Presentations

Anita Gurumurthy, Executive Director, IT for Change presented a paper at the Asia Pacific Regional Consultation on Women’s Public and Political Life in Asia Pacific’ organised by the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD), from 19-20 September 2012, at Dhulikhel, Kavre, Nepal.

The Jamsetji Tata Centre for Disaster Management (Tata Institute of Social Sciences) organised a consultation between 27-28 August 2012 on 'Post 2015 Development' to reflect on, and develop potential successor goals and indicators to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Anita Gurumurthy was invited to review the candidate goals and indicators related to universal connectivity.

The presentation discusses the key challenges facing teacher education and the need to evolve new models of teacher education that are need based, self directed and self paced learning with continuous mentoring, such models are essential to make RTE, NCF, NCFTE a reality in the Indian school system.

The presentation explains the need for state governments to move from 'first generation programs' where students only learn word, notepad, paint etc, bypassing teachers, to "second generation programs" - where teachers use software tools to create digital learning resources, and ICTs are used to achieve specific educational aims.

Study Visit for Mongolian delegation on e-governance in India , November 18-26 2011

Between 18^th and 26^th November 2011, IT for Change in partnership with LoGin South Asia organised a study visit on e-governance for a 17 member delegation from Mongolia, led by the Deputy Chief of the Cabinet Secretariat Mr. Nyamjav Darjaa, Government of Mongolia. All the participants of the study visit are closely involved in the implementation of the One Stop Stop programme (OSS) funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation – which attempts to bring about single window convergent service delivery in Mongolia. The study visit was organized with the primary aim of enabling the participants to understand the emerging e-governance initiatives in India so that they could take away learnings that could aid in refining the implementation of OSS in Mongolia : especially from the multiple experiments that attempt to use the potential of ICTs for convergent public service delivery.

IT for Change organised a panel with IKME at the EADI/DSA General Conference on 'Rethinking Development in an Age of Scarcity and Uncertainty' which was held in York (United Kingdom) on 19-22 September 2011. The panel was titled 'How are Digital Technologies Transforming Development?' Anita Gurumurthy was a part of the panel and presented on 'Bottom of the Pyramid and Other Dangerous Development Delusions of the Information Age'. Her co-panelists were Mike Powell, IKME, United Kingdom, and Evangelia Berdou, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, United Kingdom. This  panel examined ideas and broad ideologies that new ICTs are bringing to the development sector, looking at the challenges and possibilities in terms of equitable development with social justice. The panel was chaired by Robin Mansell, London School of Economics, United Kingdom. More information is available about the conference at http://www.eadi.org/gc2011. The session overview along with the presentations can also viewed on the EADI site

Anita Gurumurthy attended the UNWomen workshop on 'Leading Innovations for Gender Responsible Service Delivery' at Dar-es Salam, Tanzania (21-22 June 2011). The workshop was part of the United Nations Public Service Forum being organised by UN DESA along with other UN entities such as UNODC. Anita spoke on 'What information and communications technologies can do for gender responsive service delivery', presenting ITfC's experiences from the field project of Prakriye - Centre of Community Informatics and Development and the Gender and Citizenship in the Information Society Research Programme.

IT for Change engaged with Department of Technical Education (DTE), Government of Karnataka to help them in the process of shifting to public software (Free and Open Source Software) along with revising their syllabus to include public software educational tools.

Based on our advocacy work relating to National Policy on ICT in School Education, the issue of 'vendor driven ICT programs' was discussed in the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) and a sub-committee was setup to study the issue.

Anita Gurumurthy made a presentation on Network publics at 'Conference on Digital Technologies for 21st Century Democracy' by Club De Madrid in New York (USA). The presentation titled 'Network publics as digital futures' questioned the nature of a global network public that can guarantee equitable governance.