We are happy to announce the launch of the Amy Mahan Research Fellowship Program to Assess the Impact of Public Access to ICT, a capacity-building component of the Global Impact Study named in honor of Amy Mahan, a dear friend and partner.
The program is an eighteen-month project sponsored by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and managed by Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, in collaboration with scholars from Universidad de San Andrés, Argentina, and the University of the Philippines. It will award up to 12 Research Fellowships to teams of emerging scholars from developing countries in Africa and the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean. These fellowships will provide research grant funding and specialized mentoring guidance to enable Fellows to carry out a new original research study.
The Global Impact Study has identified several areas for in-depth investigation, and has started working on the first three:
- Infomediaries: public access brokers
- Collaborative knowledge sharing
- Non-instrumental use of ICT as a component of general ICT skill acquisition
- Mobiles and public access venues
- The life cycle of public access venues
- Community information ecologies
- Direct and indirect impacts
- Non-users
- Willingness to pay
- Policy and regulation
- Institutional and stakeholder influence
- The effect of venue rules and regulations on use
- The role of networks in venue ecosystems
- Local content
- Venue architecture and design
- IT skills, training, and employment
- The relationship between the costs and benefits of providing public access to ICT
The Global Impact Study team will start work on more of these areas — but we won’t be able to pursue all of them. Our goal, therefore, is to enable other researchers to take up our ideas to continue this research.
The Amy Mahan Research Fellowship Program is one way to reach this goal. We are excited to contribute to developing new researchers and furthering research on the impacts of public access ICT.
For more information on the Amy Mahan Research Fellowship Program, including application instructions, please visit the fellowship program website.
Photo of Amy by Bruce Girard, 2008.
January 3rd, 2010 at 4:49 am
I am really fascinated with your vision and the vision of telecentre as a whole. I strongly hope to fully become a part of this move in my country (Nigeria). Though presently in Asia country (China), but i hope to return after i finish my PHD research in 2012. I am a member of telecentre. I am hoping to be part of this move if our research group is awarded the fellowship.
January 29th, 2010 at 8:46 pm
Perhaps your study should include how we are approaching the wide digital divides and the worsening environment problems caused by loss of trees when children around the world are voracious users of paper.
Examine how if there is a tool that empower every teacher from the old black board into a digital teacher on the fly.
Examine how using modern low cost netbooks can uplift education in rural areas including areas without electricity through use of low cost low power solar panels.
… and examine how EFA would be realised if contents are easily delivered… even without broadband.
you can find the answers here at http://www.paperlesshomework.com
Regards
Alan