Why Blog? A direction.

So, why blog?  I guess that is the question.  Why are these groups spreading advocacy by advocating blogging?  This is not questioning citizen media or advocacy in and of itself.  I want to know why blogging is so important to these groups in this context in this discourse.  This analysis will require identifying blogging as a genre and identifying its conventions and analyzing the way in which meaning is created and presented in this form.  I guess part of this question has to ask if blogging in these colonial / post-colonial geographies.  This a geographically situated question as well.  But, what study about colonialism is not geographically situated?  So where does blogging fit in to those geographic regions, in these local discourse communities?  What is it doing to their agency in that community, in the larger region, and in the globalized colonial discourse?

Now, I need to come up with a proposal and analyze the relationship between these texts and these communities?  These communities are now producing these texts but is that because the text as a genre leads them to some sense of power, or is the power in the people and the text is merely a product of the discourse created by the community?  

I have mentioned Rising Voices on my blog before, but I now plan to make them a greater part of my research into the communication portals used to build global agency among previously silenced populations.  This is how they describe themselves:  "Rising Voices, an outreach initiative of Global Voices, aims to help bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the global conversation by providing resources and funding to local groups reaching out to underrepresented communities" (http://rising.globalvoicesonline.org/about/).  Literally, the voice of the internet is changing, and Rising Voices (child organization of Global Voices) is an agent of this change.  They work to spread multi-media literacy to communities who have had no control over their own digital, global identities.   They refer to this type of work that they are promoting and teaching as citizen media (not their term of course).  

Interestingly enough to technical communication, one of the biggest problems that they cite on their site is the lack of documentation in other languages besides English that explains how to create podcasts, start a blog, or create a wiki.  In response to this, Rising Voices has created a series of six guides, of which only first is currently available on the website, in six different languages.  "The first guide, An Introduction to Citizen Media, offers context and case studies which show how everyday citizens across the world are increasingly using blogs, podcasts, online video, and digital photography to engage in an unmediated conversation which transcends borders, cultures, and differing languages."  

Turning these concepts into a Proposal

The research questions:  

1.  How will access to the internet and accessible mesh networks benefit children in poverty ridden areas?  And how will the community benefit?

2.  Blogging is given a high level of importance in groups like Project Ceibal and the FOKO Blog Club (check previous posts).  For giving these children a sense of agency in global discourse, is this an appropriate genre?  Because it is a product of western discourse ideologies, is this another form of colonialism?  Is agency being defined by the western colonial powers or by the blogger?

3.  Are appropriate products being created for local collaborative problems solving and global outreach?  By products, I am referring to anything from the structural elements needed to set up a local mesh network, to the mesh network it self, to various communication platforms (wikis, blogs, SNSs, MMOs, etc).

4.  In global collaborative problem solving, how are people building agency and trust in these virtual environments?  This is somewhat related to question 2.  

5.  How are these children learning to use the technologies?  

Possible Theoretical Frameworks:  

I see activity theory playing a big role in this project in some contextual task based analysis.  So, what kinds of tasks do these agents have to perform in these  environments on a daily basis, and how does connectivity (OLPC) fit into this discourse?  Along with this, I will be reflecting on concepts of user-centered design and David Dobrin's definition of technical writing:  "Writing that accommodates the technology to the user"  (118).  

I will be reflecting on post-colonialism, contrastive rhetorics, and Lisa Nakumura's conception of Cybertyping.  

The purpose of the project is to analyze all the facets--agency, contextual task analysis, technology accommodation--that are arising out of this push to create universal connectivity.  Hopefully, this project will yield results that cause us to questions the ways in which power relationships affect the agency of individuals.  Because collaboration is occurring across cultural and national divides, the ways in which agency and trust is build is directly related to the methods of cross-cultural collaboration and problem solving.  Also, this study is designed to analyze the communication tools (products) being used to harbor and facilitate collaboration and communication.        

Works Cited

Dobrin, David. "What's Technical About Technical Writing?" in Central Works in Technical Communication. 

Nakumura, Lisa Cybertypes:  Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. 

Trust and Agency in Global Collaborative Problem Solving

Possibly something else to consider with globalized connectivity and global collaboration to solve local and global problems via new interactive, collaborative technologies may be the concept of building agency among minority participants and the process by which trust is build over distance collaboration.  

Barbara Mirel and Nicholoas Johnson's recent article "Social Determinants of Preparing a Cyber-Infrastructure Innovation for Diffusion" (Technical Communication Quarterly 15(3) pg 329-353) may add to this discussion on a global scale.  Particularly I am interested in their application of "Dramatic Analysis," which they describe as " As a rhetorical methodology, dramatistic analysis presumes that textual exchanges make certain realities present to participants and leave others out. People exchanging these texts choose some emphases and omit others to get readers to go along with them" (337).  

The question that remains is this: What cultural factors (specifically referring to the post-colonialism and the identity of the "other") will determine how agents emphasize and de-emphasize content for the sake of consensus?  Or, how are various power balances going to work out in global collaborations by NGOs?

Posting on the XO

Currently I am blogging on the XO while y class is watching a presentation by Howard Reingold who is talking about collaboration and new media. It is quite optimistic about the way in which people will collaborate to solve problems that span cultural, discursive, and national lines. I hope my students, who represent five different nations, will take away a greater understanding about the posibility for shared actions and oppotunities for transcendence.

Please excuse typos and spelling; this is a small keyboard.

Essential Questions for Research

Well, I guess the essential question that I am asking in this project is what exactly is the ultimate goal of connectivity?  Then, based on that goal, are we creating the efficient avenues to achieving those goals.  Essentially, what kinds of discursive products are being used, re-contextualized, or produced to accomplish these goals.  Blogging is a discursive product that has essentially be re-contextualized by Ceibal, and they have had some problems in accomplishing their goals of putting the voices of their students out there.  So is blogging the write discursive product or do we have to produce something else.  Or do we have to re-imagine the genre.  Or does it have to be used in conjunction with some other avenues.    

Rising Voices is not only concerned with student blogs but also the with creation of a digital infrastructure to poor, rural communities in the third world.  Thinking about the theoretical framework for this study I think we are looking at discourse, genre analysis and community information infrastructure.  This last one would possibly relate to an extension of community literacies.  Looking too at communication technologies and digital community network setup as products of discourse.  An interesting turn may be to look at the way in which new products arise in a discourse.  Does the ideology change or does the available means of production change.    

The XO, access, and the availability of the means of production.

I haven't posted on this blog in a while but my recent resurgent interest in discourse analysis and the means of production have lead me to topic in question again.  Hopefully this line of questioning will lean me to a conference proposal or paper.  

I have reflected many times on the Ceibal project in Uruguay.  One of the fundamental efforts of the project was to create a system of blogs that created a network for school children to communicate and collaborate.  I have done some work that considers blogging to be a Euro-American, western conception, which reinforces colonial ideals of communication, rhetoric, discourse, memoria (or the way in which information/knowledge and stored and retrieved), genre, and collaboration.  These notebooks, while giving access and connectivity to these underprivileged children, are made to adapt to a colonial discourse.  

But these laptops allow for users to write their own applications.  The Ceibal project actually wanted to create a blogging application that would be suitable for the users after failed attempts with blogger.  There has been no reports on the headway with that project (I actually created this blog on the XO).  There has been much debate over how effective blogging is as platform of education.  So this issue may be a question of who is controlling the means of production.  Why is the blogging genre being produced in this context?  Is there a more effective, anti-colonial genre that can serve the needs of this discourse community?    

I see this as possibly a usability study (or part of one).  Analyzing the context and coming up with product or a means of production that leads to efficient communication and accomplishment of discursive goals.           

Colonial Discourse and the XO

Among the controversies surrounding this laptop, colonialism seems to be on the far edges of the spectrum in the conversations occurring in the mass media.  But their have been arguments that have concluded that this laptop is the preservation of colonial discourse.  Is western discourse permeating in the third-world through these laptops?  I need to do further research into colonial discourse and the uses of these laptops to determine whether this is a significant concern.  But there is a video online that raises these questions of western permeation  and the flattening of the world. 

On You Tube, there is a video of a young boy, somewhere in the British Isles, using one of these laptops that his father brought back from Nigeria.  How his father got one is up for discussion.  But the significant part of this discussion is when the boy begins to talk about his new online friends from Nigeria.  The laptop, when turned on, immediately sets up a mesh network with the other laptops around it.  So, every child in one class will automatically be connected with one another.  The point is to promote collaboration to solve problems.  But, the connection to these Nigerian children still remain on this computer.  The disturbing part is that the young boy from Britain refers to they're use of English as "poor" or "bad."  Now, how many little "proper" English speaking children are going to get one of these laptops and "correct" their new friends' "inferior" speech.  I don't think this is a situation that is going to happen often.  However, many of these countries that are receiving these laptops are promoting connectivity.  And their are other avenues in which these children may speak with "proper" English speakers.  So, these connections may continue to rise as more under-privileged   children receive these laptops.  So, this is a situation that may continue to repeat at an increasing frequency.

Windows on the XO

There seems to be some speculation floating around that Microsoft has adapted XP for the XO (the one laptop per child).  There is a video on YouTube of a Group Program Manager from Microsoft Corp. giving a demo of Windows XP running on the XO.  However, according to One Laptop per Child official Wiki, "The OLPC is continuing to develop a Linux-based software set for the laptop in conjunction with Red Hat. But since the OLPC project is open we cannot (and maybe even don't want to) stop other people from developing and supplying alternate software packages."  There are no plans to move from Linux-based software according to OLPC.  However, they do acknowledge that Microsoft has been working on adapting their operating system for this computer.  

This relatively mild controversy raises questions of literacy however.  If part of this project is help underprivileged  children to become literate in a digitally functioning world, why would you not possibly want these children to work on Apple  or Microsoft based system?  Part of the reason may be that added storage space is needed to run XP on the XO.  This may cause a rise in cost.  But there is possibly a better explanation to avoid contracting with Apple or Microsoft.  Waveplace, an organization for the promotion of the use of digital media in education in the Caribbean, "If someone tells you a child needs to learn Windows, ask them what they think Windows will be like when the child enters the workforce. Very likely, it won't resemble the Windows of today. Waveplace focuses on core computer fundamentals that apply to all computer systems, both now and in the future. What we teach them now will help them learn (and create) the software of tomorrow."     

The benefits of these laptops to these children are still under question however.  The XO took much criticism on YouTube under the video displaying XP on the XO.  One YouTubian commented "wow. those 3rd world kids arent interested in making spreadsheets or word documents. they want water and food and shelter. this is a pointless cause" (Ooshbala).  There is also some worry that the children would sell the laptop for food or merely use it as a porn machine.  But there were some serious comments about how antivirus software can run on these computers.  The assumption was that it would be major fail.  But, I did find it interesting that most of the worries were not focused on children's lack of nutrition, exposure to disease, substandard education, or access to shelter.  Instead, these commenters were mainly concerned that they would be wasting their tax write-off on a little peep show for a horny little under-privileged child.  This may point to larger issue of contrastive discourses.  Is this computer an extension of colonial discourse?  Some say yes and some say no.  I think I' will try to explore this in my next post.     

Ceibal Project: Uruguay

According to Bill Strickland, the problem with poor people is that they don't have any money.  The interesting thing about that statement is it's simplicity of thought.  It is not hard to come to this conclusion.  It is hard to act on this dictum.  One Laptop per Child seems to have broken that barrier.  The only difference between this organization and Strickland's expansive community center in the worst neighborhood in Pittsburgh (with a fountain) is materiality.  Strickland creates a discourse around an idea that manifested itself in the form of a building.  One Laptop per Child is creating discourse around connectivity.  

Uruguay's version of the One Laptop per Child project, Ceibal, which stands for "Conectividad Educativa de Informática Básica para el Aprendizaje en Línea”or basic informatic educative connectivity for online learning.  Despite the organization's appreciation of the XO's other applications, they are more apparently concerned with this cute little computer's ability to connect discursively starved students to a greater source of history and information.  More importantly it gives these students a voice that was previously deprived of them.  Ceibal recently held an open forum which they called Ceibal Jam.  The purpose was to brainstorm ideas for applications that would be useful for young student in Uruguay.  The meeting focused on six basic needs:  develop games, create applications for the XO, install and work with emulators, knowledge of the Python programing language for XO, and develop a system for blogging.  In a post by Pablo Flores, a member of the Ceibal team, stated  "for the first time, those with little voice will have a medium of communication with which to describe their experiences, dreams, and needs from their own perspective, unlike the traditional means of researchers from other sectors of society speaking for them."  

So what happens when you give these students this power.  There are many questions to be left answered.  But the focus in Uruguay, which now has over 200,000 of these laptops, is on connectivity.  They have yet to post on their blog the different ways that the students are using these laptops.  At least in the ways that fit vision of project Ceibal.  But this raises another possible blog post.  One of the critiques of this program is that this is merely a continuation of a colonial discourse.  It is another way for the west to impose its definition of discourse and agency on rest of the world.  Ceibal's adaptation and effort to make this project their own may be the beginnings of a reaction to this critique.  

Now What?

Well, I have officially started to blog on this little XO. These blogs are going to be short and sweet because I cannot stan to typeon this child sized keyboard for to long. I am doing some research into the significance of this little machine's ability connect to people in new ways to a larger global discourse that was at one time unavailable to children in third world countries. The signifiganeof web 2.0 and now carried into the much hailed web 3.0 (call it whatever you want, these labels are downright silly at times) is user generated content. The user is automatically given a sense of agency through self-publication. What will a small child do with such an agency? I am particularly curious about how children in these countries will utalize these tools that do not necessarily solve pressing issues in the third world such as poverty, disease,famine,malnutrition.

Rwanda may be an interesting place to explore the use of these laptops. War and genocide still weigh heavily on the minds of the people. 16,000 laptops have since been delivered to children throughout the country. How will this new generation use this access to agency? How will it shape the future of Rwanda? Of course, this beckons another question: What will Darfur be like in 14 years? What would a hungry child do with this laptop there?

I will be posting links to the OLPC wiki and some links about what people are doing with this darling little device.