Tag: TC104

Meet Carolyn Florey, this week’s featured TechChange alumna who we interviewed this week in her office at the World Bank. A serial TechChange participant of over five courses to date, Carolyn started taking TechChange courses in 2011 to supplement her Master’s program at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and has since been coming back for more continuing education in her ICT4D career.

Read Carolyn’s story below:

What interested you in taking TechChange courses? As a graduate student of International Development at Johns Hopkins SAIS, I wanted to focus on tech innovation in developing countries. I had taken a course at SAIS on the Politics of Humanitarian Aid that touched a bit on the use of technology for crisis mapping and disaster relief and wanted to learn more. I enrolled in TechChange’s TC103: Tech Tools and Skills for Emergency Management and was hooked. From there, I crafted an independent study around the format and content of TechChange courses.

What did you find useful from TechChange courses that keeps you coming back? Based on my experience taking TechChange courses in Mobiles in Development, mHealth, mData, mAccess, and Digital Organizing and Open Government, I continue taking TechChange courses for professional development and networking in my industry. Here’s why:

  1. TechChange is at the pulse of ICT4D. TechChange is great at weaving together the application of technology across sectors and industries. You always need to keep up with what’s happening, especially in this field. They’re always updating the syllabi to share the latest industry information and inviting the most relevant industry experts as guest speakers. I found that TechChange always offered courses with both breadth and depth. For example, TC105: Mobiles in International Development was a good introduction for cross-sector applications of different mobile tools, while TC309 on mHealth let me narrow my focus to relevant topics for my daily work in the Global Health Bureau at USAID.

  2. Course format and flexibility. In graduate school, I was working 30 hours a week and going to school full time with a five-course workload, so I needed the flexibility that TechChange gave to supplement my curriculum at SAIS. In my independent study, TechChange courses were helpful resources when I wrote papers and organized events for the SAIS Careers in Development club. The format and content is convenient to access as live events are recorded and archived, and course materials are available even 4 months after a course ends.

  3. Learning industry lingo and key players. One valuable take away from TechChange courses is learning key terms and industry influencers to build and demonstrate expertise in ICT4D. For example, the mHealth content I was exposed to in TC105 came through in my interview for my former role at USAID, and I think ultimately helped me get the job.

What impact has TC105 had on you and your career? TechChange is part of my regular continuing education to stay up-to-date with the most relevant information on the ICT4D industry. I’ve also made some very meaningful connections through my TechChange courses. At this point in my career, TechChange has evolved for me to become a valuable networking tool. One example of this was the TechChange happy hour during the mHealth Summit in Washington, DC last December that brought together participants of the mHealth TC309 course and attendees of the Summit.

What advice would you give to students taking TC105 or any TC course?

  1. Make attending live events a priority. Look at the live event discussions as part of your continuing education. Rarely will you get an hour of access to these industry experts.

  2. Focus on what you’re most interested in. If you’re juggling work, a TechChange course, and sometimes other courses as well, all the information can get overwhelming. Make sure to review the TechChange course syllabus ahead of time and focus on the things you’re interested in, prioritizing one week’s content over another if necessary.

  3. Read through other participants’ comments and questions. Often, other participants will have experience you don’t, so they’ll have some informed questions and insightful comments.

About Carolyn Florey

Carolyn Florey is an Operations Officer at the World Bank Institute’s Innovation Labs. Prior to joining WBI, Carolyn worked as a Private Sector Partnerships Specialist at USAID, focusing on mobile technology and health partnerships. She has worked in the ICT for development space for the past few years at organizations such as Jhpiego, NetHope, the Federal Communications Commission, and Earth Institute across sectors including mHealth, mobile money, women’s access and eAgriculture. She also worked at the Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank’s Development Marketplace, a women’s health NGO in Delhi (Breakthrough), and as a Fulbright grantee in South Korea. She has an MA in International Development from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a BA from Tufts University. You can find Carolyn on Twitter @carolynflorey.

[UPDATE: Course rescheduled for April 8th, 2013]

We’re very sorry to inform you that we are rescheduling the Digital Organizing and Open Government course that was originally scheduled to begin on this Monday, January 7. If you have already paid for a seat in the course, we will (of course) refund your tuition in full if you so desire, or we will hold your spot in the rescheduled course as well as offering you a complimentary seat in our upcoming course: Tech Tools and Skills for Emergency Management. The reason for this unexpected schedule change at such a late date is that the Lead Facilitator, Christopher Neu, dislocated his shoulder and will be unable to type for several weeks. Rather than find a last-minute replacement, we opted instead to offer the course at a later date with the original experience intact. We apologize for any inconvenience and still hope to see you in class!

 

[ORIGINAL POST]

We’re excited about starting class on January 7th! We’ve already received applications from Senegal, Italy, Egypt, Spain, Cameroon, Kenya, Sweden, Haiti, India, UK, and more. However, we’ve had a number of questions about the course format, content, experts, and exercises that we wanted to address in more detail. Please let us know if this helps!

HOW IS THE COURSE ORGANIZED?

We’ve designed our courses specifically to combine self-paced multimedia content with real-time video engagement with experts. We have also included hands-on exercises to get you familiar with the tools under discussion under guidance from our staff. Courses are expected to take 5-9 hours per week of effort with a minimum of one real-time interaction, but can also be completed up to three months after the end of live courses. Broadly speaking, these are the themes that will be discussed during the four weeks of the course:

  • Week 1: Introduction to Core Themes (Jan. 7)
  • Week 2: Tech Tools for Digital Organizing (Jan. 14)
  • Week 3: Tech Tools for Open Gov and Open Data (US) (Jan. 21)
  • Week 4: Final Project–Toward Global Open Government (Jan. 28)

WHAT KIND OF CONTENT CAN I EXPECT?

Part of the course revolves around reading the latest research and discussing as a class. To that effect, we’ll be exploring the latest research from leading experts on “liberation technologies” such as Patrick Meier; crowd-sourced manuals (including one of our favorite: The Outsider’s Guide to Supporting Nonviolent Resistance to Dictatorship); and other videos, blog posts, and academic research. We try to balance the readings to contribute to expert discussions so that participants can dive deeper into core content in their field.

WHO ARE THE EXPERTS?

We’re excited about the broad panel of experts that we’ve lined up to hold live class discussions via video over the four weeks.

  • Kaushal Jhalla of the World Bank will be speaking about the challenges and potential of big data and development
  • Jordan Menzel of CrowdHall on the topic of using technology for public engagement and accountable government
  • Linda Raftree of Plan International, USA on open data and community engagement
  • Wayne Burke of the Open Forum Foundation on building sustainable communities around open government.

HOW DO THE HANDS-ON EXERCISES WORK?

Moving beyond content and experts, we’ve designed hands-on exercises for each week of the course to familiarize students with the tools under discussion.

  • Week 1: Explore application of social media tools with guides from Movements.org including Twitter and other social media.
  • Week 2: Public access tools such as CrowdHall to be used for engaging public figures in dialogue.
  • Week 3: Domestic/US-oriented open gov resources from Sunlight Labs including Open State Project, Stream Congress, and ClearSpending.
  • Week 4: International final project exploring open government in your home country: How can you get involved?

 

We hope this helps! Please let us know if you have any other questions by leaving a comment, tweeting @techchange, or sending an email to chris [at] techchange.org. Thanks!

Curious about learning with TechChange? Check out our upcoming class: Digital Organizing and Open Government. Class starts Jan 7! Apply Now.

Have you seen our latest video about TC104: Digital Organizing and Open Government?

This may just be a simple ad for our course, but it also showcases a lot of what we can do to create a learning experience through video. We thought we could use this video as a chance to show the process we go through any time we make a video.

Step 1: Conceptualize

The first step to producing any video is developing the content for it. Whether you’re dealing with a fictional narrative or factual documentation, whether your movie is thirty seconds or ninety minutes, the first and most important step will always be figuring out the story that you are telling.  We meet as a team – and with clients – to go over in detail exactly what information needs to be conveyed, and we develop a visual narrative around those ideas, drawing on the shared talents of our educators, tech experts, graphic designers, and video producer/editor (me!). From this collaborative process, we develop a script and produce a storyboard of what the final video will roughly look and flow like.

Step 2: Drawing/Filming

Once we have the concept fully fleshed out, we get to work on building the pieces we use for the final video. Our incredibly talented graphic designers draw the different pieces and make adjustments based on feedback; some of these pieces are fairly simple drawings, others are highly detailed and contain multiple frames of action that will ultimately get animated. Additionally, at this stage we produce a high quality audio track of the script, as well as potentially doing any live-action filming that is required (most commonly in front of a green-screen).

Step 3: Animating/Editing

Once we have the pieces made, we begin to assemble them together. Drawings are animated primarily using Adobe After Effects. First basic motions are mapped in time with the audio, and then more complex effects are added, such as sub-compositions/animations, lighting effects, motion effects, or anything else that’s needed. Generally, the animating phase begins while the drawing phase is still underway, so that if any problems arise with our original ideas for the video, we can easily and efficiently make adjustments. For example, in our TC104 video, we decided to flesh out the bike metaphor used near the beginning when the visual narrative around that section seemed weak, and it was a simple matter of drawing a few additional pieces and animating them into place.

Step 4: Revisions

The animation culminates in the production of a rough draft of the final video that is then reviewed first by the entire TechChange team. Here’s the rough draft we produced for TC104:

After any changes, we then go over a revised draft with the client. We carefully weigh their feedback to make a final round of adjustments to the video, and then we are done!

Key Takeaways

There are a few key lessons about this process that are worth highlighting and remembering:

  • The strength of the concept/story will carry over to the strength of the video. Having a strong script and audio track early in the process makes the whole process smoother.
  • Producing animations is a collaborative process. The input of experts and clients is extremely valuable, and our creative team is very talented and flexible in working to achieve the strongest possible video. Having multiple perspectives throughout the process is incredibly valuable, because viewers of the final product will have a wide range of perspective, too.
  • Producing animations is fun! It is an effective and easy way to uniquely convey any information to the entire world!

Hopefully this post has been an insightful look into our process. Please contact us with any questions about our process, or if you’d like us to help you produce videos!

TechChange is excited to announce a new partnership with Transitions (TOL), a Prague-based journalism and media training organization with a focus on the post-communist countries of Europe and the former Soviet Union. Running a variety of programs – from the publication of one of the first online magazines to cover political, social, economic and cultural issues in the region since 1999, to providing young reporters with intensive training on best journalistic practices  – TOL has been a regional leader on media and democracy building efforts.

Bringing their expertise on media and journalism development to their target region through our eLearning environment, TOL will be running their course: “Reporting on Education,”  adapting a course that the Guardian Foundation originally created for TOL and the BBC’s iLearn platform. And though journalist training is a broad endeavor, even when focusing on a particular region, we’re hoping that this course will help to not only train journalists, but also to elevate national and regional policy dialogue on the issues of educational reform, open governance and democratic accountability.

Counting gets underway at a polling station in Moscow following Russia’s Presidential election, 4 March 2012.*

This new institutional relationship and course topic comes at a time when the role of the media in promoting such topics is an ever salient issue, particularly in Eastern Europe. Over the past few months, the Kremlin has tightened control over various aspects of civil society and acted to counter what it views as foreign interference in Russia’s sovereign affairs, moves that included booting USAID, a key funder of media training and other efforts, out of the country.

TechChange has helped organizations address these challenges and co-authored a piece in the Huffington Post (USAID’s Eviction From Russia: An Opportunity for Online Learning as E-Development) expressing that:

“there is reason to believe that using widely-available technology, democracy promotion organizations have the potential to greatly influence dialogue by amplifying local practitioner voices, and giving domestic organizations a channel for collaboration with international experts.”

This is where we are hoping that our partnership with TOL will further distribute valuable content – including across closed or semi-closed borders – and build up the capacity of a core group of journalists to report in an informative and engaging way on the sometimes complicated field of education. After all, the task of training journalists in this case isn’t geared just toward building a better media, but also a better, more equitable education system and more modern and democratic societies. We’re hoping that this first course will be yet another worthwhile addition to this process.

*Photo Credit: Credit: OSCE/Jens Eschenbaecher

Interested in digital activism and citizen journalism? Check out our 104 course on digital organizing, which will be run January 7 – February 1!

Cross-posted from the TC104: Global Innovations for Digital Organizing course we ran last May. If you are interested in mobile organization and censorship/privacy in the 21st century, consider enrolling in the next round in January. 

 

Credit: Duncan 2012

Most of you will be familiar with the philosophical thought experiment, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Well over recent weeks I’ve been mulling over the much less catchy or succinct question of “If a person tweets/updates their status/sends a text/blogs and no one responds, did they really make a sound?” It probably won’t be making it onto a philosophy syllabus anytime soon, but hear me out…

I recently travelled to Malawi to trial a social accountability approach designed to improve the quality of rural schools. The purpose was to help adolescent girls analyse their problems and provide an opportunity for them to raise these with school management to find collaborative solutions. I found it both sad and hopeful when some of the girls explained that nobody had ever asked for their opinions – they saw this as a chance to finally speak. A voice was incredibly important to these young women and self-expression seemed to have real value in itself. But I wonder if voice is enough. Doesn’t school management also need to value and respond to girls’ opinions? I kept asking: If speaking out doesn’t lead to action, do we just create false expectations and disillusionment?

During TC104 I’ve thought about this a lot. The internet and mobile phones offer so many opportunities for voice and reaching out – to other citizens but also to people in power. But I question what other elements are needed to ensure that voice leads to dialogue, and dialogue leads to responsive actions and tangible development changes.

   Credit: Plan

I came to this course wanting to know about the digital tools/approaches that could support young people’s meaningful participation in social accountability initiatives (for an explanation check out pages 10-11 of Plan’s Governance Learning Guide). I was interested in how technology could leverage their voices and strengthen the interaction and responsiveness between them and their state to create better services, like health and education. As such the expert interviews with Barak Hoffman and Darko Brkan were among the most interesting for me. The Maji Matone project in Tanzania and the accountability and transparency work by Dosta! in Bosnia were excellent examples of digital media’s potential use to increase responsiveness of governments to citizens’ voices.

However, the Tanzanian example acted as a cautionary tale of how projects must recognise wider socio-political contexts in which they seek to work. That project seemed to offer a simple technology-enabled way of directly linking citizens’ voices to government action on water points. However, as this blog post explains the target communities were not used to demanding their rights to services and seemed sceptical of the government’s ability or will to respond. In addition, in a tight-knit local community people were scared of being seen as trouble makers and being critical of those in power. As a result they saw little benefit, and indeed some risk, in exercising their voice through the ICT channels that were offered.

        Credit: Plan

In contrast Darko’s post explains the approaches used by Dosta! to first strengthen a weak Bosnian civil society. What interests me most, though, are Dosta!’s tactics to encourage responsiveness from the supply side through mixing digital and traditional tools for accountability. They were able to leverage power over politicians through the tangible threat of removal through democratic elections and in 2006 discredited the Prime Minister by exposing his corruption through the media. It was the media which again played a strong role in promoting the fact-checking website Istinomjer with further impact on election discourse. This active media environment and electoral accountability gives additional power to digital information and can help turn transparency into action.

These examples underline that creating opportunities for voice and participation doesn’t automatically lead to accountability and tangible changes. A whole host of reasons may stop citizens raising their voices or governments from answering – a key one being lack of effective digital and traditional feedback loops. The workshops from Dhairya and Rob provided lots of ideas for integrating technology into our social accountability projects and I’m excited to share these with colleagues and get to work. But the Maji Matone example reminds me not to lose sight of the need to analyse existing communication, political and social environments before getting too carried away with the technology.

 

Jennifer Doherty is a Governance Programme Officer working in the Programme Support and Impact Unit of Plan UK, an international development charity promoting the rights of children.