Seven scholars from the School of Information returned this week from the ICTD 2010 Conference in London. The conference provided a forum for researchers and practitioners of the use of information and communication technologies in development practice to meet and discuss the latest research advances in the field.
Visiting senior researcher Kentaro Toyama served as the chair of the conference program committee and also delivered one of the conference’s keynote addresses. The senior program committee also included I School faculty members Jenna Burrell and Tapan Parikh, as well as I School affiliate Eric Brewer.
Jenna Burrell and Kentaro Toyama were organizers of the workshop “Qual Meets Quant: Bridging the Gap between Technical and Social Researchers to Foster International Development through Mobile Phones,” which brought together together technical and social researchers, as well as policy makers, to explore the potential of mixed-method approaches to analyzing new sources of data gathered through ubiquitous technologies.
Toyama was also a co-author of the papers “Collage: A Presentation Tool for School Teachers,” “Beyond Strict Illiteracy: Abstracted Learning Among Low-Literate Users,” and “Managing Microfinance with Paper, Pen and Digital Slate.”
Assistant professor Tapan Parikh was a co-author of the paper “Metamouse: Improving Multi-user Sharing of Existing Educational Applications,” along with Brewer and I School alumna Janani Vasudev (MIMS ’10).
Doctoral student Josh Blumenstock co-authored the paper “Mobile Divides: Gender, Socioeconomic Status, and Mobile Phone Use in Rwanda,” based on his dissertation research.
Doctoral student Janaki Srinivasan presented the paper “Looking Beyond ‘Information Provision’: The Importance of Being a Kiosk Operator in the Sustainable Access in Rural India (SARI) Project, Tamil Nadu, India” as well as the poster “From Telecom Switches to Telecenters: Changes in the ‘Telecom for Development’ Discourse in India (1947-1999).”
