[Air-l] teaching tool: Technology and Development

[Alexandra Samuel]

As part of a class I taught last year on ³The Internet and Politics,² I
developed an in-class exercise on technology and development. The exercise
was greeted enthusiastically by my students, and spawned a number of term
papers, so I thought it might be useful to other people teaching this topic.
I¹ve created a page on my web site that describes the exercise and links to
all the supplementary materials; it¹s online at
http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/teaching/developmentcases/techdevelopment.htm
l

It¹s a group-based simulation exercise that asks each group to develop a
development application for a specific technology. In the first part of the
exercise, students are given a scenario, and work as a group to create their
own technology-enabled development project. In the second part of the
exercise, students learn about the real-world outcome from their scenario,
and compare the real-world outcome with their own solution.  The cases
include Grameenphone, the Simputer project, community radio in Sri Lanka,
and a couple of other projects.

Please let me know if you use the exercise in your own teaching, and if you
have any suggestions for how I can improve it (I¹m happy to answer any
questions, too). And please feel free to forward this e-mail to colleagues
who may be interested.

Alexandra Samuel
samuel at fas.harvard.edu
http://www.alexandrasamuel.com