Group items tagged

Industrialisation, but at what price?

An interesting story discussing an enrichment program directed at Peru's underprivileged schools. The aim of the program was to put a laptop computer in the hands of every student. With the help of this technology, the hope was that young Peruvian's would be able to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of literacy, mathematics, technological aptitude, etc. However the results of the project were not exactly as planned. The rural areas, which are often the neediest, suffer the greatest complications when trying to implement the technology in the classroom. It appears that these communities are simply not equipped to maximize the potential of the laptop devices. Remote locations, lack of prior understanding, and poor electrification infrastructure all play a part. Still, the use of the laptops did seem to improve some aspects of the learning experience, and at the least provided some exposure from which future interests may be sparked. This article seems to shed a bit of light on the dramatic discrepancies across cultures. In the U.S. individuals are so completely surrounded with technological resources that the assimilation of new technologies is often seamless. For other countries, like Peru, their lack of technological immersion creates systemic and epistemic faults which greatly affect their ability to actually make good use of information technologies. I thought this piece was fascinating and seems to point toward other worthwhile cultural questions.

I wonder what the impact was in more urbanized areas, as opposed to Lacachi.

Rosling is a global public health expert, and is passionate about how statistical data should inform our understanding of global regions, individual nations in comparison with each other, and he challenges the possibly erroneous conventional wisdom about differences between "first world" and "third world" nations in terms of social markers that exist. This item is also useful background for understanding the foundational aspects of any area of the globe, and it also points you to relevant data sources.

This animated data software is available at http://www.gapminder.org/ It could make a great format for your final project in lieu of a more conventional paper -- something to think about?