nine eleven and sustainable ICT in schools

Prompted by remembrances of the Sept 11 2001 attacks on the New York and Washington DC served up by radio and other media (I don't have a TV, thank goodness), I'm led to recall _where_ _I_ _was_ on that fateful day: In Jinja Town in Uganda, about 100 KM east of Kampala, delivering a workshop to school principals on sustainability strategies for their school-based telecenters. My colleagues there at that time were the redoubtable Meddie Mayanja (!) and the formidable Tony Bloome (!). With the Ugandan school heads, we clustered around the one TV set to watch replayed footage of the Twin Towers crashing down. At that distance, frankly, it was difficult to grasp what was really happening. Instead of a dream within a dream, we experienced a dream within reality. I walked around Jinja, which _still_ featured burnt-out houses and wastelands from the purging of Indians and others that had happened 20 years before. At some point, I think, Tony and I went rafting on the Nile. Eventually I caught my flight home, passing through Heathrow and discovering a world that had been upended in my absence. 

The school heads at our training workshop were remarkable. The program--VSAT-enabled school-based telecenters--launched and it was successful in the short term. Then the VSAT provider went bankrupt ("who are you callin' 'sustainable'?") and connectivity was shut down. Eventually, however, because the school heads, the students and their parents all saw value in the Internet connection, things began to re-emerge in sustainable forms with a new, local ISP. Today, the original 20-something broadband-supplied schools have increased 4x, at least. And all (or almost all) are running sustainably. (!)

 

Tony Bloome and a school head confer

No smart phone for you!

From 4 March edition of The New Vision (daily paper in Uganda) by way of Digital Learning:

EXPENSIVE mobile phones are a liability to teachers, information and communication technology (ICT) state minister Alintuma Nsambu has said. Nsambu encouraged teachers to instead invest in cheap computers that would help them move with the modern technological trends. 

“That flashy phone can have more features than a computer but cannot do certain things. It can also be easily stolen and you go back to zero,” he said. (snip) "Students are learning via the Internet. It will be difficult for a computer-illiterate teacher to stand in front of such children,” he cautioned. 
...

Robert Ssebukwu, the education ministry commissioner for ICT, said teachers had been offered refurbished computers at sh300,000.

300,000 Ugandan Shillings is about US $150. A Blackberry Curve is available for about US $325, WITH pay-as-you-go pricing or a monthly subscription of about US $45.

The MOE-subsidized computer doesn't seem like that bad a deal, until you factor in connectivity costs ($174 set-up for broadband, with monthly costs of $2,300 for 512 Mbps*) and whatever you need to do to keep your refurb running. And you still need to have a phone...

* I do realize that individuals in Uganda won't be signing up for broadband. Teachers make a little more than US $100 per month. Uganda's overall Internet pricing, however, is among the most expensive in Africa.