I was stuck by 2 things in Mr. Sang's presentation: first, the determination to bring global perspectives and collaboration to all of Kenya's students and, second, the practical approach ICT is taking -- with full understanding of neccessary pieces that need to be in place. Empasizing mobile technologies to bridge the gap on simple issues like dissemination of test results to student parents via mobile phone and empasis on compuitng centers aimed at students as a way to maximize distribution and solve connectivity and related issues, makes eminent sense and delivers practical benefits as the infrastructure improves.
An aspect of the ePals/Kenyan relationship that I discussed with Barnabas last evening and wanted to share was that ePals enables Kenyan schools and students to collaborate across the coutry and across the world -- and importantly -- to do so with low bandwidth dialup environments that typify connectivity in Kenyan schools. This is an important point to consider. Around the globe -- and in in most major cities -- the environment is a mix of very low, medium and higher bandwidth instances. Making resources available for use consistent with these disparate environments is a challenge. One way that ePals helps solve this is throught the very different kinds of communications technolgies that are made avaialble and by expressly publishing envirnomental ocntraints on profiles used by classrooms to discover each other. Email is a killer app of low bandwidth and is easily used to scaffold writing and critical thinking skills in an authentic fashion. ePals Projects show many uses of these. At the same time, in higher bandwidth enviroments, the ability to use muti-media and tools for synchronous sharing are desirable. Our view is that it is the mix of capabilities, fueled by a desire to authentically collaborate that is needed to transform environments.
