unisay

UNICEF is on the ground in over 150 countries and territories to help children survive and thrive, from early childhood through adolescence. As the world's largest provider of vaccines for developing countries, UNICEF supports child health and nutrition, good water and sanitation, quality basic education for all boys and girls, and the protection of children from violence, exploitation, and AIDS. UNICEF is funded entirely by the voluntary contributions of individuals, businesses, foundations and governments.

Referenced in:

RapidSMS is a web-based platform that can send out SMS messages to groups of people, as well as monitor their input back into the system via SMS or voice. It is also able to collect statistical data via forms that can be configured through the interface. The platform has been appropriated for use in several different scenarios including emergency situations and data-collection involving health and education indicators.

Referenced in:

UNIWIKI is a customized MediaWiki installation that is designed to address some common wiki usability issues. Following ideas from the folks at wikiHow (www.wikihow.com), UNIWIKI has a template and editing interface that makes working with wikis easier for the not-so-tech-savvy.

Referenced in:

Camping is a web application framework which consistently stays at less than 4.5kb of code. The complete source code can be viewed on a single page.

Referenced in:

Ushahidi is a website created to give Kenyans a way to report incidents of violence in the ongoing post-election crisis. The website relies heavily on Google Maps, and allows people who are on the ground to report in directly. The project came together, it seems, during the TED Global conference event earlier this year in Tanzania. Erik Hersman, who publishes Afrigadget and was one Ushahidi's organizers, talks in detail about who's behind it.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which is making low-cost education laptops to sell in bulk to governments in developing countries, is struggling to sustain momentum in the wake of a reorganization that has alienated several key contributors. The project has been plagued with serious problems from the start and might end up on life support if its leadership can't turn things around.

The power of niche social sites isn't just in connecting people, it's in providing tools that allow people to do something better than they could before.

The Standish group recently completed an extensive study that examines factors influencing open-source adoption. Based on five years of research and analysis, the report provides intriguing insights into open-source adoption levels and the way that open source is reshaping the software industry. Individuals who participated in the Standish survey identified several key drivers for open source adoption, including lower costs, better security and reliability, and faster development speed.

GENEVE*accessible by Antoni Abad is an intriguing project launched by the city of Geneva in partnership with the Handicap Architecture Urbanisme (HAU) association, with the purpose of making travelling easier for the disabled. The project is simple: disabled phone are handed out GPS-enabled mobile telephones so that they can take pictures of every obstacle they come across in Geneva. By means of multimedia messages they create a map of the accessibility of the city on the internet.

The Nokia Event Site announces the debut of new phones designed for the emerging markets like Sub-Saharan Africa. Nokia put a lot of thought into the functionality that they added, which makes me want to give one of these gems a whirl. I am a sucker for features such as FM Radio, and there is just something about a phone with a flashlight…that is absolutely genius IMO.

There is a reason that Africans, by and large, love Nokia and there's a reason that the brand has made such an impact in that part of the world. While most companies around the world are ignoring Africa, Nokia actively develops solutions for the continent.

At the Global Philanthropy Forum, I caught up with Jan Chipchase; Jan works for Nokia as what can best be described as a design and usability ethnographer. He explores the way mobile phones are used worldwide and reports that back to Nokia's design team. He's a fascinating person to talk to, and I thought I might highlight some of the stories he's come up with while exploring in Africa.

Open Source Living is a community-driven dynamic archive of Open Source software spanning all major platforms.

One of the great features of electronic maps is the ease with which they can present information in its geographical context on-demand. Working with user-generated geographic content or creating your own custom tags, however, requires a certain degree of standardization if the annotations are to move beyond scribbles on a printed page. In great news for map fans everywhere, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has announced that it has accepted Google's XML-based annotation system, KML, as a standard.

Mobile networks and handsets are becoming more of a target for criminals with a technical bent, security experts are warning.

Many countries around the world block or filter Internet content, denying access to information--often about politics, but also relating to sexuality, culture, or religion--that they deem too sensitive for ordinary citizens. Access Denied documents and analyzes Internet filtering practices in over three dozen countries, offering the first rigorously conducted study of this accelerating trend.

Many participants in OLPC's 'Give 1 Get 1' program of last November are now encountering what has come to be known as the 'stuck key' problem, in which one or more of the keys on their XO-1 laptop's built-in keyboard become stuck in an activated position, or are activated when adjacent keys are pressed.

A few weeks ago while walking in a street in the Ipanema neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro I became another victim of crime in the city after being robbed. Like many in the city, I was hesitant about contacting the police. But this under-reporting of crime is one of the motivations behind a new interactive website called Wikicrimes, created by Professor Vasco Furtado from the University of Fortaleza in northern Brazil. "The idea is very simple; when people are robbed it's quite common for them to tell other people," he tells me."With wikicrimes this information will be available globally."

To get a sense of how rapidly cellphones are penetrating the global marketplace, you need only to look at the sales figures. According to statistics from the market database Wireless Intelligence, it took about 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide. The second billion sold in four years, and the third billion sold in two. Eighty percent of the world's population now lives within range of a cellular network, which is double the level in 2000.

One of the most significant moments in the history of the modern software industry took place in 1998 when Netscape announced plans to release the source code of its browser under a license that would freely permit modification and redistribution. That pivotal event represents the point at which software freedom extended its reach beyond the enthusiast community and began its ascent into the mainstream.

A recent banking service in Kenya called M-PESA (M for "mobile" and pesa for "cash", in Swahili) was launched in 2007 as one of the world's first cellphone-to-cellphone cash-transfer services for people who lack access to conventional banks. According to the author, "On a continent with more than 225 million cellphone users – double what it had just two years ago, according to World Bank statistics – the impact could be profound on poor families' ability to save for a house, plan for emergencies, or get a loan."

The videos from the Innovationsforum are finally available online. Innovationsforum, which took place last year, invited a stellar cast of interaction design thinkers and practitioners to discuss the many aspects of interface and interaction design: mobile telephone and media interfaces, problem solutions and product visions, web pages and virtual worlds, art and commerce, business and science.

Refugee camps almost by definition have limited visibility. Often located in places that are hot, flooded, or at war, such camps go unseen by most of the world except for the occasional crisis segment on the evening news. Now, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) hopes to give more visibility to the work that it does in such camps around the world, bringing the reality of refugee life into the laptops and living rooms of web surfers thanks to the power of Google mapping tools.

As expected, the FCC today approved plans to roll out a nationwide SMS-based alert system, which is now all but certain to be adopted by all four national carries, and no doubt most regional carriers as well. As CNN reports, under the new plan, the FCC will appoint a federal agency tasked with creating the messages, which will in turn be passed on to participating carriers. Those messages will be limited to one of three categories of emergencies, also as we had heard before, individuals will be able to opt out of the system if they so desire, and carriers will be required to provide distinct vibration and audio alert options for people with disabilities.

You've heard a lot about OpenID, the decentralized framework for authenticating users across the web. OpenID is convenient for end users, allowing them to login to numerous web sites using one set of credentials - their OpenID. But how is OpenID doing today? Where can you get one? And more importantly, where can you use it? We took the pulse of OpenID to see how it's currently faring.

The FCC is collecting final comments on the subject of text message censorship in preparation for a policy review that will address whether or not mobile carriers should be allowed to discriminate against text message transmitters based on content.

Here's project that activist organization Sokwanele announced today: a Google maps mashup of election-rigging incidents. Each icon on the map corresponds to a media report of an incident that controvenes SADC standards for a free and fair election. Clicking on an icon will take you to the issue of Sokwanele's Zimbabwe Elections Watch newsletter, which summarizes media report on the elections, and to a database record, where each instance is coded as to which SADC rules it violates.

I was thrilled to get an email from Nicholas Kayser-Bril earlier today, introducing me to his research with Gilles Bruno on media attention. The pair are making lovely cartograms - maps distorted to show a particular factor - based on how much attention various media sources are paying to countries around the world.

Today was the first day that Peruvian teachers from remote villages began training to use the OLPC in their day-to-day activities. From the article: 'Success of OLPC now depends largely on frontline teachers and, of course, parents and kids. Peru's effort, if successful, would be a model for other nations. In the training now under way, teachers must become versed not only in how to operate and maintain the laptops, but also in how to do their jobs within a newly laptop-centric educational model. The laptops will contain some 115 books, including textbooks, novels, and poetry, as well as art and music programs, cameras, and other goodies. What many of these kids won't get is Internet access: about 90 percent of the villages lack it, and may not get it anytime soon.

You'd think that with a name like "One Laptop Per Child," NickNeg and company would have stress-tested their laptop with some actual children, but it looks like everyone's favorite green machine just isn't up to the toddler challenge -- OLPC owners are reporting that the laptop's rubberized keyboard is easily destroyed by inquisitive kids, who are peeling the keys off like so many scratch'n'sniff stickers.

The One Laptop Per Child project's sonic contributors have been hard at work. They've collected 8.5 GB of Creative Commons-licensed sounds from the likes of the Berklee College of Music and electronic superstar BT. These are free for use whether or not you've got an OLPC. They've also been working on musical applications for children using the machines, building on Csound, an open-source synthesis and effects tool. The upshot: open music development on the OLPC will benefit the whole music community, not just XO laptop owners.

The laptop computers most people haul around are underutilized. They hardly break a sweat to read e-mail, stream video, view photos, browse the Web, or run word-processing or spreadsheet programs. Their powerful processors are rarely tested except by heavy-duty gamers, scientific researchers, or other specialized users. So while some PCs continue to bulk up and tout their speed and raw power, others represent a new trend: slimming down. Way down. These smaller, simpler machines are aimed at a potentially lucrative market: the next 1 billion PC users around the planet.

For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games.

A recent study by the Pew Internet Project in America on teens in social media found that blogging growth among teenagers is almost entirely fuelled by girls, whom it describe as a new breed of "super-communicators". Some 35% of girls, compared with 20% of boys, have blogs; 32% of girls have their own websites, against 22% of boys. Girls have embraced social networking sites on a massive scale, with 70% of American girls aged 15-17 having built and regularly worked on a profile page on websites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook, as opposed to 57% of boys of the same age.

A Chicago-based nonprofit called Innovations for Learning has joined the fray with a new $50 entry dubbed the Teachermate. The small PCs come equipped with a 2.5-inch LCD display, 512MB of RAM, an SD slot, and built-in microphone and speaker. The systems are being rolled out to a whopping 500 Chicago elementary schools over the next two years, with the aim of having a unit in the hands of every child.

Ambient Corporation has developed a neckband that picks up subvocal communication and translates it into synthesized speech. New Scientist has an article on the technology and a video demonstration that's quite impressive. The applications range from cell phones to aids for people who have lost the capacity to speak due to certain neurological conditions. Called the Audeo, it currently recognizes about 150 words and phrases. A new version without a limited vocabulary is slated for release later this year.

Visualization is a technique to graphically represent sets of data. When data is large or abstract, visualization can help make the data easier to read or understand. There are visualization tools for search, music, networks, online communities, and almost anything else you can think of. Whether you want a desktop application or a web-based tool, there are many specific tools are available on the web that let you visualize all kinds of data. Here are some of the best.

Supporting users’ navigation is a fundamental feature of mobile guides. This paper presents an experimental evaluation comparing three different ways of providing navigation guidance by combining visual and audio directions during guided city tours. The three considered solutions differ in the way audio directions are augmented with visual directions: a traditional map-based solution, a combination of a map and photographs of the area, a combination of large arrows and photographs. The results of our evaluation show that when the map is combined with photographs that clearly indicate the direction to the user or when the map is replaced by a combination of directional arrows and photographs, users’ performance is significantly better. Moreover, the combination of map and photographs was highly preferred by users.

Mobile learning presumes the use of mobile Internet technology to facilitate the learning process. The growth and rapid evolution of the wireless technology have created new opportunities for anytime and anywhere learning paradigm. As a result, numerous mobile learning portals have been developed to gain the advantages of it. Nonetheless, there is little research and exploration has been initiated in proposing usability guidelines in designing mobile learning portals to achieve efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction of learning. Thus, this paper seeks to present usability guidelines by grounding the user interface on usability theoretical framework, possible constraints, and unique properties of mobile computing. Three categories of usability have been formulated: user analysis, interaction and interface design. Ten golden usability guidelines have been suggested which aims for designing highly efficacious, user friendly and usable mobile interface to support dynamicity of mobile and handheld devices. Moreover, Mobile Learning Course Manager (MLCM) portal has been developed to demonstrate and exemplify the usability guidelines proposed.

Practical advice about designing and developing for the mobile web is virtually non-exisitant. As a web developer it can be difficult to make heads or tails about one of the essential mediums of the information age. At the end of this session you will know not only how to create mobile websites, but why you should from one of the experts in the field.

What are the challenges facing mobile design? We're all aware in a vague sense that mobile applications are the next "Big Thing" and that a lot of issues are arising from a lack of standards and limitations with the interface. Listen to a range of designers and consultants who are building independent applications and games as well as extensions of massive online presences discuss how they tackle these issues and what considerations to take if we were to delve into that space ourselves?

Wireless data communications in form of Short Message Service (SMS) and Wireless Access Protocols (WAP) browsers have gained global popularity, yet, not much has been done to extend the usage of these devices in electronic learning (e-learning). This project explores the extension of e-learning into wireless/handheld (W/H) computing devices with the help of a mobile learning (m-learning) framework. This framework provides the requirements to develop m-learning applications that can be used to complement classroom or distance learning. A prototype application was developed to link W/H devices to three course websites. The m-learning applications were pilot-tested for two semesters with a total of 63 students from undergraduate and graduate courses at our university. The students used the m-learning environment with a variety of W/H devices and reported their experiences through a survey and interviews at the end of the semester. The results from this exploratory study provide a better understanding on the role of mobile technology in higher education.

The emerging mobile services, including m-commerce, have received considerable interest among researchers, developers, service providers, and users. Some of these mobile services require the support for group communications among mobile users for conducting transactions. Therefore, there is a need for protocols that are designed to support transactions for group-oriented mobile services especially under brief dis-connectivity and/or intermittent connectivity. In this paper, we identify the transaction requirements of group-oriented mobile services, present three protocol schemes and several new metrics for transactions, and evaluate the performance of protocol schemes under varying conditions. Our results show that higher levels of transaction completion probabilities and lower levels of transaction delays can be achieved to support the performance requirements of diverse group-oriented mobile services.

In late 2005 and early 2006 the authors carried out a survey of Information Technology professors in eight universities in Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Europe to explore their ways of coping with large group teaching. The aim was to investigate the effectiveness of various teaching methodologies in similar Faculties teaching IT around the world. Interviewees were selected through web-based research to identify the most comparable teaching departments from various universities locally, nationally and internationally. In telephone interviews many of the respondents reported on their use of the Internet for teaching and managing large groups but none mentioned the use of mobile learning as a strategy. In this paper we argue that mobile devices such as the video iPod, 3G phones and PDAs have the potential to revolutionize the learning experiences of the 21st century students.

The irresistible wave of globalization is transforming our society and our educational institutions. Profound IT-related challenges and opportunities stimulate IT research and lead to constant IT curriculum changes. This paper discusses the significance and impact of globalization and emerging technologies on IT curriculum and IT education in general. With a brief discussion of emerging technologies in the computing discipline including Grid Computing, Storage Area Networks, Entertainment Computing, Service Computing, Pervasive Computing, and Trustworthy Computing, this paper suggests some IT research topics and a new course that could be added to IT curriculum - International IT Project Management.

The importance and acceptance of M-Learning systems by both students and faculty is becoming increasingly important. The advantages offered by such systems such as accessibility, mobility, collaboration, and the opening of the educational process for continuous and lifelong learning are of paramount importance. Since teaching and learning has been practiced for thousands of years, the transfer of this process into the electronic environment requires a holistic, interdisciplinary approach. This paper identifies and examines three major areas of critical success factors for the development of mobile learning applications.

The capabilities of current mobile computing devices such as PDAs and mobile phones are making it possible to design and develop mobile GIS applications that provide users with geographic data management and cartographic presentations in the field. However, research on how to properly support users who interact with geographic data on mobile devices is still lacking. In this paper, we present an approach to geographic data analysis that allows users to exploit interactive dynamic queries as a technique for filtering geographic information. Moreover, the proposed approach displays the results of queries through visualizations that are aimed at facing the screen estate problem typical of mobile devices.

Practitioners interested in integrating mobile technology effectively into distance learning programs need to consider both the benefits and limitations of such devices. This paper outlines some major limitations of mobile devices and suggests strategies to mitigate them such as chunking information, using appropriate organizational techniques, reducing the number of required actions, and improving ease of use. Properly planned integration of mobile technology also offers some distinct advantages. Learners can benefit from a dynamic and flexible learning environment with anywhere, anytime access to people and information. Practitioners can use these features to help learners enhance their skills in assessing the relevance and appropriateness of information for use in practical settings.

The increasing use of mobile devices and the dissemination of wireless networks have stimulated mobile and ubiquitous computing research. In this context, education is being considered one of the main application areas. This paper proposes the use of mobile and ubiquitous computing to support and improve learning in a new kind of academic structure called Undergraduate Course of Reference (nicknamed GRefe). The GRefe was proposed in Unisinos, a university located in south of Brazil. Currently, there are four GRefes. These courses are organized in Learning Programs and Learning Projects. They use a practical and multidisciplinary approach to stimulate the learning.

Mobile Education or M-Education is a new conceptual paradigm in the use of mobile and wireless technologies for education. M-Education encourages distributed peer collaboration over wireless devices and desktop computers to create opportunities for discovery and education in the field and community. It is a project-oriented approach that will use a wireless virtual community to facilitate the learning activities of teachers, students, and peers through collaboration in a distributed environment. M-Education is significantly different from existing mobile learning systems in that it leverages its collaborative activities from an existingdesktop-based online virtual community (MOOsburg), and thus offers a range of collaboration opportunities, such as synchronous and asynchronous interactions with peers, and viewing or changes to persistent data. In this paper, an innovative use of wireless and mobile technologies in education is explored as part of a scenario-based design process

With the progress of mobile technology, Mobile Learning (ML) will be a part of our daily life. This paper discusses the issues of ML deployment, and its role in the society. First the pedagogical characteristics are explained, and then the change of the paradigm of the learning is given. The suitable applications of ML, according to the researcher's experiences, are demonstrated. The barriers of deployment as well as suggested solutions are explained. At the end we suggest three learning models.

There is an ever growing number of mobile learning applications based on location-awareness, However, there is still a lack of information concerning how it might impact socio-cognitive processes involved in collaboration. This is what the following empirical study aimed to address. We used a mobile and collaborative game, running on tablet PCs, to test two conditions. In one experimental condition, groups could see the positions of each member; while in the other location-awareness was not provided. All users could use the tablet PC to communicate through annotations. We found no differences between the two conditions with regard to the task performance. Neither were there any differences in terms of cognitive workload. However, players without the location-awareness indications had a better representation of their partners' paths. They wrote more messages and better explicated their strategies. The paper concludes with remarks about how this can be taken into account by mobile learning practitioners.

The kid-centric online game Club Penguin (acquired by Disney last year) adds 500-1000 words a day to its list of forbidden chat-words in an effort to keep things clean.

The BBC looks at how poor Indian farmers are using business text messages to get better prices for their goods.

Google has just begun supporting Unicode 5.1, less than one month after it was released. Web pages can use a variety of different character encodings, like ASCII, Latin-1, or Windows 1252, or Unicode. Most encodings can only represent a few languages, but Unicode will handle anything from Chinese to French to Arabic.

Imagine you're in Bangladesh and you want to buy a cow. You pull your mobile phone out of your pocket and start sending text messages to CellBazaar, a mobile phone marketplace which some have called the "Craigslist of Bangladesh." You look through the relevant ads and look at the ages, locations, and number of teeth of the 187 cows that are currently for sale. After another SMS, you are connected with the phone number of the the seller, ready to make your new purchase. What could have taken days to coordinate was made easy by a series of simple text messages.

Populi.net has developed a platform for capturing data in a very simple wizard interaction via entry level mobile phones, with their first product called "Mobile Researcher". A step by step wizard interaction is very much suited to the small screen, and their solution combines a web-based management console with a lightweight mobile application. WAP and SMS channels are also available when more appropriate than an application.

Populi.net has developed a platform for capturing data in a very simple wizard interaction via entry level mobile phones, with their first product called "Mobile Researcher". A step by step wizard interaction is very much suited to the small screen, and their solution combines a web-based management console with a lightweight mobile application. WAP and SMS channels are also available when more appropriate than an application.

Twitter's ease of use and plethora of third-party visualization tools are great for crowdsourcing any number of things, but a new service may actually bring social networking into the real world. Brightkite, a Denver startup, gives users tools to post about what's going on at a location, meet up with friends, and even, if you want, meet new people in the same place.

An initiative called The Pan-African Living Dictionary Online (PALDO) is attempting to create an interlinked multilingual dictionary for African languages. It is being built upon the foundation of the well-known Kamusi Project, which developed a useful online Swahili/English dictionary. PALDO is particularly hoping for participation from programmers, linguists, database experts, lexicographers and past users with experience in other online dictionaries.

Facebook is to add a slew of new safeguards to protect young users from sexual predators and cyber bullies. At the heart of the changes are efforts to ban convicted sex offenders from the site and finding better ways to verify users' ages and identities.

Google - whose shares currently trade at almost $600 (£300), more than $100 above its level a year ago - is facing two shareholder motions at its annual general meeting on Thursday. Both insist the company needs to do more to fight censorship and support human rights.

Mobile carrier Verizon Wireless has joined the Linux Mobile (LiMo) Foundation and has announced plans to adopt the open source software platform. Linux-based phones will be available from Verizon next year, alongside other devices that run competing proprietary operating systems.

Former One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) security director Ivan Krstić is mad as hell and he's not going to take it anymore. He opened up a massive can of damning allegations about OLPC earlier this week in a lengthy tirade on his personal blog. The blog post includes a deeply pessimistic appraisal of constructionist learning theories and some harsh words for OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte, but it also offers some valid and insightful observations about the project's failings and what can be done to remedy them.

Microsoft is aggressively pushing a new low-cost version of its operating system intended for use with "ultra low cost PCs," competing with Linux on machines like the Eee and the One Laptop Per Child XO. However, Microsoft isn't willing to sell the low-cost license to any ULPC -- rather, the company has set out onerous conditions governing the maximum spec of these machines: 10.2" screens and no more than 80GB of storage, and no touch screens allowed.