This Thursday at Change, Nell O'Rourke will provide an overview of the key points of Kentaro Toyama's talk "Ten Myths of Technology and Development" and lead a discussion about this material.  Please take a brief look at the slides (http://change.washington.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/2009-11-19-Ten-Myths-of-ICTD-Toyama.pdf), thinking about which myth you agree with and disagree with most, and come prepared to share your ideas.

Kentaro Toyama is a visiting scholar at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and until 2009 he was the assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, which he co-founded in 2005.

"In the same world where there are 1.4 billion Internet users, a very different 1.4 billion people live below the World Bank's poverty line. As if in sudden recognition of this gap, the past decade has seen incredible interest in applying information and communication technologies for global development, an endeavor often abbreviated "ICT4D." How do you design user interfaces for an illiterate migrant worker? Can you keep five rural schoolchildren from fighting over one PC? What value is technology to a farmer earning $1 a day?

Interventionist ICT4D projects seek to answer these kinds of questions, but the excitement has also generated a lot of hype about the power of technology to solve the deep problems of poverty. In this talk, I will present 10 myths of ICT4D which continue to persist, despite increasing evidence to the contrary. My hope is to temper the brash claims of technology with realism about its true potential."


What: Nell O'Rourke discussing Kentaro Toyama's talk "Ten Myths of Technology and Development"
When: Thursday, March 4th at Noon
Where: UW, Paul Allen Center, Room 203