kind of realized on review that my OP was pretty dull. :)
I'm going on my own. I have a friend who has been there for three years, and I was there briefly in the spring to sort of get a feel for things. Initially I will be working with computers at a few existing sites.
Basically, there's this really common phenomenon where western donors will give things like computers or e-readers to a school or other worthy organization in a country like zambia, but will not be prepared to do the sort of sustained support work involved in actually seeing that those resources work. My sort of general idea is to try to make use of those resources that are now mostly sitting unused.
I guess my go-to anecdote was a visit I made last year to a computer lab that had been set up and funded by the british council[0]. They'd done a really considered job, involving creating a full-time support/sysadmin position at the school, sending that person to nairobi for special training seminars, and just generally working pretty hard to avoid the kinds of pitfalls I'd seen in other places. When I visited the room, two of the ten computers (the only ten computers with internet access in basically a public school board serving 300k kids) were in use, and they were in use by teachers. The admin, whose job is keeping a computer lab running, had never heard of wikipedia. Etcetera.
So I'm going to go live there for five months, bring some freelance work (I do iOS stuff, a bit) and see if I can't show some kids some of the neat things they can do with computers.
I'm going on my own. I have a friend who has been there for three years, and I was there briefly in the spring to sort of get a feel for things. Initially I will be working with computers at a few existing sites.
Basically, there's this really common phenomenon where western donors will give things like computers or e-readers to a school or other worthy organization in a country like zambia, but will not be prepared to do the sort of sustained support work involved in actually seeing that those resources work. My sort of general idea is to try to make use of those resources that are now mostly sitting unused.
I guess my go-to anecdote was a visit I made last year to a computer lab that had been set up and funded by the british council[0]. They'd done a really considered job, involving creating a full-time support/sysadmin position at the school, sending that person to nairobi for special training seminars, and just generally working pretty hard to avoid the kinds of pitfalls I'd seen in other places. When I visited the room, two of the ten computers (the only ten computers with internet access in basically a public school board serving 300k kids) were in use, and they were in use by teachers. The admin, whose job is keeping a computer lab running, had never heard of wikipedia. Etcetera.
So I'm going to go live there for five months, bring some freelance work (I do iOS stuff, a bit) and see if I can't show some kids some of the neat things they can do with computers.
0: http://www.britishcouncil.org/
edit: their/there =[