Can technology change the status of women in the world?

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Can technology change the status of women in the world?

That was the underlying question of the workshop I participated in at the United Nations during the week long Commision on the Status of Women conference.
All this new technology is great, one participant from Zimbabwe said, but how does it help an impoverished woman from the countryside? An impressively eloquent and passionate high school aged girl in the audience spoke about how the Internet is used for trafficking girls all over the world.

My response was that new media is a tool, and that like any tool, can be used for good and bad. I used the example of how video games; which have a reputation for being violent and mindless; can, like BREAKAWAY, be a vehicle for spreading positive and meaningful messages. I also replied that although the Internet may not be able to directly change the life of an illiterate woman in the countryside, others can use the powers of this highly connective medium to create awareness, raise money and facilitate change.

Nonetheless, the fact that these issues are so real and so easily overlooked really hit me. The digital divide grows by the day. Knowing this, how can we sit back and ride the tide of new technology further and further away from shore?

What good is giving a laptop to a boy who cannot read? How can organizations use open source tools if they don't know about them? These are some of the other questions that lingered for me.

The solution seems somewhat obvious -- tools are only what we make them out to be. Without the knowledge of how to use them, they provide no value. You can not just drop a pile of laptops in a village and leave. Putting literacy software on their computers is one solution, having educators facilitate the process is ideal. For just this reason, thanks to a new round of funding from the UNFPA, we will be developing a facilitators guide to travel along with BREAKAWAY.

What are your thoughts and ideas about this? Do you feel any obligation to help bridge the digital divide? How can we best use the tools at our disposal to help others?

Many thanks to Jimmie Briggs from Man Up and UN Women for putting this together!

Watch the video!

I dreamed...

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It has been quite a while since I last posted. Partly this has been due to the fact that SO much has been going on, partly due to the pressure of insuring the EMC finds financial stability, partly to insuring that the students, project teams and partners are supported in non-financial terms, partly to insuring that projects  in-house deliver and are completed, partly to seeking funding to support said projects to completion...this all on top of normal operating and faculty responsibilities.

This is what I have not been able to report on—the students have produced enormous results: 

• Innovation Congress successful and we will be doing a variation of it at the VHA conference in May in San Antonio, 
• the Masie Learning 2008 team blew away all expectations with Teletrust, 
• CIMIT RIPS—solidly done and delivered, 
• America's Army—the online community commented that they may have been some of the best maps to come out of the line recently, 
• IBM project presented a concept so awesome I can't wait to see it on my desktop and now the project is going into Stage 2 funding, 
• UNFPA Violence Against Women—presented at MIGS, a digital concept successfully presented and Stage 2 received funds to extend development through to July, 
• Cystic Fibrosis game project—concepts to be released for testing in a month, 
• Burlington 3D—models excepted into Google Earth and funding extended through the summer (fly in and check out the models around campus), 
• and then there's all the other cool projects happening—the video blogs, the wiki, and now Twitter (see our roll on the right)!
  

But what I have also not been able to report on is our community! We've grown to over 114 students involved in varying ways in varying projects. We've grown in so many other ways as well.

Yet we have so much further to reach and to make happen. I'm writing once again from JFK. Today I was extremely fortunate to meet with a woman who blows me away and if we can create half what she has done, the world could be that much richer. President Finney introduced us via email, as she was a former colleague of his at NYU. 30 years ago despite the challenges that beset visionaries dreams, Red Burns began I.T.P. at Tisch . Meeting her, I felt as if I was meeting a sister soul. Perhaps today more than ever we need to share her vision—a dream of a collectively created future. Red sees humanity first and technology second—as an enabler, a connector, not as a vehicle for separation and disassociation. 

One last dream I wish to share comes from Wes Knee's blog. He begins "Last night I dreamed of Africa...". Perhaps this is how humanity calls out to those who have the ends to enable change—through our dreams. A call to share. Personally I can not dream of a better purpose for a teacher than to enable her students to follow these dreams.