Last Wednesday we attended a conference hosted by the student organization Develop and the Centre for Business and Development Studies at CBS. The conference was called "Is microfinance a solution to end poverty?".
When Kenneth and I took the course ITI, the course where we met our supervisor, we actually wrote an assignment on microfinance. Therefore we actually felt that we had a good understanding on the subject, and would be able to engage in the discussion, with questions and comments.
We ended up not engaging in the discussion, not because we didn't think we had anything to offer, but because the discourse for the conference was narrowed to only the economic aspect. Because of our background we would have broadened the discourse and looked at other things such as a successful application of ICT to facilitate microfinance, but also on how the microcredit could or should be spend, e.g. the use of indigenous knowledge. Instead the conference took these things for granted or made a reduction and simply discussed the optimal company size that should be granted loans, in order to actually create new jobs and not only improving one persons life.
I guess this post can be seen as a reminder of how one’s own background encapsulates and determines the things you see and find interesting. At least the attendance made Kenneth and I discussed why we didn't use more economic theory in our own framework.
Wednesday, 19 November 2008
Tuesday, 4 November 2008
Finding the right path to illustrate our theory
Even though Kenneth has been the only author of our latest blogs I'm still part of the project. Or at least I still think so. I have just been to busy with other things to actually sit down and create a post on our progress. Well here goes the next one.
As Kenneth blogged about last week we attended a workshop at ITU yesterday on how to help people become functional literates through the use of mobile technology. I think that their framing of the problem through m-learning was interesting and also moved themselves away from simple looking at literacies, to actually looking at the posibilities with ICT. Whether or how much they could use our input to their project is difficult to say, I hope so.
We have been in a reading freeze on new literature for two weeks now. Our time is instead used to organize what we have read so far. Both of us really likes this process of finding the right path. The fun is always to actually agree on a common understanding of the projects and how the literature should be used to highlight our view. On earlier projects this process has taken hours after hours with no seaming progress for the overall project, which have often caused much frustration for other project members.
Our master thesis has been no exception to this pattern, except that this time we have no other frustrated teammates. Let me try to shortly highlight our current problem. We want to present a theory framework which will end in a position or discourse somewhere along this statement: "We conjecture that ICT has the potential to transfer knowledge to illiterates in effort of establishing sustainable development."
This statement sounds reasonable. The problem arises when trying to find the path and not the least the links between the individual literature throughout the chosen path, e.g. sometimes we simple do not have the link and finding the literature which can close the gap can be very time consuming. We have four main topics which we would like to cover and discuss. These are Development, Knowledge, Literacy and ICT. Our first try on a path sounded like this: Development -> Knowledge -> Literacy -> ICT. Where the links are D->K (Development driven by knowledge), K-L (Literacy is needed to get knowledge), a statement which would when be problemetised under literacy leading to L->I (Literacy is not a prerequisite to gain knowledge when using ICT). The only problem is that we do not have any literature taking about literature being a prerequisite for knowledge.
Some would say why bother the link between knowledge and literacy is self-evident. But just as with the chicken and the egg. What comes first? Is literacy itself knowledge? Perhaps they should both simply be treated under knowledge? And if so why not simple having just two main areas Development and ICT. Lots of ideas have been flouting between us on how to construct the correct path, including Literacy -> Development -> Knowledge -> ICT. This path would solve our link problem as we have literature taking about the link between Literacy and Development. Anyway this was dropped because taking about Literacy without the context or discourse of Development would be odd.
Taking about all of this with Sudhanshu last Friday his view was that what we wants do do is to create sustainable development through a continuous circle which problematise the established view of Literacy being a prerequisite for Knowledge which leads to Development (Literacy -> Knowledge -> Development). To create sustainable development we exchange Literacy with Resource encompassing both Literacy and ICT, leading to Development -> Resource -> Knowledge -> back to Development.
Yesterday and today Kenneth and I have pursued this framework to come up with a suitable solution. The problem which we have used quite a lot of time on is what Resource actually is. As we want to do sustainable development Resource must, beyond Literacy and ICT, also contain books. Hence this category encompasses both abilities (reading, using ICT) and things (books, radios, PCs). This way the link between Resource and Knowledge is actually Information. But is the word Resource the correct word to illustrate both abilities and things? Kenneth has instead proposed the word Infrastructure, which I am not entirely comfortable with as I see Infrastructure as entirely things and hence not encompassing the abilities. What we are seeking is a word which can encompass both abilities and things, but which are also more concrete than a word like Ensemble. Please comment or email us if you have a proposition.
I hope Kenneth thinks that this post is interesting and long enough. :) Let's see if I will be able to post more regularly in the coming months. When we go to India we will at least have lots of pictures to post.
As Kenneth blogged about last week we attended a workshop at ITU yesterday on how to help people become functional literates through the use of mobile technology. I think that their framing of the problem through m-learning was interesting and also moved themselves away from simple looking at literacies, to actually looking at the posibilities with ICT. Whether or how much they could use our input to their project is difficult to say, I hope so.
We have been in a reading freeze on new literature for two weeks now. Our time is instead used to organize what we have read so far. Both of us really likes this process of finding the right path. The fun is always to actually agree on a common understanding of the projects and how the literature should be used to highlight our view. On earlier projects this process has taken hours after hours with no seaming progress for the overall project, which have often caused much frustration for other project members.
Our master thesis has been no exception to this pattern, except that this time we have no other frustrated teammates. Let me try to shortly highlight our current problem. We want to present a theory framework which will end in a position or discourse somewhere along this statement: "We conjecture that ICT has the potential to transfer knowledge to illiterates in effort of establishing sustainable development."
This statement sounds reasonable. The problem arises when trying to find the path and not the least the links between the individual literature throughout the chosen path, e.g. sometimes we simple do not have the link and finding the literature which can close the gap can be very time consuming. We have four main topics which we would like to cover and discuss. These are Development, Knowledge, Literacy and ICT. Our first try on a path sounded like this: Development -> Knowledge -> Literacy -> ICT. Where the links are D->K (Development driven by knowledge), K-L (Literacy is needed to get knowledge), a statement which would when be problemetised under literacy leading to L->I (Literacy is not a prerequisite to gain knowledge when using ICT). The only problem is that we do not have any literature taking about literature being a prerequisite for knowledge.
Some would say why bother the link between knowledge and literacy is self-evident. But just as with the chicken and the egg. What comes first? Is literacy itself knowledge? Perhaps they should both simply be treated under knowledge? And if so why not simple having just two main areas Development and ICT. Lots of ideas have been flouting between us on how to construct the correct path, including Literacy -> Development -> Knowledge -> ICT. This path would solve our link problem as we have literature taking about the link between Literacy and Development. Anyway this was dropped because taking about Literacy without the context or discourse of Development would be odd.
Taking about all of this with Sudhanshu last Friday his view was that what we wants do do is to create sustainable development through a continuous circle which problematise the established view of Literacy being a prerequisite for Knowledge which leads to Development (Literacy -> Knowledge -> Development). To create sustainable development we exchange Literacy with Resource encompassing both Literacy and ICT, leading to Development -> Resource -> Knowledge -> back to Development.
Yesterday and today Kenneth and I have pursued this framework to come up with a suitable solution. The problem which we have used quite a lot of time on is what Resource actually is. As we want to do sustainable development Resource must, beyond Literacy and ICT, also contain books. Hence this category encompasses both abilities (reading, using ICT) and things (books, radios, PCs). This way the link between Resource and Knowledge is actually Information. But is the word Resource the correct word to illustrate both abilities and things? Kenneth has instead proposed the word Infrastructure, which I am not entirely comfortable with as I see Infrastructure as entirely things and hence not encompassing the abilities. What we are seeking is a word which can encompass both abilities and things, but which are also more concrete than a word like Ensemble. Please comment or email us if you have a proposition.
I hope Kenneth thinks that this post is interesting and long enough. :) Let's see if I will be able to post more regularly in the coming months. When we go to India we will at least have lots of pictures to post.
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