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Thursday, February 16, 2006 |
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One more way mobile social technology is being used to make a difference. BBC News has a report on how folks in distant villages with electricity for two hours a day, in Peru, are being reached through podcasts - a new pilot project is using podcasting to get important agricultural information to farmers. Some excerpts from the article :"The farmers do not yet have the means to listen on portable MP3 players. But UK charity Practical Action has married old and new technology to podcast twice-monthly updates to eight information centres in the Cajamarca region.
Expansion hopes : These telecentres, many of which are run on solar power,
automatically download the programmes onto CDs to rebroadcast them on
local radio stations. The charity has found it effective to distribute audio
material to local people, who prefer listening in their own dialect to
being sent the written word." "We are also hoping that the database of podcasts on the internet will be used not just by Peruvian farmers but other farmers in Latin America." The Peru project is currently running on a trial basis, and will be evaluated at the end of March. If the Peruvian podcasts are successful, Practical Action has plans to roll out similar schemes in Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe. "Our plans are to test out some of the technologies that would enable people to listen to the podcasts on a mobile phone or a PDA, in fact on any device that can play an MP3 file," said Dr David Grimshaw, international team leader on the project." 5:21:25 PM  comment [] trackback []
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Copyright 2006 Dina Mehta
