From Re: Students' Needs by bfillip on Thursday 18 October 2007 12:35:00:
the needs of students in developing countries have little to do with the excesses and/or misuse of technology.
And, inappropriate technology, when someone (from outside the community) has decided what's needed...
Barbara also mentioned the ethics of viewing video, at the expense of others' connections.
The other drawback of that is, of course, that the cybercafe may'nt have the required software installed.
Nellie also asked about the bandwidth of Google - I think that if you have saved the videos at quite a low frame rate & small resolution, they aren't too bad. However, more and more work is being done on MPEG4, which generally requires far less bandwidth than older technologies, but it's still much more than text.
One solution would be to have as many videos as possible on a DVD that could be sent to users, along with other educational materials - which would work for a course that people have to sign up/ pay for, but not freely available material.
Having transcripts of the videos would help those on dial up connections - as well as anyone who's deaf, but clearly it's not quite the same.
Nellie also mentioned "
"However, from my observations of the population at FB, I noticed many from developing countries. A social network may actually be excellent motivators"
Just as a matter of interest - what's the proportion of members from the majority world, to those from the Western world? I agree, that a social network can be a good motivator. I wonder if the more social based communities that often exist in the majority world, compared to, say, the UK (here, it's pretty common to not know your neighbours), might well mean that people find creating social online networks easy from a psychological point of view, even if they aren't too familiar with the technology required to do it.