constraints of keyboard activism and strong hierarchical power structures within social movements. Hence, effects on political mobilisation are still limited. Social media do not spontaneously produce non-hierarchical knowledge structures. Attention to both internal and external knowledge sharing is therefore conditional to optimising digital and social media use

Lecturers' use of Web 2.0 in the faculty of Information Science and communications at MZUZU University, Malawi

The study reported on in this article investigated the use of Web 2.0 technologies by lecturers in the Faculty of Information Science and Communications at Mzuzu University (MZUNI), Mzuzu, Malawi. By distributing a questionnaire to 19 lecturers, conducting follow-up interviews with seven lecturers and analysing the curricula, the study showed that between 10 (58.8%) and 13 (76.5%) lecturers use Wikipedia, YouTube, blogs, Google Apps and Twitter to accomplish various academic activities, such as handing out assignments to students; receiving feedback from students; uploading lecture notes; searching for content; storing lecture notes; and carrying out collaborative educational activities. The study adopted the Decomposed Theory of Planned Behaviour (Taylor and Todd 1995) and the theory's elements that strongly affected lecturers' use of the technologies according to the results included attitude and perceived behaviour control. The study also found that poor Internet access remains the key stumbling block towards a successful adoption of Web 2.0 technologies by lecturers at MZUNI. To this end, the study recommends that the newly established Department of ICT Directorate with support from MZUNI management should install campuswide Wi-Fi and improve Internet bandwidth so that lecturers' access to the Internet is not limited to their offices but rather is available in the teaching rooms across the campus.DHE