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Impatience as a Virtue: Addressing Persistent ICT-in-Education Challenges in Small Developing Countries

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ICT-Supported Innovations in Small Countries and Developing Regions

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Abstract

This chapter details one scholar’s experience being a practitioner in her area of expertise: technology for schools in developing world contexts. After being invited to design a solar powering system to charge donated laptops in Haitian schools, she began working with students in hands-on, project-based courses to design and deploy ICT4D-related technologies in the field. Once on the ground, she and her students discovered that the challenges and failures of playing such an active role can be many, but the speed and intensity with which we learn is much greater than from more traditional types of classroom-based or ‘book learning’. After shifting geographic focus to Pacific Island schools, the author and her students designed, developed, and deployed multiple new technologies, including a solar computer lab in a box and a solar digital library. Throughout this venture, unexpected developments continually arose, which have led to the changing of project partners, improvement of the relevance and usefulness of technology being developed, and an expansion of the project to multiple small island-nations. Through a narrative case study of experiential learning, both in-the-classroom and in-the-field, this chapter details the challenges and lessons learned from the scholar-practitioner’s experience.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In an interesting and coincidental footnote, George Marcus, often seen as the originator of the idea of multi-sited ethnography, arrived at this concept springing from the disconnect he felt when trying to apply Immanuel Wallerstein’s World Systems Theory to the realities on the ground as Marcus carried out ethnographic research in Tonga, another Pacific Island (Pierides, 2010: 185).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Arizona State University, Interdisciplinary B256K, 1120 S. Cady Mall, P.O. Box 875603, Tempe, AZ, 85287-5603, USA

    Laura Hosman

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  1. Laura Hosman
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Correspondence to Laura Hosman .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Independent Scholar and Researcher, Savannah, Georgia, USA

    Ian A. Lubin

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Hosman, L. (2018). Impatience as a Virtue: Addressing Persistent ICT-in-Education Challenges in Small Developing Countries. In: Lubin, I. (eds) ICT-Supported Innovations in Small Countries and Developing Regions. Educational Communications and Technology: Issues and Innovations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67657-9_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67657-9_8

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