ICTworks

Welcome to the ICTworks bi-weekly ICT4D Retrospective, where we condense the last two weeks of news into a succinct list of links for your perusal. If you want your news to be featured, email them to ritse [at] ritseonline [dot] com To get these links faster, follow me on Twitter: @RitseOnline

Motivation by Curiosity: “A teacher who can be replaced by a machine should be”, says Arthur C. Clarke. Do you agree? Education scientist Sugata Mitra discusses the results of his experiments in child-driven education using computers during a talk given at TEDGlobal 2010.

Slashed: The price wars that have agitated Kenya’s mobile market take a new turn as Safaricom slashes prices by 94%. Will this activity hurt investment within the industry?

Rent-A-Computer, Government-Style: The government of India seeks to overcome cost barriers to computer literacy by providing computer rental options in rural areas. Learn more about this pilot project.

A is for Android: Google and Huawei launched the relatively affordable IDEOS Android Phone in Kenya last week, will this fragment ICT development in Africa?

Distance Matters: Ken Banks offers some thoughts on the problem of distance between ICT4D problem and ICT4D problem-solver.

A Gender Myth-Buster: According to a recent study, mobile ownership rates of women have surpassed that of men…in South Africa. Is the gap finally closing?

In The World of Academia: Ismael Peña-López lived-blogged the just-concluded IPID Postgraduate Symposium, where masters and doctoral students presented their research on a variety of topics within the field of ICT4D – Day 1, Day 2

Job-Hunting for the Unlettered: Microsoft Research India and Babajob have collaborated on an innovative text-free UI that allows non-literate people use computers to find jobs. This development seems to hold some promise for the non-formal education sector.

Got A Question about Mobile? MobileActive.org continues to be the go-to spot for most anything on mobile. Check out their new resource guide on using mobile for data collection.

Get a Job in ICT4D
IREX (Washington DC, USA): Program Associate
Tactical Technology Collective (Bangalore, India): Info-Activism Programme Coordinator

Finally…the ICT4D Spotlight of the Week: FrontlineSMS:Legal
This new iteration of the vastly popular FrontlineSMS product is focused on helping its users “bridge the distance between communities and the legal services they need most, using low-cost mobile tools”.