what are they doing?
Brazil's favelas online--Comitê para Democratização da Informática (CDI)
In 1994, the group that was to become CDI (the Committee for the Democratization of Information) opened a computer center in the Santa Marta favela, one of Brazil's infamous shanty-towns that have virtually no schools, irregular electrification, water, and utility services. The brain-child of Rodrigo Baggio and an ever-expanding corps of volunteers, within a few years they had created 10 centers/schools with no budget--just volunteers and donated equipment. The goal was to teach children and adults computing and internet skills, to expand their employment prospects and to connect the favela's often socially isolated residents to each other and to the wider world. (Disability World)
Now, in 2001, CDI is running diverse programs with sponsorship from corporations like Microsoft and Esso. They run preschools, projects for people with disabilities, 208 schools in 30 cities, and an online newspaper. An initiative inspired by CDI in Brazil, called CDI Americas, has opened offices in Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay and seeks to expand activities to other countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.
According to its website, since its founding in 1997, the African Virtual University has offered classes in English and French to students in learning centers in 15 African countries. Faculty from around the world offer classes from studios, which are then beamed by satellite to the learning centers, which are equipped with at least 50 computers and an on-site moderator. Students have the opportunity to interact with the professor in real time via email and phone. AVU also offers access to free email accounts and a database with online journal. It includes a "crossroads" threaded discussion list, and offers programming and other computer classes. One of its primary goals has been teaching teachers, who in turn can pass knowledge to their students.
Rural education: CEBU: Philippines Secondary Education Distance Education Project and Universiti Sains Malaysia
As Zuraidah Abdul-Rahman discusses for UMS, and Veloso et al. for CEBU, these are projects that have relied on print, paper and pen resources that they give to their students. Students then have the opportunity to email faculty with questions. In other words, it's decidedly low-tech, and in many ways not much different from extension programs (particularly ag extension) initiatives that have been run since the 1930s, and university-without-walls plans that have been available since the 1970s, albeit with the important difference that email allows communication more or less without the time lag of mail or traveling; however, in places with low technological density, it's possible to overstate how instantaneous virtual communication is. It is important to keep these kinds of models in mind, however, lest we think we've invented the world anew with e-education, or that web-based learning is the best paradigm for all settings.
Guillermo Gomez-Peña's performance art
When Gomez-Peña writes of "low-riding
through the interneta" on his laptop with a 3-D Virgin of Guadelupe
sticker on it (1997), he may be describing precisely
what we all, in fact, do--bring our wholly racialized, gendered, place-specific
selves to the practices of internet computing. For those of you unfamiliar
with the barrio vernacular of the U.S. Southwest, this may be an untranslatable
phrase, but we will try. A "low-rider" is a very cool car, rebuilt with
hydraulics to lift and drop, an expression of individuality and artistry,
and the police believe everyone who drives one is a criminal. To "low-ride"
is to engage in an extremely hip, gendered male, usually harmless activity
that nevertheless subjects you to police harassment. The Virgin of Guadelupe,
of course, was a specific, mestiza incarnation of the Virgin Mary in Mexico,
who has become the patroness of Mexicans and their descendents, protector
and nationalist symbol. The "interneta" is Spanglish, that proud, edgy,
postmodern, transnational language invented by Spanish-speakers in the
U.S., especially youth, that irritates parents, teachers, English-only
policy-makers, and all humorless defenders of pure languages and identities
alike. Peña's point is crucial to how we invite students to use
the Internet, to appropriate it, engage it, challenge it, and transform
it, with their full, funky, troubling selves. Far from entertaining conceptions
of the Net as a gender-less, race-less, disembodied place, a cyberspace
of pure digital stream and binary logic, we need to conceive of it as having
a culture (obviously: why else would we have needed to invent words like
"netizens" and "netiquette"), albeit a culture that imagines itself as
neutral and transparent, as simultaneously mainstream and endlessly multi-sited,
the "culture of no culture," in Sharon Traweek's phrase (1988).