I have spent the week in a remote village in Kenya with no Internet access, no phone and very little electricity.
When I arrived I assumed that in places where there was electricity I would be able to access the Internet using the Dongle I bought in Nairobi as I had read that Africa had the biggest uptake of online learners. I had assumed that the Internet would be the same as we have here – I was wrong. Accessing the Internet was a very different experience, and involved one tab browsing of websites which had limited graphics and no video or it would be seriously overloaded and not open. As for accessing the Mooc – Meh!!!!
The education system in Kenya that I saw was like ours in the 1980′s in teaching style, curriculum content and use of technology. It was quite amazing to see how far behind in technology terms the students at the local Secondary school were in comparison to the group of tech savvy 6th former’s we brought from the UK.
We provided 11 laptops for the school (of 300 children!) and ran workshops on how to use basic packages, teaching clicking and dragging was a challenge, yet toddlers can pick this up so easily here without teaching just through early exposure to adults interacting with technology.
This school (and village) is going from having one laptop to 12 in a short space of time, we have also funded more to arrive in the near future along with Internet access. The availability of information is going to increase exponentially and the links to the rest of the world through communication and observation of other people will have an enormous impact on this society.There will be a transition from analogue to digital – Hand (2008) suggests that “digitization enables and intensifies processes of circulation, flattening, de-territorialization, and de-differentiation, and for new kinds of objects, subjects and practices to become emergent and convergent in a transition from analogue to digital cultures”
It would be interesting to see the ‘emergent practices’ and the impact it will make to their lives and their system of education. Will the introduction of technology create a need for a change in the education style, which is currently very didactic and information based? The children will then have the access to the information they require and the teaching may need to change to support the students application of the information rather than just providing facts.
Culture is very different at the moment in this village in Kenya and digital culture is limited, perhaps the culture will become ‘flattened and de-territorialized’ with the introduction of technology. I’m not sure if this is a bad or good thing for the community but it is different and the future.
Hi Annabel, The opportunity to step outside the box and rethink the concept of digital culture could be quite a revelation! I await to hear more about your experience. When connection keeps breaking and the upload of a small file takes a whole hour, I used to wonder if I should be looking at progress from the eyes of a non digital user, or from the other side of the experience.
It is clear from your story that the worldwide web isn’t quite any of those 3 components depending on where one lives. There are political and economic considerations too. There is a certain romanticism involved, i.e. being untouched by technology, but I fear that in the long term by being in this forced exclusion, there is so much more that might be negatively affected.
With regards to the MOOC I guess there won’t be many students from that part of the world signing up. It illustrates the digital divide quite starkly. One of the comments I had on my pinboard was about passing on the knowledge from the MOOC to those that could not get access – in that case it was about the English language barrier and how it was translated by a MOOC student from English into the local language. But for where you are now, they don’t have that option, or if they do, on occasion, it would be utterly challenging.