Science, Technology and Society  Information and Communication Technologies for Development  Ethics/Privacy  One topic from one of these each week  At the end of the quarter you will pick a specific topic from one of these two and write a paper about the topic and how it fits in with ICTD or ethics 1

Big themes in ICTD  Mobile phones are the thing There are more mobile phones in the world than toothbrushes  Leverage limited numbers of highly trained people Use technology to empower less-trained people 2

Challenges  Some are technological Power  Some are social Literacy  Social scientists and technologists must work together 3

Topics in ICTD  Livelihood  Education  Medicine  Data Collection and Reporting 4

Natalie Linnell, Richard Anderson, Guy Bordelon, Rikin Gandhi, Bruce Hemingway, S.B. Nadagouda, Kentaro Toyama 5

How do we improve access to education  Given shortage of teachers?  Primary education  Livelihood and adult education 6 Photos: dsh.cs.washington.edu,

One Approach: Facilitated Video 7 Excellent educator Recorded at one site Video shown to students at another site by a Facililtator who leads interaction around the video Idea: combine strengths of lecture and discussion

Facilitated Video has been used in Rural India for  Primary school education  Health education  Agricultural education Digital Green 8  Primary school education  Health education  Agricultural education Digital Green Photos: dsh.cs.washington.edu The work discussed here was done with Digital Green

Digital Green  Non-Governmental Organization (NGO)  Facilitated video for agricultural extension Teaching farmers better farming practices  Help existing agricultural organizations switch to facilitated video  Over 2,500 shows in January 2011  488 villages with recent shows 9

Benefits of Facilitated Video  It enables a less skilled person to lead class  Provides teacher training while teaching  BUT it relies heavily on the facilitator Interaction is vital The quality of interaction matters 10 How can we ensure high quality and quantity of interaction? Technology to increase capabilities of facilitators

Goal:  Use technology in facilitated video to provide structure to the interaction support to the facilitator 11

Contributions of this work: 12  Identifying the kind of support that is helpful to the facilitator Targeted facilitation advice  Building two different technological solutions to provide support  Field testing and evaluating these solutions With a real deployment Custom hardware remote control Audio Codes/Android Device

Approach: Provide prompts to the facilitator When to stop the video What to say On a handheld device 13

There is a challenge: How does the device know what video is playing and where it is? 14 We developed two different approaches to this problem

Why two separate approaches?  The two approaches have complementary strengths and weaknesses  Rather than guessing which was better Evaluate in the field with real users 15

First Approach: “Smart” Remote Control  Custom hardware device  Normal remote control + screen for presenting information  When the user puts the DVD into the player, they enter that DVD’s ID number  Then the device tracks button presses to know which video is playing and at what time offset 16

Second Approach: Audio Codes + Android Application  Create (audible) “audio codes” with distinctive frequency distribution  Embed them into the video at regular intervals  An Android-based application Activates the microphone Listens to audio Uses simple digital signal processing to the detect codes and display the correct information 17

Audio Codes 18

User response In interviews, all users said:  They liked using the device  It helps them remember the points they should highlight  Without it sometimes they would forget points  Facilitating was easier; without the device they needed to watch the video more closely 19

 This is a solution people can and will use 20

Conclusions  Support for the facilitator has a number of benefits Improved interaction Increased confidence Facilitation training Making facilitation easier  Context matters Affects which benefits are realized The setting and the users matter 21