Educational Technology in Sub–Saharan Africa
January 2006 — December 2006
Education is vitally important to lasting democracy and economic growth in Africa. Unfortunately, lack of learning materials,
scarcity of qualified teachers, the epidemic of AIDS, and financial constraints are massive obstacles to learning across the continent. Information and
communication technologies (ICTs) offer one way of delivering higher education to residents of Sub-Saharan Africa who would otherwise have no access to
such institutions.
By incorporating the technologies of MIT’s OpenCourse- Ware (OCW) and iLabs to provide remote access to MIT laboratories,
the project demonstrated a sustainable model for sharing education content with this part of the developing world, initially Cameroon, Zambia, and Kenya.
Besides providing a valuable resource to the African universities involved, MIT students were also able to evaluate the effectiveness of the new
technologies and prove, over great distances, the power of remote learning.
Student Participants:
Mohamed Haji
Fawah Akwo
Jamira Cotton
Marta Luczynska
Faculty Advisor:
Prof. Shigeru Miyagawa
Additional Information:
http://icampus.mit.edu/projects/OpenAfrica.shtml
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A Collaborative Information Tool for the Biological Research Community
June 2006 — December 2006
In the field of biology research, information resources are often incomplete, out-of-date, and difficult to search.
Experimental details are often shared anecdotally between researchers, offering little stable basis for sharing ideas and holding discussions around
specifics.
OpenWetWare is a portal created and maintained by MIT graduate students in biology that promotes the open
sharing of research, education, publication, and discussion in biological sciences and engineering. It provides a place for laboratories and individuals
to organize their own information and collaborate with others easily and efficiently. It currently hosts sharing sites for 50 research laboratories from
30 institutions, including Boston University, Brown University, Caltech, Cambridge Research Institute, CNRS, Harvard University, and many others.
Student Participants:
Jason Kelly
Danielle France
Barry Canton
Jeff Gritton
Reshma Shetty
Faculty Advisor:
Prof. Drew Endy
Additional Information:
http://icampus.mit.edu/projects/OpenWetWare.shtml
http://openwetware.org
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