The World Bank EduTech blog in 2009
In 2009 the World Bank's education sector conducted a year-long pilot experiment to explore a variety of new methods and channels to disseminate its messages and engage with stakeholders in new ways.
One of the most prominent of these initiatives was the Bank's first blog in the education sector, 'EduTech' (http://blogs.worldbank.org/edutech). Its goal, as is stated at the upper right hand side of each page, is to explore issues related to the use of information and communication technologies to benefit education in developing countries. By doing so, it is one modest attempt to highlight particular initiatives, studies and emerging trends that we think, based on our regular interactions with government officials, NGOs, researchers and companies active in this area in developing and developed countries around the world, might be of interest to a wider audience.
In contrast to many standard World Bank publication efforts, which effectively document the end of a multi-year research effort and disseminate the key findings, EduTech was also conceived as a way to initiate conversations on various topics with a globally dispersed group of experts and practitioners in a very open and public manner. Its weekly posts were meant to initiative discussions around many emerging topics, and to, in its own small way, help to increase the transparency of the activities of the World Bank around related topics by providing insight into emerging World Bank thinking at early stages, inviting comment and criticism.
This electronic publication [pdf] collects together featured writing from the first year of the EduTech blog. The 43 short articles assembled here cover topics as diverse as the use of mobile phones to support teachers in Tanzania, evaluation of computer use in education in Colombia, the development of a globally-recognized set of ICT/education indicators, and new initiatives to connect every secondary school in India to the Internet.
These articles are collected and repurposed here to enable off-line reading of the entire collection, plus access via a variety of new devices (like e-readers and mobile phones), based on requests from readers in developing countries with poor access to the Internet. That said, each blog entry contains multiple links to resources on the Internet, and this collection is best sampled when Internet connectivity is at hand.
At the heart of many blogs – and EduTech is no exception – are comments from readers (and occasional rejoinders from the blog author). All comments on individual EduTech blog posts have been omitted from this collection, due to a variety of sourcing rights issues; readers here are invited to visit the blog itself to participate in the often lively discussions around various topics.
Posts on the EduTech blog are not to be exhaustive in theirs consideration of a given topic, but to point to interesting developments and raise questions. They should not be mistaken for peer-reviewed research or World Bank policy papers. The views expressed on the EduTech blog are those of the author alone, and not those of the World Bank.
Most weeks, the EduTech blog features images that are made available via a variety of Creative Commons licenses for broader use. We consciously utilize such images not only because it is easy to do so (although that of course is true as well), but also to highlight the fact that different approaches and mechanisms for the sharing of information and media resources are emerging that may be of special relevance to our counterparts and partners working in the education sector in developing countries. Please let us know if you feel that any of the images reproduced here have been used in ways contrary to such licenses.
The blog – which is published most Fridays – is typically read by about 1,000 people on the web each week (with about the same number of readers via RSS). Popular posts can reach in excess of 10,000 readers. These numbers are decidedly modest when viewed against the wider ‘blogosphere’, but, as one of the few regular blogs on this topic, our goal has been to appeal to a rather narrow niche: professionals engaged in exploring the use of ICTs to aid a variety of developmental objectives in the education sectors of so-called ‘developing countries’. Frankly, I do not like using the term 'developing countries' as often as I do on the pages that follow here, but I have done this intentionally, if reluctantly, in an attempt to subtly reinforce the context of the comments and questions we include on the blog. One memorable academic commenter on one of the early posts on this blog (about the use of mobile phones) said basically that 'there is nothing new here, we've been aware of all of these issues for some time'. This may indeed be true – if you are sitting in Cambridge or Helsinki. However, these are very new discussions – and often very different discussions! – in other, less economically privileged parts of the world, and it is to catalyze and participate in such discussions that the EduTech blog was conceived.
- Michael Trucano, March 2009
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