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One result is that they deliberately decided to complement the delivery of the devices with extensive engagement with local stakeholder groups, did a lot of capacity building with teachers and trainers, and tried to help align what they were doing with what was happening in the formal education system.

hat said, there are very real concerns in some quarters that e-book initiatives from the 'West', however well-intentioned, are potentially an important tool contributing to a subtle form of, for lack of a better term, cultural imperialism. Worldreader is apparently working on a platform for African authors and publishers to be able to distribute their works electronically, so that it will be easier for students to read books from local authors, consistent with the learning goals of local school systems.  While not downplaying the difficulties of getting large educational publishers to make their content available digitally for use by students in Africa, this desire to help promote digital marketplaces for African reading materials is perhaps the most ambitious aspect to the Worldreader initiative.

When they went back and asked, "what if content was digitized and made available at $1/book?", many people suddenly got very interested. 

We know how to build inexpensive laptops to get access to the Internet, however, the problem in consumer electronics is that high demand for particular components drives prices up. Success is kind of counterproductive to keep prices low. That’s why we procure components for the Cherrypal Africa in a different way, we buy access inventory, overcapacity, out-of-fashion shells, shells with minor cosmetic flaws, discounted limited batches, and other high quality though discounted components and systems, package them up and sell them under the Cherrypal Africa brand. Bear with me. What this means is that 5 randomly selected people ordering a Cherrypal Africa on any given day theoretically might get 5 different systems, with different configurations. However, their “Africas” would have one particular thing in common, you can browse the Internet, actually pretty fast.

Our goal at Cherrypal is to help educate children all around the world so that the digital divide is no longer a divide but a global community of knowledge that everyone has access to.

n many ways, Ceibal can, and perhaps should, be seen not so much as an education project, but as a larger societal transformation project (of the sort often associated with e-government initiatives), with the education system as the primary and initial dissemination vector.

Under Plan Ceibal (earlier blog post here), Uruguay is the first country in the world to ensure that all primary school students (or at least those in public schools) have their own personal laptop.  For free.  (The program is being extended to high schools, and, under a different financial scheme, to private schools as well).  Ceibal is about more than just 'free laptops for kids', however.  There is a complementary educational television channel. Schools serve as centers for free community wi-fi, and free connectivity has been introduced in hundreds of municipal centers around the country as well.  There are free local training programs for parents and community members on how to use the equipment.  Visiting Uruguay last week, I was struck by how many references there were to 'one laptop per teacher' (and not just 'one laptop per child', which has been the rallying cry for a larger international initiative and movement). 

There is no doubt about the numbers (over 380,000) in Uruguay -- the laptops are not sitting in boxes under an awning at the Ministry of Education collecting dust.  You see them everywhere you see school children.

The Talking Book is a low cost audio computer that shares knowledge and improves literacy.  It is helping impoverished rural families learn to prevent disease and improve their crops. In overcrowded classrooms, children use it to learn from interactive literacy lessons.

At the heart of Bederson's wide-ranging talk (and indeed at the heart of the ICDL itself) is a belief in the value and importance of child-centered design. Notably (and rather famously, in some quarters) the ICDL utilizes children as design partners in the development of the digital library, and how it is used.  Adopting this approach sometimes yields approaches that, at least for many in the audience in Hangzhou, were rather surprising.

The ICDL (not to be confused with the International Computer Driving Licence, which shares the same acronym) is dedicated to building a collection of "outstanding children's books from around the world and supporting communities of children and adults in exploring and using this literature through innovative technology designed in close partnership with children for children". The ICDL, which is part of the World Bank-funded READ project in Mongolia, currently features children's books in over 50 languages and receives over 100,000 visitors a month to its web site.

These are representative questions of some of the desires for books that children express to the ICDL, and its on-line presence is organized and searchable in a way that can help meet such demands.   Observing that children are not well served by most existing dictionaries, Bederson and his colleagues use definitions from children themselves, and then enable children to rate each other's definitions. By incorporating teams of children into all stages of the design and development of the various component parts of the library, the ICDL team is able to be guided by what children want, and how children act.  Given the strong research focus of project principals, findings from the ICDL experience are being well documented and made publicly available.

The 'Talking Book' is a low-cost audio device device with recording capabilities -- imagine a rubbery MP3 player about the size of a grapefuit -- rather ingeniously engineered (and re-engineered) to meet specific needs and usage scenarios in very poor communities in Africa.  It is designed for use in local languages, using locally produced content, as tool to promote literacy among primary school children (to cite just one goal and target group). One way to think of the device, Cliff said, is as a  'small portable computer without a display'.  While the project is still in its pilot stages, it is notable for its express interest in investigating solutions that are low cost and scalable from the beginning, and in rigorously monitoring and evaluating the impact of its interventions.

Literacy Bridge began, he said, with the idea that the most effective approach towards ending global poverty requires empowering people with better access to knowledge, and that those in greatest need are impeded by illiteracy, disability, and inadequate infrastructure. (Here's video from a talk Cliff gave at Google about the project's goals and approach to development.) The project is operationally very lean, supported financially by hundreds of individual donations and by thousands of volunteer hours. 

I have never heard a presentation from a project proponent about the development of an ICT device (of whatever sort) meant to be used by poor people that contained so many comments like what I heard from Cliff: "our users told us"; "we learned from our users that ..."; "what we found out when speaking with and observing our users caused us to radically change how we were thinking, and so we re-designed ..." etc.  The iterative, user-centric design process the Literacy Bridge has been engaged in to develop the Talking Book stands in stark contrast to that demonstrated by most (almost all?) of the 'ICT for development' initiatives in the education sector that come through our offices here at the World Bank.