ICTworks by Inveneo

As teachers at a primary school in the Kisongo district of Arusha, Tanzania huddled into their computer lab, they quietly scoffed at me. What can a twenty-something American girl have to say in a meeting with all of us? I tried to remain upbeat and ignore the fact that I couldn’t understand what was being discussed in Swahili amongst the group.

“So I wanted to meet with everyone today to show you some computer software that can be used to support the concepts that are being taught in your curriculums.”

Blank stares. This was one tough crowd.

“Well there are lots of free tools on the Internet that you can use to help reiterate some of the concepts that you teach in the classroom.”

Crickets. Now I’m getting nervous.

I decided it might be best to open a program and demonstrate, so I opened Sebran, an open source educational software package, developed in Sweden. This would be a good start because it could be run in Swahili. I then loaded a math game that tasked students with counting the number of pictures on the screen and selecting the corresponding number.

“This game should be helpful to students in Class One who are just learning how to count. They can see several objects and then relate them to a number.”

I clicked on the first answer to show the teachers how it worked. Heads perked up. Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. I clicked on another answer. Now the teachers were closing in around the screen. One more answer. Now I had one teacher thieving the mouse from my grasp. They immediately started answering on their own and exploring the other games that were available through Sebran.

“Do you have anything to help with Class Two English?” “What about Class Five Science?”

I went on to show what I had collected and then explained how other educational tools could be located on the Internet. They all remained intrigued and attentive for the remainder of the meeting.

Guess what. This story took place in a primary school where each Standard had weekly ICT classes. Let me repeat that: Every student in this school sat in an ICT class every week. Guess what else. The ICT teacher, the one that instructs the students that sit in the weekly ICT class, was present at the meeting and was just as fascinated by the software as the rest of the teachers.

So if we have students that sit in an ICT class every week, being led by an instructor that has no prior knowledge of how to make use of educational software, what are the students doing in the ICT class?

Well I can somewhat tell you because I just so happened to stumble upon Class 5’s final exam in ICT from the previous year. It included questions such as: “An aluminum rod antenna is the type of __________.” “Most television sets use __________-power.” Or my favorite: “[True or False] Children are not supposed to watch television.”

And why is Class 5 being tested on these things in the ICT class? Because it’s what’s in the curriculum! The Tanzanian ICT curriculum lists objectives related to how a computer, radio, or television operates. Students are expected to know how to type up and save a document and how to transmit a message via radio. With instructors faithfully adhering to these policies, they don’t ever consider how technology can be used as a tool for facilitating instruction in other subjects.

I will admit that basic ICT literacy will be vital to students as they prepare to enter job markets where technology use is emphasized. But what is the ultimate goal of incorporating ICTs into education? Is it simply to teach kids how to use a computer? I hope not. What is the point in teaching kids how to use a computer if they are not using it for anything constructive to their learning?

The main goal of incorporating ICTs into education should be to improve or enhance the quality of a student’s education. This involves developing pedagogies for integrating the use of technology with the curriculums of other subjects. When used appropriately, technology has the potential to reiterate concepts learned in the classroom and allows students to think about these concepts in a different way. Furthermore, students are able to see a connection between technology and its applications.

Being able to offer this type of learning to students is dependent on several factors. First of all, the policies must back it. Teachers teach to the curriculum. They have been trained to teach to the curriculum, and with little prior ICT knowledge, there is little incentive for them to steer away from the curriculum. If teachers are going to use ICT as a tool for learning, then the policies should reflect that.

Second, teachers must have training. Teachers need sustained instruction, not only in basic ICT literacy, but also in the ways in which technology can be leveraged as a learning tool. A teacher will not take a classroom full of students to work on computers when (s)he is not comfortable working on it on his/her own. The ones that do this often find that they are unable to come up with productive activities for the students.

ICTs have the ability to effectively support student learning. It should be the main focus of ICT4E practitioners to veer policy development and teacher training in a direction that promotes technology as a learning tool. Doing so will provide students with better education and understanding of how technology can benefit various aspects of their lives.

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Over the course of the past semester, I teamed up with fellow RPI IT student, Lorena Nicotra, to develop a project that would promote curriculum-driven technology use in primary schools in Tanzania. In response to the problem of neglected computer donations in Tanzanian schools, we wanted to come up with an idea that would help schools make effective, intuitive use of technology in a way that would supplement the existing curriculum.

Our Solution

The basic premise of our project was to develop a web interface that lists Tanzanian curriculum objectives for standards one through four in Mathematics, English, and Science. Under each of these objectives, the interface offers several links to external online resources that have been screened for relevance to Tanzanian education. Games, videos, simulations, and audio are provided to offer a wide range of resources that can augment an instructor’s daily lesson plans.

While the project is still in early phases, the progress so far can be viewed at http://www.lpoirier.myrpi.org/ks.

Challenges

While math curriculum is very transferable among cultures, other subjects vary a great deal. For example, in Tanzania, a focus is placed on teaching sanitation, hygiene, first aid, and disease prevention in science classes. The way that these topics are taught in Tanzania is very different from the way that they are taught in other, Western cultures, making it difficult to find online content that can be used in this area. Luckily, we were able to find some resources developed by USAID and its partners that addressed these objectives particularly well.

Finding ESL resources was also difficult because most online content is developed for teaching English to a demographic with existing knowledge of Spanish or French. In this instance, it would have been helpful to have a native Swahili speaker working with us. We did end up finding several resources that were intended to support teaching ESL to any demographic.

Successes

With an overwhelming amount of content and information available on the Internet, it can be intimidating to mine through and find relevant educational material. This bottleneck prevents teachers and administrators from taking advantage of the wealth of online educational resources. Our solution eliminates this concern by plopping relevant learning content in a central location that is extremely easy to navigate.

A second, and more important, value lies in its ability to provide relevant content. As I highlighted in my Challenges spiel, it is difficult to find relevant resources in Science and English. All of the resources on our interface will directly address points within the Tanzanian curriculum standards, however, so it can be verified that all of the site’s content is extremely applicable to Tanzanian education.

With easy navigation and applicable content, teachers are able to direct their students to the site and immediately locate resources that will address the day’s lessons. In this way the technology is able to support the role of the teacher and reinforce a student’s understanding of educational concepts.

I will be spending my winter break in Arusha, Tanzania, and I will have the opportunity to introduce this solution to teachers and students in a local primary school. The introduction is expected to highlight areas of success and needs for improvement. Development will continue as more resources are discovered and issues are identified.

If you have any suggestions for ways that we can boost this project or comments on our progress, please feel free to contact me at poiril@rpi.edu.

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I am Michael Benedict and while working with SMS-based applications I’ve noticed an air of mystery around the issue of reliability. I hear colleagues say ambiguous things like “carriers consider SMS to be lower priority than voice”, or “SMS delivery isn’t guaranteed”.

My personal experience has been that messages are almost always delivered quickly and correctly, but I’ve heard stories of hours-long delays, corrupt data, and occasionally messages that never arrive. Since I am working on two projects that depend on reliable SMS service — one involves field-based data collection and another employs SMS as a transport layer between computers — I’m curious about how factors such as network, location, and time of day impact message transmission.

I found myself in Mwanza, Tanzania last week with two GPRS modems and a local partner who was unenthusiastic about the work I was actually there to do, so I tried a little experiment. I bought SIM cards and airtime for three of the major TZ networks, put two at a time in the modems, and wrote a simple python script using Adam Mckaig’s excellent pygsm library.

The script sent messages in all permutations at an arbitrarily chosen interval of about 20 minutes. This means that four messages were sent at a time: each SIM to itself and to the other SIM, repeated about every 20 minutes for periods of up to 27 hours. Outgoing messages noted the origin and destination networks, send time, and a sequential message number to make it easier to spot lost messages. Incoming SMS were stamped with the time received, and the delay in seconds between sending and delivery. Messages were sent two seconds apart to reduce errors from the modems trying to send and receive at the same time, and results were recorded in a CSV file.

a) Airtel and Zantel

Zantel is one of the smaller networks in TZ, but I was having technical problems with my Tigo SIM so started with Zantel and Airtel. Airtel was known as Zain until recently when Zain was acquired by Baharti Airtel, based in India. The script ran from about 1AM on January 14 to just before 5AM on January 15. Here are the results:

Delivery times and dropped messages between Airtel and Zantel Tanzania. Click to see scale. Note that the Airtel modem stopped sending and receiving at about 7AM on Jan 15, and the script hung until I woke up shortly after 8 and reset the modem. I do not know what caused the problem.

331 messages were sent and 10 (3%) were dropped. Delivery times fell into three bands. Airtel-Airtel (i.e. the Airtel SIM sending to itself) was easily the fastest, with messages typically delivered in 6 or 7 seconds. Messages in either direction between Airtel and Zantel took roughly twice as long, typically between 13 and 16 seconds. One outlier, an Airtel to Zantel message sent between 2 and 3 AM on Jan 15, took 24 seconds to arrive, and the only dropped Airtel-Airtel message occurred around the same time. Delivery times for Zantel-Zantel messages were split unevenly: one cluster near 6 seconds, another around 15 seconds, and a third around 32 seconds. 9 messages sent from Zantel-Airtel were not received.

Some aspects of this plot seem reasonable. Airtel is a larger company with wider network coverage, so it’s not too far fetched to imagine that messages sent from an Airtel SIM to itself would be the fastest to arrive. By that reasoning I’d expect messages sent between the two networks to take somewhat longer, and they do. The Zantel-Zantel delivery times are less intuitive. I don’t know what would account for the three distinct time ranges for delivery. It is also unexpected to see that 9 Zantel-Airtel messages were never delivered but no Airtel-Zantel messages experienced this problem.

b) Airtel and Tigo

SMS delivery times between Airtel and Tigo SIMs on January 14, 2011. Click image to see scale. *Messages marked unreadable appear to have reached the modems but could not be read, and resulted in an (unfortunately unlogged) exception in pygsm.

192 messages were sent and 3 (1.6%) were not readable by the modem. Four distinct delivery time ranges emerged. I eliminated one outlier from the plot to make it easier to view: on January 15 at 11:47, a Tigo-Airtel message took 129 seconds to arrive. I believe that the 3 unreadable Tigo-Tigo messages reached the modem, but the script raised an exception and the messages were not read. Unfortunately I was not logging pygsm’s debugging output so I am marking the missing messages as “unreadable” instead of dropped. I will have to log output in future runs and see if I can reproduce the problem. I didn’t expect Tigo-Airtel messages to arrive slower than Airtel-Tigo. The difference is small but it would be interesting to know why it’s there.

c) Two Tigo SIMs.

The purpose of having the modems send messages to themselves in the previous two runs was to test delivery times within a network. It occurred to me that sending from a SIM to itself may not be equivalent to sending between two different SIMs on the same network, so I bought a second Tigo SIM:

SMS delivery times between two Tigo SIMs. Click to scale.

164 messages were sent and 1 (0.6%) was not received. The data shown excludes one outlier: the first Tigo A-Tigo B message took 457 seconds to arrive. So: is SIM to SIM within a network equivalent to sending from a SIM to itself? Sometimes. I don’t know why it varies, but note that the number for Tigo A is +255716379091 while Tigo B is +255717435798.

In particular, after the 255 country code the numbers have different prefixes, 716 for A and 717 for B. Typically Tanzanian SIMs on the same network have the same first 3 digits, and the difference here may indicate that Tigo’s servers treat the two numbers differently. The Airtel/Tigo data above used the SIM that is labeled as “Tigo B” here.

Thoughts and next steps

Unexpected patterns emerged, including asymmetric delivery times between networks, that I would like to understand better. The few dropped messages do not seem to follow a clear pattern, which is a concern for both human and computer-focused SMS applications where missing messages can cause confusion and frustration.

It seems possible that having the modems send all 4 messages with only a 2 second delay between sending could be impacting the results. It would be interesting to revise the script to randomly offset the message send times by a few minutes and see if that increases reliability.

This is not a scientific experiment since there are variables such as time of day, day of the week, network traffic, modem location, weather, and likely many others that are not being controlled for. Still I think the data gives a representative snapshot of network performance. Overall SMS delivery was quite good. With the exception of a few of outliers most messages were delivered in under a minute, and Airtel consistently delivered on-network SMS in less than 10 seconds.

Occasional dropped messages show that safeguards need to be in place if SMS is used for critical applications. Some preliminary timing data I took in Uganda suggests that the networks there are not nearly as reliable. I’m looking forward to looking more carefully at Ugandan networks when I’m back.

If you like this sort of thing and also have too many modems and not enough social life, feel free to try out the script yourself. I’d be interested to see what the results look like in other countries.

A special thanks to Henry Corrigan-Gibbs and Matt Berg for interesting discussions about the timing script and SMS reliability.

This was posted first as SMSpecially Reliable? Part 1 and is repulblished here with permission

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"Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine, should be." - David Thornburg

Does this statement make you cringe? Squirm a bit in your chair? I’m not surprised if it does. As access to technology proliferates among schools in developing countries, a call for improved teacher training, curriculum, and methods of assessment seems vital to ensuring that the initiatives are sustainable. How else can you ensure that children are using time spent on a computer effectively and for educational purposes?

Despite this logical breakdown, research conducted in India over the past decade disputes these views. Let me preface an explanation of this research with a brief story:

This story illustrates New Dehli researcher, Sugata Mitra’s, suggestion that students using technology in unstructured, self-organized groups can help each other guide their own learning. In 1999, Mitra began experimenting with educational technology by building a PC with a high-speed internet connection into a wall in the slums of New Delhi. He then left the computer with no instructions for use or devices for language translation, planning to observe how individuals interacted with it.

Soon two children were huddled around the computer. Within minutes they had taught themselves how to point and click and were browsing the internet by the end of the day. After repeating this “Hole in the Wall” experiment throughout rural communities in India, he came to the conclusion that children, living in areas that lack adequate resources for instruction, could teach each other how to use a computer by working together in groups.

He makes several arguments for the benefits of this type of learning in classrooms:

1. It reduces the costs of efforts such as One Laptop per Child. While Mitra supports the design of the laptop, he believes there should be one laptop for every four children so that groups can work through their setbacks together.
2. When children are learning technology and exploring interests in an unstructured setting, they become excited about learning and retain much more.
3. Expecting children to work through the dilemmas on their own teaches them innovation and creative problem solving, two skills essential to any job. Instead of producing students that are able to memorize a laundry list of items, this approach produces students that know how to pinpoint where to find the same information.
4. Having children work together in groups teaches teamwork and collaboration.

I do not doubt that there is a place for Mitra’s recommendation of self-organized group learning in ICT4Ed. It’s a great opportunity for students to explore their curiosities, learn skills in innovation and problem solving, and retain steps to a much greater extent than they can with rote memorization.

However, I do believe that it is important to discern an appropriate time and circumstance for this method of learning. For instance, providing students with an allotment of time each day to freely roam the internet together, researching topics of their own interests, could be a great opportunity to keep them excited about technology and to show them how they can find answers to pressing questions and work through problems on their own.

This, however, can not replace the role of a teacher and a curriculum. Knowing how to use the tools for gathering information is an excellent skill but will not help a student requiring computer knowledge at a time when tools are not at hand. Following a structured curriculum ensures that students have the foundation of fact-based information to make them productive even when technology is not readily available. Furthermore, it ensures that all students are participating and learning the skills that they will need.

To illustrate these points, let’s look at back at my story and point out some of the gaps:

1. All of the students may now remember exactly how to change a desktop background. This does not mean, however, that they know how to verbalize the steps that they took without the computer screen directly in front of them. If someone were to ask one of the students to write down the steps, the student would not know the terms needed to describe the steps discernibly. Having a solid, curriculum-based foundation in educational technology and being assessed on it without a computer screen makes a student much more productive in times when technology is not available.
2. Students may have worked together to describe their steps to me, but this does not account for the one student, towards the back of the group, that is not paying attention or contributing to the group’s input. Having teachers and providing assessments can make sure that all students are gaining knowledge, not just the ones that put forth the most effort.
3. Changing a computer background may have been a great lesson working through computer screens to bring about a change on the computer, but it is not much of a useful skill in technology. If computer instruction consists of students roaming about the computer, exploring their interests, there will be quite of bit of pertinent information that they will likely not take the time to learn on their own. Making the desktop background look pretty is much more interesting to a student than learning the difference between RAM and ROM or how a file system works. These are skills that are important, so it is necessary to have a curriculum in place.

Taking this into consideration, while Sugata Mitra sets forth an interesting model for student learning that may have a place during a fraction of the school day, teachers, curriculums, and assessments cannot be replaced by machines and curious children.

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As a follow-on to Why Tanzanian Internet Access Prices Have Not Decreased with the Arrival of SEACOM, Jenny Stefanotti has submitted Domestic Broadband Infrastructure Policy: Laying the Foundation for the Future of ICT in Tanzania.

This is the Executive Summary of her thesis, written to fulfill the Second Year Policy Analysis paper requirement for the Master of Public Administration in International Development degree at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Domestic Broadband Infrastructure Policy: Laying the Foundation for the Future of ICT in Tanzania
By Jenny Stefanotti

With the recent launch of its submarine fiber-optic cable, SEACOM removed the most significant historical constraint to East African broadband connectivity. Nonetheless, lack of adequate domestic infrastructure still prevents widespread broadband adoption and the Tanzanian government has enacted very proactive policies in response. Determined to catalyze investment, the government recently began building a national fiber-optic backbone.

Because the substantial fixed costs of fiber networks are largely capacity independent, aggregating traffic in a single backbone can significantly lower the cost of broadband service provision. By encouraging private companies to utilize the government-owned backbone, Tanzania’s policy seeks to maximize cost efficiency and to enable the private sector to focus on last mile infrastructure, content, and application services.

Of concern, in the two years since Tanzania’s backbone policy was first put in place, the market has shifted rapidly. Currently the private sector is eager to invest in national backbone infrastructure on a cost effective basis, which implies public investment at the scale of the existing policy is no longer required. Additionally, the current policy carries substantial risks that remain unmitigated in implementation to date:

1. the government’s ownership of a single national backbone may bias policy decisions;
2. a public monopoly limits incentives for efficiency and current costs for the national backbone are higher than industry norm;
3. the government’s participation in the retail market through the government-owned Tanzania Telecommunications Company Limited (TTCL) compromises neutral management of the backbone and exacerbates the concerns outlined above.

As a consequence of these issues, the current policy risks undermining the very objectives it was formulated to achieve.

Recommendations for policy improvements must consider the substantial government investment to date. Furthermore, the government must take care to foster private investment and competition without creating market inefficiencies. By selling conditional indefeasible rights of use (IRUs) and dark fiber across the government-owned national backbone, Tanzania can enable competition in the wholesale broadband market alongside a consolidated infrastructure. Offering IRUs and dark fiber will shift capital away from duplicative investments in new networks and allow the government to quickly recover a substantial portion of its investment.

This approach will achieve scale in the national backbone and foster competition in the last mile, updating the current policy in light of the changes that have occurred in the market since its inception. Furthermore, these policies do not carry the significant implementation risks currently observed.

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