IT for Change's blog

The Policy Planning Unit (PPU) of the Education Department, Government of Karnataka, organized workshops to train 120 government teacher educators’ from DIETs and BRCs, as ‘Master Trainers on Public Software educational tools’, during August 2010, with resource support from Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and Azim Premji Foundation, infrastructure support from RV College of Engineering and faculty from IT for Change and RV Educational Consortium. The participants came from all parts of Karnataka and will work with teachers in their respective districts to build their capacities to use these tools in the regular teaching-learning processes in mathematics, science and social science subjects.

Almost all computer programs in schools so far have focused primarily on teachers and students acquiring basic computer skills, and there is not much attention to ‘computer aided learning’. The teachers also have no opportunity to use these basic computer skills acquired and the training in many cases becomes redundant and irrelevant. The workshop premise is that by shifting the focus to training teachers to use ICT educational tools for teaching regular subjects , it will enable greater ownership and commitment of teachers to using new possibilities offered by ICTs and consequently to more effective use of the ICT tools in the schools.

This is the first program in public education system in Karnataka, that focussed on ICT educational tools, covering mathematics (Geogebra), science (KTech), english (KAnagram) and geography/ environmental sciences (KGeography, KStars). Since these tools are publicly owned, a copy of the software applications was given to all the master trainers to install in their offices and elsewhere. Master trainers from the Kerala IT@Schools program (which has pioneered the use of such public software educational tools), invited by Azim Premji Foundation, also shared their ideas, lesson plans and gave feedback to the participants .

These ICT tools adopt a learner centered approach based on a theory of learning called constructivism, its core idea being that knowledge is actively constructed by the learner, building on her existing knowledge and it is not passively received from the teacher . The premise also is that by the teacher herself experiencing this pedagogical approach through use of these educational tools, she would be more amenable and able to adopt it while teaching in her classroom.

State Project Director, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, Ms Sandhya Venugopal Sharma interacting with participants in State Master Trainers in ICT educational tools program. The background screen shows the “Marble” public software tool useful for teaching of geography

In order to move beyond narrow ‘tool focus’ of ICTs, where techno-fascination is often a serious limitation and even danger of such programs, the program also had sessions on educational perspectives and the National Curriculum Framework 2005, where the potential of ICTs to support constructivistic teaching-learning approaches was discussed. The program resources are available on www.KarnatakaEducation.org.in.

An inexpensive netbook costing Rs 15,000 was demoed to the participants – this has all the features of the latest computers (except it has no DVD drive), provides 7 hour power backup and is highly portable being less than half a kilogram in weight. A netbook or laptop needs to be seen as a basic learning tool that all teachers must possess, and looking at it as a luxury or only as a sophisticated typewriter can retard powerful teacher professional development possibilities. Two of the participants were motivated to buy this during the workshop and many others expressed that they would too purchase their ‘learning tools’.

The participants were enthusiastic about the possibilities of these tools in daily teaching learning processes. Some even came up with creative lesson plans on the above tools taught. An e-mail list pskarnataka@googlegroups.com has been created for them to network, discuss these tools and also share their ideas, issues and solutions.

The assessment process for these participants included reviewing their pre training and post training learning through simple tests, participation during the training and reading the ‘reflections’ written by them after each days training. The participants who would be ‘certified’ as master trainers based on the assessment, would train five high school teachers in each block who would then train their colleagues over the next three years.

Photo: Pavan K J

A two day photo exhibition was organised in the villages Hosavaranchi (on Jun 7-8) and Attiguppe (May 31-Jun 1), in Mysore district, to showcase to the community the learning of adolescent girls who participate in the ‘Kishori Chitrapata’ (Adolescent girls’ expressions on the video screen) Project, a collaborative intervention of IT for Change, ‘Mahila Samakhya’ (Women of Equal Value) Karnataka, a women’s empowerment intervention of the Government of India, and UNICEF. The project aims to empower them through Information and Communication Technologies like videos, audio recorders, digital camera and computers.

The event was attended by community leaders and organised by ’sangha’ women who manage the ‘Namma Mahiti Kendra’ (Our Information Centres), also established by IT for Change in partnership with Mahila Samakhya. Sangha women are the support structure for these adolescent girls to facilitate their learning.

Kaveri, Manjula, Reetha are some of the 15-20 year old girls from rural areas who had to drop out of school to go for sheep grazing, to marry or to take care of the household, among other reasons. Their mobility was restricted to a couple of streets in the village due to their condition as girls and their belonging to a certain caste. Over the course of learning photography through digital camera, they shot pictures in other places, including agriculture fields and upper caste streets and homes. With the involvement and the support of the community, these girls started a process of re-visiting their own place as well as their role to show their realities through photos and videos.

Adolescent girls (kishoris) from rural villages in Mysore district were trained in audio and video content to be used to promote contextual and participatory learning process among them. A photo exhibit revealing the perspectives of their communities is being organised by IT for Change in Attiguppe village on May 31-June 01, 2010 and Hosavaranchi village on June 07-08, 2010. The event is part of a project implemented by IT for Change in Mysore in partnership with Mahila Samakhya, Mysore and Sarva Shikshana Abhiyan, with the support of UNICEF. The main goal of the project is to empower young girls from rural communities using ICTs.

May 14-15 2010: Jaipur- ‘What is Free Software and why is it relevant to you?’
May 18-19 2010: Delhi- ‘What is Free Software and why is it relevant to you?’
May 27-29, 2010: Kochi, Kerala- Software in Public Sector, with focus on Public Education’

For more information, please go to the Public-Software Website

With about 10 days left for the deadline on pre-proposals for the Gender and Citizenship in the Information Society Program, we are rather hopeful that there will be in the next few days, a steady email flow of applications. Indeed, the past month after the launch of the Program has been exciting. We have had discussions with many organisations and scholars and feel rather affirmed by their interest in the Program. Having the Project advisors come on board was the first pat on the back; the issue of gender and citizenship in its indisputably organic link with the digital space that we all inhabit is an area that southern feminist scholarship needs to immediately look at.

We know that the global south is indeed a highly contested concept, but it certainly is a metaphor that fills much of the conceptual vacuum when we discuss the standpoint of women from developing countries whose social locations make them vulnerable and exploited even as we move on the space ships of post-modern global existence that are post-human in their digital avatars. For many women, the context of the emerging world may be far removed from the information society, in the lack of their personal access to gizmos and the Internet. But ignoring the more pervasive, rapid and complex developments of the social reality of our times that are created through technology and its intermixing with social processes, would amount to the proverbial head in the sand, as social change overtakes development vision and the strategic response necessary in defining social justice and gender equality agenda commensurate with our times. The women in Mysore district we work with may be illiterate, but their lives are embedded in the wider process of institutional changes that new information and communication architectures are crafting. It is not only the heavily romanticised mobile phone that seems to create new excitement in their lives. The changing contours of state transactions through e-governance, the changes to work organisation patterns and employment trends a few miles outside of their villages, their affair with peer to peer video related processes that we were responsible for engineering and its insidious impact on their identity and solidarity as poor women and the shot in the arm that these videos have given their creatively wicked tactics to educate men about gender equality.. are all part of what has been an evolutionary space of the digital world that they belong to.. whether or not they have even seen the computer or surfed the Internet.

So coming back to the proverbial ostrich, why do some of us feminists want to deny this domain of study – of the information society – as relevant to deeper feminist quests? Why is there a rather widespread trend to see technology as tools that enable or interfere with daily life and not as a semantic transformation that alters society and relationships? And if indeed some others among us do acknowledge that there is something here that is deep, why dont we see the obvious – the desperate need there is for theory building across many arenas of gender and development and perhaps, (and on this i have had some insightful conversation with Lisa McLaughlin, one of our advisors), for a grand theory of development, social change and the gender equality question.

Not that without development intervention we don’t see autonomous sparks of action catalysed by technology. Only today i saw an email about a book called SMS Uprising that documents how mobiles are alchemists of social protest . But the heart of the matter is that as they are, technological super-systems tend to consolidate power. Today, the flows of domination and of resistance are different – like the Himalayan tributaries that change course once in a while signalling something deeply disturbing. The smaller sub-systems, at our local levels are constantly having to respond to the whims and ways of the ‘network’ (if you have not read Castells, please do), which in its essence has seen a capitalist surge that is unprecedented and the birth of a surveillance and highly paranoid patriarchal state. This means, the spunky and inspiring women in Mysore who we work with are perhaps doing what they will with their mobiles and their limited access to computers through their NGO, but how they will be able to turn the tide – or as it is in this case, reign in the propensities of the network so that it works for them is the BIG question. Can the smaller sub-system and its members survive and how will they subvert the network’s tendencies to totalise?

This is therefore a moment of reckoning for southern feminist scholarship. How are we reinterpreting the categories that we so passionately employ in our analyses – democracy, livelihoods, sexuality, citizen rights, entitlements, subversion, institutional accountability, global governance, solidarity, voice, agency, participatory development etc.- to be alive to the change under our noses that is so profound ? Are we willing to look at the emerging public sphere, the idea of space, the notion of the collective, the meaning of autonomy and choice – in relation to the information society?

Well, this Program seems to create a space for this kind of exploration. I have learnt a lot form the conversations I have had with women friends in the past month from across Asia. From the cooption of citizenship in the version of citizen-journalism promoted by TV channels, the fanciful preoccupation of Gen X politicians with e-development and its mutants, the structured ignorance of male policy makers in many of our countries who are busy with discussions on broadband (as if it is about wires and not about communication); the convenient conversion of many a public good into private goods through the doors that markets in the digital space are adept at opening, the confounding contradictions in our societies that arises with the strategic use of digital spaces for coopting women into retrograde and fundamentalist action to the ballooning spaces controlled private interests that paradoxically concern the arena of ‘public’ interaction like Face Book and Google, and the active censorship of anything remotely concerning the word ’sex’ by some governments, the issues ready to be explored from the standpoint of gender and development are innumerable.

This Program hopes to be able to attract committed scholar activists who believe there is in this Program some potential for influencing feminist practice and social policy.

The Teacher’s Communities of Learning Project aims to initiate computer aided learning in Government School Classrooms as well as introduce the idea of teachers networks among 35-40 teachers in one of the blocks in Bangalore.

The project began in March with an orientation workshop where we introduced teachers to the project idea. This was met with a mix of enthusiasm and confusion at the same time. Here we were trying to ask teachers what they want for their own professional development and they kept telling us what they want for the children in the classroom! (This is but one of the many challenges the project faces).

The month after this workshop was spent on school visits, where we saw the situation of computers in the schools, discussed general school issues, interacted with the teachers and the HMs of the schools. The picture on the left is not an anomaly. In a lot of schools, computers are kept along with utensils, other school items and even sewing machines! This coupled with the fact that teachers are not adequately trained to use the computers leads to non-use and sometimes mis-use as well. (We even found videos of porn in one computer).

Thus, the future success of this project lies in getting teachers excited about using computers and interacting with one another. The former seems easier to do as interest in computers has always been there. The networking bit however might prove to be a tough nut to crack. Suggestions, Comments welcome!