Week 11 Reflections
This week took me down unexpected routes. Facebook presented me with a suggested post from The Hastings Center. That suggested post led to my first blog post of the week, which discusses ethical concerns surrounding a Twitter job market study. The week's reading from The Pew Research Center led me to consider Internet, Smartphone, and social media usage in developing economies versus developed economies, resulting my second blog post of the week. Finally, reading the following posts from my fellow EME 6414 classmates inspired me to consider the role of Internet and social media use in education in a specific developing economy (The Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC):
Idam's Blog - Social Media Use in Developing Countries
Through my reading, I learned that integrating the Internet into education in the DRC isn't as simple as it might seem to me, sitting here in the US typing on my laptop in my air-conditioned home. It's one thing to read about a lack of infrastructure, it's another thing to learn that schools don't have WiFi or learning management systems, or that only about 1% of the rural population has consistent electricity at home, or that only half of girls aged 5 to 17 attend school at all. I found all this information with only one hour of online research, so I imagine it's only the tip of the iceberg. No wonder integrating web 2.0 tools into the education system isn't a high priority in the DRC at the moment.
It's really amazing what we take for granted, isn't it? And yet some countries leap over steps we took in the US. For example, some countries went from no Internet to mobile Internet, without the intermediary dialup and such that we have in the US. Those countries never built the landline infrastructure.
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