Girl Scouts of the USA has hired The Learning Collective to conceive an engaging online experience that will help girls across the globe reduce their carbon footprint.  This is part of GSUSA’s Journeys program.  Learn more.

The Learning Collective is proud to work with the Girl Scouts on this important project.

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This video is a synopsis of the projects, themes and trouble-shooting expressed at the Design Days event on May 10-11 at UNICEF NYHQ.

We have edited down a conversation between UNICEF sponsored rapid design prototypers to profile what they have created in order to respond to and alleviate actual needs of families and children. This video is intended to help make transparent the iterative process that development must undergo in order to create a new device that can respond to global concerns. Also touched on are ways for the organization to make the process of creating prototypes more streamlined, and the best method to take what is developed and to make it open source in order to create a sustainable and beneficial outcome to those that need it.

For Design Days we invited designers and engineers who have worked with us to discuss UNICEF, the design process, and recommendations for future design collaborations.

Lessons Learned:

UNICEF needs methods for iterative and flexible design contracting; we can’t always know what the end result will look like.

UNICEF would benefit from understanding and discussion of the design process before embarking on projects.

We need to work with open-source designers and engineers so that whatever we pay to have produced is public domain.

“Research” and “development” need to happen with end users, in the field.

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• UNICEF to Offer Free SMS to Nepalese Youth (appscout.com)

A project that particularly caught our eye is Hole-in-the-Wall, the inspiration for the book “Q&A” which inspired the movie Slumdog Millionaire.  Bridging the digital divide by reaching previously underserved youth in the developing world … urban slums and remote-rural populations, ethnic minorities, juvenile home detainees, and children with special needs … Hole-in-the-Wall has installed over 700 internet-enabled public Playground Learning Stations across India, Bhutan, Cambodia and countries in the African continent.  Game-activities promote experiential learning that is mapped to prescribed primary grade curricula across various subjects, Hole-in-the-Wall’s Activity Based E-Learning Solution imparts a playful learning environment by encouraging learning through self and group exploration beyond the classroom.

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Business strategy and information technology consultant Stowe Boyd wrote a blog post on Thursday entitled “Thought Leadership: Beyond Marketing” in which he suggests that the rise of social media might be making us immune to marketing. Boyd suggests that startups might benefit from rethinking how they position themselves online to land on the side of that signal-to-noise ratio so that they’re actually heard.

Boyd observes that “Even in a time of great noise, people are still looking for guidance: they still need to make informed decisions, and to take action on their own behalf or on behalf of their companies. To do so, they look more than ever to those individuals and organizations that they trust, those that have credibility and hard-won reputations.” In order to capitalize on this search for expertise, Boyd suggests that companies try to situate their online presence less in terms of marketing and more in terms of thought leadership.

Boyd says there are three obvious ways to do this: Hire a thought leader. Ally your company with innovative, leading-edge programs. And actively participate in the community discourse in your field, either through written publications or through speaking events.

But these might not be viable options for startups. Hiring a thought leader is likely to be cost-prohibitive. As Boyd notes, “A startup wondering how it can stand out in a crowded field may just punt, and go down the classic social media route: the CEO and/or marketing folks will blog on the company website, and hope that people read the posts; they pay to attend conferences, and hope that they can get a speaking slot; and they try to make the company and its various spokespeople seem to be highly regarded in the community. This is the path that all companies seem to head down, so it comes as no great surprise that it generally doesn’t lead to outstanding results.”

Boyd suggests some alternatives… Read them via Read, Write Web

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But online functionalities, coupled with sourced content, designed to help folks deal with emotional issues represent a new direction for the web … an emotional rather than factual web.

Consider pepfly.  Currently in beta, Pepfly is built on the scientifically supported idea that changing your everyday feelings, thoughts, and behaviors in small ways can have a powerful effect over time.  Pepfly is an app that connects people to emotional experiences using the web.  Pepfly uses a psychology recommendation engine to recognize the words you use to describe yourself and make sense of them in psychological terms.  It uses a matching algorithm to connect your psychological state to a piece of media that might work for you. It uses a learning system to find patterns in your ratings so that it can deliver more of what works for you and less of what does not.  Check out their FAQs.

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School-age children across Africa often don’t have access to a formal education. They may live in remote rural areas or in violence-plagued regions too dangerous for teachers to visit. Others can’t spend a full day in the classroom: They have to work or are heading households left without adults because of the ravages of AIDS.

But educators are finding increasingly innovative ways to bring education to such students in various countries in Africa, using mobile technologies to deliver curricula in ways that go beyond what many school districts are doing with portable devices in the United States …

Areas of Africa are “ripe for the use of mobile technology, even more so than in the U.S. because technology—particularly mobile-phone technology—leapfrogs a frayed and ineffective land-line system,” says Matt Keller, the director of global advocacy for the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child initiative based in Cambridge, Mass.

“It can also leapfrog a frayed and ineffective education system,” he says. “Technology will take this generation of kids to a level that is unprecedented there, in terms of thinking critically and analytically.”

The use of cellphones has been particularly prevalent in many African countries throughout the general population. According to a 2009 report issued by the United Nations-affiliated International Telecommunications Union, based in Geneva, 28 percent of Africans now have a mobile-phone subscription …

In Mali, sub-Saharan Africa’s sixth-largest country, with a population of more than 12 million, 10,000 schools are spread over what is often desolate land, says Rebecca Rhodes, the deputy director for student learning for the country’s Road to Reading program, implemented by the Boston-based Education Development Center, a global nonprofit organization. The program is part of a five-year, $30 million reform plan funded the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Rhodes says cellphone use in Mali is widespread, but it’s nearly impossible to visit the often-isolated schools. As part of the Road to Reading program, lesson plans are posted on a blog site, and teachers use their own cellphones to access the Internet for online curricula to use in their classrooms. The EDC also asks the teachers to provide feedback on the lessons by responding to a text-message survey …

Currently, the Mali cellphone program reaches 500 schools, but soon it will go nationwide. The EDC is also seeking to improve data collection and analyze the information. In addition, the group is looking beyond lesson plans toward the possibility of posting sample tests for teachers to download or to provide standard criteria for teacher evaluations …

A variety of other projects involving cellphones are fanning out across the continent.

In March, the Washington-based World Bank Institute launched a new type of problem-solving video game called Evoke, which is designed to empower young people in Africa to come up with creative solutions to social problems.

Students can play the game by accessing the Web, typically through a cellphone or laptop. Students in South Africa can also sign up to receive weekly text bursts updating them on the latest storyline or mission. Those playing the game may collect videos or photos with their cellphones and can submit them using mobile e-mail, according to the game’s blog.

Players are faced with such problems as environmental degradation, lack of food and water, and poverty and violence and are challenged to find ways to solve them. The game ends May 12, and top players who complete 10 game challenges will earn certification as Evoke social innovators, plus a chance at earning online mentorships, seed funding for new ventures, travel scholarships, and a trip to Washington …

A number of factors have coalesced in Africa making it ready for the use of mobile technology for education, says Robert Spielvogel, the chief technology officer at the EDC. With huge numbers of children lacking any kind of formal education, many ministries of education are focusing on the problem.

“There’s a built-in enormous need, and economically there’s almost no way in a timely fashion that enough schools can be built or teachers found,” Spielvogel says. “There’s an openness here because there’s a sense of crisis that you don’t see in the U.S.” …

In addition, a small pilot project in Zambia used cellphones to improve teacher training. Groups of teacher trainees received cellphones and sent text messages to college lecturers asking questions about assignments or social issues.

The EDC also distributed iPods loaded with training videos to help teachers improve their teaching skills. For example, a survey showed teachers struggling with 6th grade concepts, so the videos highlight how to teach topics like congruency in math or the concept of a magnet, Easterbrooks says …

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