This article was first published on the The Asia Foundation’s blog,
In Asia.
“Just because they are poor and isolated doesn’t mean they don’t have
the potential to be the next Bill Gates,” said Shahed Kayes, the
founder of
Subornogram Foundation in
Bangladesh, while introducing me to lively students at a school he
started on the remote island of Mayadip. Located in the Meghna River,
the island’s 1,100 residents don’t have access to public services such
as safe drinking water, public schools, or health care. The residents
rely on the river’s catch of fish for their livelihood, and 97 percent
live below the poverty line. Although the school doesn’t own a single
computer and the island has no electricity, Shahed couldn’t resist
taking out his personal laptop and showing the children how to use it,
giving them at least a small glimpse of the world beyond their shores.
Shahed
Kayes, pictured here with students, founded the Subornogram Foundation.
The school doesn't own a computer and the island has no electricity.
While the school on Mayadip only recently
acquired rough wooden tables to use as desks, Shahed’s philosophy
captures the promise that technology holds to leap over barriers created
by geography, social class, and language.
The desire to use technological innovations to improve education in
both the developed and developing worlds is undeniably trendy these
days. I attended a UNESCO and
Consortium of School Networking conference on
this topic in Washington, D.C., recently, and there are dozens of
similarly themed workshops being held every month. Experiments using
technology in education in the developing world are often driven by
international funders, domestic companies, and non-profits who hope
these innovations can surmount the many obstacles facing severely
challenged education systems where rote teaching methods and
undertrained, underpaid, and outnumbered teachers are the norm.
In
recent years, Asian governments have made large investments in
technology innovations to expand their population's technology capacity.
Photo by Bart Verweij.
National governments have also made large investments in this sector
with the hope that expanding their population’s technology capacity will
fuel economic growth. In Thailand, the government has set aside the
equivalent of $60 million to purchase 900,000 tablets through the One
Tablet per Child initiative for the country’s 860,000 first graders. The
governments of India and the Philippines have been behind efforts to
create the world’s cheapest tablets. The National Library of Vietnam
reports that while 2,000 people daily walk through the doors of the main
Hanoi library, another 5,000 access their online database, compelling
the government to invest in digitizing its collections.
And as mobile phone ownership becomes commonplace in the developing
world and internet access increases, democratization of information does
seems more possible than ever before. In 2010, although the population
of Malaysia was 28 million, there were over 30 million mobile phone
subscriptions. In the same year, the average Filipino cell phone user
sent an average of
600 text messages per month,
43 percent more than their counterparts in the United States. In
Vietnam, the internet penetration rate is 31 percent and, in the
capitol, Hanoi, penetration is 64 percent. Vietnamese internet use
averages about 30 million searches per day. Indeed, when I visited
Vietnam last year, I was amazed to find a small rural post office in
Duyen Hai overrun by more than 30 eager boys playing educational games
and one young girl doing research for a school project, on computers
funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through a project with
The Asia Foundation and the National Library.
I admit that I can be skeptical about projects I come across that
seem to employ technology just for technology’s sake or as a panacea
rather than a tool. But these early efforts have yielded some important
lessons, including the realization that device-specific projects can
quickly become obsolete while long-term investments in training,
support, and adaptation are necessary for projects involving technology
to be effective and sustainable. With these guiding principles in mind, I
am energized by the potential that technological innovations hold to
create a more level playing field in education, training, and learning
across the globe.
With wider application, the following three advances will, I predict,
move us toward greater equality in education and radically transform
our world:
1. Literacy will increase dramatically and informally through mobile phones. Ambitious
adults and children who lack access to formal education will
nonetheless be able to increase their literacy through self-paced “learn
to read” text lessons via simple cell phones they already own. Imagine
what this means for the Asia-Pacific region, home to the largest number
of illiterate adults worldwide at 518 million in 2008, according to
UNESCAP. An interesting pilot is the SMS literacy project initiated in
three districts in Pakistan by UNESCO and
Mobilink.
Adolescent girls were able to retain newly acquired literacy skills by
using mobile phones to receive and send SMS messages in Urdu and copy
them into their workbooks over a four-month period.
2. Language will cease to be the barrier it is today because of breakthroughs in localizing content. Exceptional
ideas, techniques, and literature will more easily be shared,
appreciated, and put into practice across cultures. Computer programmers
are rapidly developing sophisticated tools that enable translation
between languages at lightening speed and, increasingly, even account
for cultural nuances in meaning. Although a human touch is still ideal
for translation, this technology-driven localization solution will
vastly change our lives and break down communication challenges among
users of different languages. In the near future it means that students
and reformers will more easily access the information they need even if
it is not published in a language they speak.
3. Education will become widely accessible, more affordable, and less exclusive. Today,
circumstances of birth, income, and geography greatly affect an
individual’s ability to access quality education. This is changing
rapidly in the higher education sphere thanks to the Open Education
Resource (OER) movement and initiatives such as iTunes University and
Open CourseWare (OCW). Launched by MIT in 2001 and supported by the
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the OCW Consortium’s 250
universities and associated organizations from Asia, Africa, Europe, and
the Americas offer more than 13,000 college level courses in 20
languages entirely free. The site boasts 133 million visits by 95
million visitors from virtually every country. The OCW Mirror Site
Program provides the same content on hard drives to educational
organizations with limited or costly internet access.
Distance learning is part of this phenomenon. Increasingly,
governments, technology companies, and educators are partnering to
upgrade capacity and extend education to remote areas. For example, in
Sri Lanka, the cellular company Mobitel and the University of Colombo
are beginning to offer post-graduate courses using broadband mobile
links to students anywhere in Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
While physical books will remain an appropriate technology for
delivering education to our partners in many parts of Asia for years to
come, technology’s potential to help Books for Asia meet its mission to
improve access to information and opportunity is undeniable as we look
ahead. That’s why we are launching a new “Technology Start-up Fund:
Access for Asia.” The brand-new fund will support promising projects
incubated by our in-country staff in collaboration with creative
education organizations, publishers, technology companies, and donors.
Melody Zavala is the director of The Asia Foundation’s Books for Asia Program. She can be reached at mzavala@asiafound.org. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the individual author and not those of The Asia Foundation
