Information and Communication Technologies for Development

Next order of business now that someone from our team visited Malawi firsthand is to modify anything from our project plan that didn't fit as well as expected. Apparently our idea involving SMS is a no-go. Text message reliability isn't fast enough, and sometimes messages get dropped altogether and never delivered. Thus, our idea for the community network that the school children could be in charge of to inform the community of local events won't be implemented yet.

Some great ideas were brought up about what to put in our "internet in a box" - Christina mentioned a facebook-type application, where the school children could have their own profile and share stories about themselves and get to know their other classmates and share pictures and send messages, just like Facebook - the kids would love it, I am sure. Plus, Niall mentioned how he'd like the kids to work together more and learn from each other, so this application could (and would!) facilitate that very well.

We foresee running into possible difficulties in finding health data to put in our internet-in-a-box that is at an 8-12 year old level. Much health information available now on the internet is for teenagers and older, so somehow we have to paraphrase our findings in a way that won't be over the children's head, but will still get the point across about sex education, puberty, and life skills.

Contacting elementary schools in the Boston/Cambridge area is another step we plan on taking, to get a sample of their curriculum and see how they organize it, and what they teach. The START application that has been suggested that we use is a great program, but the fact that it only allows you to search for something by asking a question is a bit impractical and doesn't accurately reflect how a person searches for something on the internet, so we'd have to modify our use of START.