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What do libraries have to do with innovation for aid and development? Total honest answer from my side: when I was doing my research for the 134th Terms of Reference Podcast, I knew there would be high value in a conversation with Chris Coward – who is the co-founder, Principal Research Scientist, and Director of the Technology & Social Change Group (TASCHA) at the University of Washington – but I had no idea that our conversation would be such a fun, far ranging and wild ride. From TASHA’s convening of the first tech conference in 1999 about how society would be affected by the “new” internet, to how MOOCs are used in the developing world, to how adoption of smart phones in Myanmar fundamentally changes that populations view of what computing is all about… to libraries, and how these institutions are becoming – not less – but more and more relevant in the age of information. I know you’re going to love this show. You can connect with Chris here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chriscoward Tweets by chriscoward
IN TOR 134 YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT
- How difficult it is to predict social change by technological means
- The wok TASCHA has done since 1999, now diving into MOOCs
- Interesting outcomes in enrollment and completion rates in MOOCs from lower income bracket people, world
- How the mobile era, with all its blessings, has done away with tinkering. People don’t surf the web, they scroll down Facebook
- How libraries, or physical spaces to meet, promote making, provide knowledge repositories, are more alive than ever in 2017’s development
- Ideas on how to fight excess connectivity issues, including fake news and echo chambers
OUR CONVERSATION FEATURES THE FOLLOWING
Names:
- University of Washington (UW)
- UW’s Information School (iSchool)U
- iSchool’s Technology & Social Change Group (TASCHA)
- Vint Cerf
- The Library Network
- USAID
- Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
- Open Society Foundations
- Microsoft (Philanthropies)
- Tableau Foundation
Topics:
- Internet, societal impact
- Y2K
- Online education
- Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), enrollment and completion rates
- Democratic transition
- Media access
- Critical thinking, skills
- Social Media, Facebook
- Fake news, amplification
- Post-truth politics
- Civic engagement
Places
EPISODE CRIB NOTES
02:25 Hold multidisciplinary academic discussions like it’s 1999- Chris was hanging with “internet thinkers”, Vint Cerf among them
- about how this tech is going to play out
- There were technologists, economists, media people, geographers
- Engaging academic debate, not a lot about the impact on society
- Thus TASCHA is born, first as a grad student project
- Stephen: Any predictions come true?
- “None of them“
- It was believed institutions would be shaken up, just not how
- There was the idea of “interplanetary web”
- There were also unfounded concerns (Y2K)
- Some countries leaped over industrialization, right into the information age
- The rise of some “online super powers” like India was a surprise
- “I really enjoy doing it from an academic standpoint”
- But TASCHA enables people to try things, intervention in development countries
- TASCHA concentrates resources
- It has supported interventions in South Africa, Colombia, The Philippines
- People were motivated, but there were not a lot of them
- Online courses had unusually high completion rates
- TASCHA courses helped job enrollment for students
- It starts finding “niches”, like women
- Realizations about the cost efficiency
- TASCHA courses are low-cost, but end users foot large internet bills
- Motivation to follow a MOOC to completion is largely a predictor of real world achievement
- Particularly interesting and important that it holds true on lower income brackets
- Stephen: We are all guilty of signing up to free MOOC and that’s all
- TASCHA is university-based, “housed in the Information School”
- It staffs researchers, teachers, students
- Proposals are bread and butter
- Projects have involved democratic transition, media access evolution
- Penetration has risen. First digital experience for many today is mobile
- At the verge of a new digital-cultural age
- Stephen: Smartphones cannot be fixed or tweaked at home. Critical thinking does not take place. A generation of non-tinkerers is lamentable
- Chris was in Myanmar. “Three people say they have used Facebook for each one who says to have used the internet”
- “They have an app-based view of internet, it distorts your conception”
- Social media exacerbates social and cognitive biased phenomenons
- Critical thinking skills are in danger
- It is easy to develop suspicions without based
- Amplification of fake news
- Stephen: What does all do to self-worth?
- Chris: we don’t go against the current. Courses about good judgment in social media
- TASCHA works with The Library Network
- “In Myanmar, things are at disarray”. Including over 4,000 libraries
- Most of the libraries were launched by volunteer groups
- They have become spaces for the exchange of ideas, socially recognized as such
- Back to the tinkerer tragedy
- “Libraries have been makerspaces, particularly in the US”
- Libraries are arts and crafts spaces, incubators
- Do they encompass something other than books, perchance?
- At libraries, people debate. “That’s how things flourish”
- “Some of the early pictures [of libraries] show people debating”, and a massive repository of knowledge in the back
- Chris was in Denmark, people were lamenting the demise of open discussion space
- Starbucks just won’t do.
- Coffeeshop people would rather you leave them alone
- Kids these days…
- Back at Denmark, a Library gong rang throughout the halls
- Chris “goes about” by focusing on a “key goal”
- Libraries are not an end goal, but something that can be leveraged into all sorts of opportunities
- “I don’t go about looking for grant to fund libraries, but to fund experimentation”
- Libraries are places to “physical peers”, round tables. “They facilitates MOOC sessions”
- Libraries are great to promote data literacy. “They are great entry points”
- Libraries are awesome intermediaries, still today. They “bring together the hardware and the software”
- TASCHA applies for funding from governments (USAID, Namibia) and private donors (Gates Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Microsoft)
- Tableau Foundation (TOR 127)
- “I don’t know”
- “I have some thought about what will take off in the future”
- Maybe something took off “but we aren’t fully aware of it”
- “Some of our work with public access to computers was instrumental in places such as Nigeria, and Georgia”. Government budgets were allocated
- Microsoft used a lot of TASCHA’s work to understand how migrants use technology, years before our current situation
- TASCHA has helps organizations make better sense of certain critical situations
- “We were selected by Gates Foundation to lead a 10-year effort”
- “It’s career changing for me”
- It goes beyond libraries.
- Civic engagement
- People realize the social media echo-chambers are a call for libraries to claim their place
- “I’m excited about the work we are about to do on civic issues”
- “We didn’t expect” such high completion rates from TASCHA’s MOOC offering. “That was quite good, and pretty much counterintuitive”
- We used to think “dropping a computer on every village” with all the info they would require to sort themselves out would be the Final Solution.
- It “pretty much did not work”
- “We weren’t looking rigorously at the issue”
- Then mobile phones exploded
- And so did Innovation Hubs and Labs across Africa, like in Nairobi
- The key was the physical space
- “People do like to come together”
- “Physical collisions”
- Meeting counteracts the lack of tinkering
- Can anonymity be protected when fighting echo chambers?
- “I do not have the answer to that. I will definitely be looking that up”
- If there is a message to the development community, is to hold on on “more, more, more”
- We have not been careful about critical thinking.
- Thoughtful attention is always in high demand
- “A lot of people on Twitter”
- Climate change. “Some people are adding real tech to the matter”
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If you have any feedback you’d like to share for me or Chris, please leave your thoughts in the comment section below! I read all of them and will definitely take part in the conversation. If you have any questions you’d like to ask me directly, head on over to the Ask Stephen section. Don’t be shy! Every question is important and I answer every single one. And, if you truly enjoyed this episode and want to make sure others know about it, please share it now:[feather_share show=”facebook, twitter, linkedin, google_plus” hide=”reddit, pinterest, tumblr, mail”]
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