ICT4D

This study investigated how ICT facilitates teaching of vocabulary, the ways teachers use ICT in teaching vocabulary and problems that hinder teachers from using ICT in teaching vocabulary development. The design of the study was survey; the area of the study was Awka town with 1250 primary teachers selected as the sample for the study from a population of 3754. Three research questions guided the study with a 24-item questionnaire used to collect data for the study. Mean scores were used to analyse the data. The findings revealed that teachers supported the use of ICT to teach vocabulary development; teachers do not use ICT in teaching vocabulary and they identified some problems which hinder their use of ICT in classroom instruction. These problems include poor finances to procure computer, slow and frustrating network connectivity, epileptic power supply, no access to computer facility and lack of computer skills by the teachers and pupils. Based on these findings, some recommendations were made.

Containing 37 essays derived from the 2013 International Conference on Sustainable Development Practice, hosted by Columbia University in New York and co-sponsored by the UN SDSN, The Earth Institute, and the Global Association of Master's of Development Practice, this collection focuses on a wide range of topics with an emphasis on positive outcomes in development practice.

I’m all for discussion and debate, and I’ve taken part in my fair share over the last decade. But I’m now beginning to wonder if, after all this time, everything the ICT for Development (ICT4D) community could have said has been said. The fact that it is still talking about the same handful of challenges and issues implies that very little, if anything, has changed. Have we really made so little progress?

"A prelimary version of this article was shortlisted, and then modified and published (IJEBR journal) in the special issue of the Engage HEI conference  (2010):                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      The pre-copyedit version of the final article is available in the e-print link below:
http://eprint.ncl.ac.uk/pub_details2.aspx?pub_id=194435
 
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This paper discusses an exploratory approach for identifying potential ICT design problems in a local community through collaboration with its members. We are currently participating in the activities of a volunteer community in Syria, where members appropriate Facebook and other online tools to collaborate and organize. In such context, conducting participatory design is not straightforward and needs to be problematized. For instance, what is the desired outcome of participation? Who participates in what? And what are the suitable tools? Here we focus on the value of participation in defining relevant design problems in collaboration with the community. We present our research process where we adopt an ethnographic approach guided by the works of sociologists Howard Becker, Juliet Corbin, and Anselm Strauss. We finally describe how this approach also allows us to move from participant observation towards participatory design.

Land management is a complex process. In developing countries, this activity has been facing many challenges. ICT is said to be an adequate instrument to facilitate land management activities. In this reports, we present experiences and observations from Tanzania

"This book constitutes the proceedings of the First International Conferences on e-Technologies and Networks for Development, ICeND 2011, held in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, in August 2011. The 29 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 90 initial submissions. The papers address new advances in the internet technologies, networking, e-learning, software applications, Computer Systems, and digital information and data communications technologies - as well technical as practical aspects.
Content Level » Research

Keywords » Web services - artificial intelligence - biometrics technologies - neural networks - wireless communications

Related subjects » Artificial Intelligence - Communication Networks - Database Management & Information Retrieval - Software Engineering"

"This paper understands that in emerging Asian contexts, the proliferation and adoption of Internet technologies leads to two distinct changes in the material (re)construction of the city:

1.      Built Form of the City: The physical and material aspects of the city are restructured, redesigned and realigned to house the infrastructure of Internet Technology economies.

2.      Governance and Administration: The technologies of governance (and also, the governance of technologies) that reconfigure the city for better control, regulation and containment of the subjects of the state.

These changes are articulated and understood, in contemporary scholarship and discourse, through the tropes of Access and Transparency, which propose Technology as neutral. These studies also locate technology as outside of the changing socio-political transformations that the city undergoes in its attempt to emerge as an IT City. The framework, by contextualising technology differently – in larger narratives of continuity and disruption – opens up a dialogue between cybercultures and social sciences to look at conditions of change It also shows how the It demonstrates how such an approach to technology studies enables new and nuanced forms of social sciences inquiry into processes like Dislocation and Migration, which have never addressed the technology question as central to the phenomena."

"Gregory, S. (2013). Engaging classes in a virtual world. In K. Bredl & W. Bösche (Eds.), Serious Games and Virtual Worlds in Education, Professional Development, and Healthcare (pp. 126–144). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

"Virtual worlds, such as Second Life, are multi-user, interactive computer-simulated environments created for users to inhabit and interact via avatars, which are graphical representations of a person that can be personalised and used in the virtual world. In this research, 239 off-campus (distance) education students chose to attend weekly sessions in Second Life from 2008 to 2011. These sessions catered for a diverse group of students. It is internationally claimed that virtual worlds are engaging for distance
education students. Engagement is the combination of student’s feelings, observable actions or performance, perceptions, and beliefs. This mixed-methods research sought to investigate whether virtual worlds were engaging for adult student learners. Recorded in-world (in the virtual world) conversations and the completion of a survey by university students provide data from which the findings are made. In-world discussion found that the virtual world, in this case Second Life, is an engaging environment
in which to learn. These findings indicate the need for further research in using a virtual world as an educational resource.""