Discussions over Tea points to two recent articles on how ICT is reaching rural India and making an impact on lives. 

In the past two days, I've read two articles on how IT is being used in rural India for the education of the masses. Article # 1, Wiring up a Knowledge Revolution in Rural India speaks about "An IT project in southern India is empowering low-caste village women, helping them net information on everything from grain prices and cataract operations to the Iraq war. ". Here are some of the pleasing excerpts of the article -

A group of 15 women, some of them from the so-called untouchable castes or Dalits, operate the computers, collate and present data.

• Villagers get information on all kinds of situations and problems - weather, crops, livestock, health, everything. (They) have even mediated disputes.
• One example of a valuable application has been the availability of the list of people below the poverty line (BPL), secured and uploaded by the nodal team at Villianur. Being featured in it provides access to government schemes for the poor.
• Every household in Embalam now has an insurance policy - a national life insurance scheme subsidized by the Central government of which the villagers had no knowledge before.
• The project had to overcome initial teething problems such as abuse of infrastructure and political interference from local parties.
• Declares a volunteer in the Embalam center, T. Amirtham, 35, and a mother of four daughters, "The men in our community first looked at us with jealousy. Then it became envy. When we first started, we would automatically stand up when a man entered this room. Not anymore - we are more confident and respected. That's the way I want to raise my daughters."

Article # 2, Indiaís Illiterates Get a Magic Wand speaks about "a project by Indiaís premier software giant, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), which if it can find the right partners and hit critical mass, Indiaís 300 million illiterates could be converted into productive individuals who can read signboards and perhaps even the simple text of a newspaper in less than 40 hours of learning-time". The pleasing excerpts of this article are mentioned below -

• The software giant TCS is using low-end computers to take out the monotony from teaching, piggy-backing on the initiatives already undertaken by the National Literacy Mission, and treating adults very differently from children when it comes to teaching them.
• The goals are to give a 300 - 500 word vocabulary to learners in their own languages. Five major Indian languages are currently covered by the software. Many more are waiting to be done. This skill could enable Indiaís illiterates to read a simple newspaper.
• Claimed advantages of this approach include - Acceleration in the pace of 'learning to read' (it takes about one-third of the time that writing-oriented methods require), flexibility in adjusting to individual learning speeds, lower dropout rates in comparison with other adult literacy programmes, it can be conducted on computers with configurations as low as 486 (these are the kind of machines that many organizations can afford to give away). and it does not require trained teachers or large-scale infrastructure.

The pleasing aspects of these endeavours are that they're working at a grass-roots level and aren't intended towards hitting rural India with the whole nine yards. Also, they have been able to overcome the apprehensions of villagers and the resistance from politicians to gain a foothold into India's progress.

Really goes to show how this technology can cut through geographic, occupational, social, cultural, economic, and educational boundaries and barriers.   

An indirect consequence is bound to be empowerment of the under-priviledged (women too as a group here).  By providing education, alternative means of income-generation through jobs, and at a more social level by the blurring of rigid caste, gender and class boundaries. 

The future looks good ! 

12:07:43 PM    comment []  trackback []

Glancing - a software application from Matt Webb of Interconnected.  A small application that makes your computer a more social place allowing for a simple social transaction like glancing that can lead to greater bonding within a group.  I like the concept - and the metaphor of agency for a computer rather than a robot. 

"Glancing: An application to allow ultra-simple, non-verbal communication amongst groups of friends online.

It's a desktop application that you use with a group of other people. It lets you "glance" at them in idle moments, and it gives all of you an indication of the activity of glancing going on.

A group is intended to be less than a dozen people. A person may belong to several groups simultaneously by running separate instances of Glancing. Groups are started deliberately, probably by using a www interface, and people are told the group secret so they can join (a "secret" is just a shared password).

Concept

I was thinking about this about three months ago... We already have quite a lot of social software, but it's all fairly blatant. What's the smallest scale of social interaction that can take place online?

I'm fairly convinced that a social group needs many scales of interaction to remain healthy and bonded. I'd heard of transactional analysis and it seemed to have a good model for the social interaction thing: a social interaction is an exchange of "strokes", and at its simplest level, that stroke is just saying: "I'm OK, you're OK".

It's an assertion of presence: "Here we are".

The analogy I'm thinking of here is a group of people sitting working at their computers. Every so often, you look up and look around you, sometimes to rest your eyes, and other times to check people are still there. Sometimes you catch an eye, sometimes not. Sometimes it triggers a conversation. But it bonds you into a group experience, without speaking.

Would it be possible to build software like this? That's what Glancing is intended to do (there are more implicit assumptions in this): To model a group of people online who occassionally glance at each other, which is a small social transaction. This is done using a group model which stores the glance state: High if people have been glancing recently, low otherwise.

The idea is if you give people software which can carry their interactions, they'll bootstrap the social stuff off of that. So people will interpret for themselves what 'high' or 'low' glance state means, and what function is fulfils for their group when it's online."

Sounds really neat !

I'm thinking of an office environment - your boss makes a ridiculous comment - and you must keep a straight face - glance at your group of buddies online - and hey you might just feel you're not the only one.  Or your colleague's getting some flak - and you just want her/him to know, i'm with you, pal - and you can't find the right words for it - send him a glance. 

Not sure though that i'm entirely comfortable with the term Glancing for this application - glancing can have negative connotations, often vitiating the I'm OK, You're Ok position.  Not sure too if this is universally true or more specific to Indian culture.

7:59:42 AM    comment []  trackback []

Now this is so cool ! Mahesh Shantaram of Filter Coffee hosts the 28th edition of the Bharateeya Blog Mela - a selection of best of blogs for the week.  I like his special and original brew - he's presented the roll as a spoof on The Indian Express - one of our national dailies.

6:46:01 AM    comment []  trackback []