"The conditions that need to be present to text in Liberia do not necessarily exist simply because someone has access to a phone; if there is one major assumption that many of us in ICT for development are guilty of, it's this one." - an interesting piece which could be used to critically examine the adoption of mobile phone technology in sub-Saharan Africa and its role in civil society. Just having access is not always enough...

This website has some great data on various developing countries' rates of adoption of ICT (in particular, mobile phones, internet, radio and television) - click on "country profiles" to see which countries are available. While there is slightly less data available for Haiti, Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique, the dedicated mini-sites for each of the other countries include data on access to various forms of "traditional media" (newspapers, radio) and "new media" (internet and mobile phones). There is also data on usage of the various forms of media by age group, gender and socio-economic status. I particularly like the annotations on the graphs, which will hopefully help students focus on the key data and show them how annotations can help add clarity and further information to figures (graphs, maps etc).

Some interesting maps that can be used when teaching Global Interactions - data available in excel files.

Interesting talk to use as a starting point for Global Interactions - How did we get to where we are? Why is it so difficult to produce goods at a small scale today? Where do all the materials we use for everyday products come from? What are the environmental consequences of mineral extraction?