E-Learning Queen & a Touch of Vanity

Ok, I have to admit this. Perhaps by admiting it I am getting past my own particular hang-ups about being OK with praise and admitting that public blogging has an ego element. I blog to be in service. Yes. But I really REALLY get a kick out of it when someone notices. E-Learning Queen:

"The E-Learning Queen takes a look at a few e-learning blogs that have caught her eye, and prepares to brief her instructionally designing cats (if she can find them)."

It is lovely to be in such wonderful company as well.

Blog Africa

On an international roll today. Another thing I have been thinking/wondering about is blog aggregations and what role they might play in creating and sustaining positive change. Just pondering out loud here. For example: Blog Africa: BlogAfrica Catalog

The BlogAfrica project is a loose collaboration between individuals at Geekcorps, allafrica.com, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and other friends across the web. AllAfrica is providing web tools, Geekcorps is providing support for our first workshops in Ghana, and Berkman is providing organizational and media help.

What is the power here? The training? The relationships that might be facilitated by working on a group project? The information that goes out? All?

Online Focus Groups

No synthesis or good "tracking down" of sources here, but I wanted to capture this post of danah's via Dina (that has a nice ring to it) as I think there are implications far beyond online focus groups. Alas, I'm running too fast for my own good to do the synthesis.

Conversations with Dina:

"danah shares her experiences of participating in a digital focus group, where she misses the nuances, the colour, the tone and gestures ....

'We were all assigned random logins. This meant that no one took the time to personalize them and thus, there were a lot of little AIM men talking. Because i was using iChat, i couldn't differentiate the AIM men and i found this consistently confusing. Nothing was known of the participants, although aspects of their interests and values emerged through conversation. Of course, the problem was that i couldn't differentiate the speakers so i'd learn something about one AIM man and not know how to connect it back to that AIM man when the s/he spoke again. Very confusing. Thus, i tried not to model gender or other attributes in my head and just stick to text, line by line. This made it feel very un-focus group-y."

Dina also points to these (old?) sites:

• Summary of Process for Conducting an Online Focus Group, US National Institutes of Health
  
• Designing and Conducting Virtual Focus Groups
  Author: Casey Sweet, from www.focusgroupsonline.net, Dec 1999

Google AdWords and the Suffering of the World

As I am soon headed to Accra, I have been cruising blogs and sites that mention Ghana. I cam across Ethan Zuckerman's Weblog : Ethan's Weblog - My blog is in Cambridge, but my heart's in Accra and found his fascinating analysis of country names in Google's AdWords program.

"So why does the free market think these nations are worth so much per click? Some are obvious: St. Lucia, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Italy and others are expensive vacation destinations - a user clicking on the ad might be prepared to pay thousands for tickets or a hotel. Others - Mexico, Panama, Dominican Republic, Bulgaria, Lebanon - have large expatriate populations who search for flights home, discount phone cards or financial remittance services.

Sudan's the really weird one. (Angola baffled me for a moment, before I followed a few links and discovered that advertisers were encouraging me to travel to Angola, Indiana.) Search for Sudan on Google. You'll get a results page with eight ads, the maximum Google puts on a page. Every ad is from a nonprofit organization. Save the Children, Care USA, Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International and Mercy Corps are running straightforward 'We work in Sudan - support our work' ads; American Progress Action Fund and National Public Radio are running ads for their Sudan information sites. The top bidder is 'Global Nomads Group', an NGO which aims to connect children around the world through videoconferencing - they're also the leading bidder for 'Rwanda'.

The rank/price relationship for 'Sudan' implies that one or more advertisers either are receiving an excellent clickthrough rate, or are paying well over a dollar per click for their ads, likely both. This reveals an uncomfortable truth about the relief business - on those rare occasions a humanitarian crisis gets global attention, aid agencies have to take advantage of the situation to raise money.

Doctors Without Borders' website lists projects in 85 countries that they've worked on in the past few years. It's pretty rare that the ongoing strife in Burundi gets international attention - the money that comes in from donors concerned about Darfur supports a program for rape survivors in Bujumbura, HIV prevention efforts in Malawi and anti-malarial efforts in Nigeria. The situation is analagous to the controversy over the Red Cross's 'Liberty Fund', where the organization announced an intention to use some of the money donated to support the victims of 9/11 to support Red Cross projects around the country - Red Cross CEO Bernadine Healy ended up resigning over the public outcry. Jim Moore has raised concerns about Bono's DATA (Debt AIDS Trade Africa) project buying Sudan impressions, advertising a site that had little to do with Sudan. (DATA no longer appears to be buying the 'Sudan' keyword.)

While it's interesting (and soul-crushingly depressing) to discover bidding wars over keywords associated with human suffering, I'm focused on the idea that I can pull data about web users' interest in different subjects out of this data. My data collection holy grail would be an algorithm that allowed me to estimate how much money is spent on each keyword based on click availability and predicted rank at different maximum click levels. Unfortunately, the math is way beyond my capabilities - any game theory/auction economists out there want to give me some pointers?"

I had to put in a longer quote, but in truth, go read the article. There are various strands of interest: Zuckerman's observations on the state of the world, the methodology and the data he hopes to extract. Zuckerman, by the way, founded http://www.geekcorps.org.

Using mobiles to track HIV treatment

I often wonder how we can extend our imaginations about how a tool can be used. I see mobile phone applications in Africa and other places as leading examples. I wonder, in the US do we lack the imagination or do we lack the need that drives our imaginations? Check this out: Using mobiles to track HIV treatment.

The researchers in South Africa have developed a unique application for mobile phone technology that helps health workers monitor HIV patients cheaply and efficiently. The Cell-Life project, backed by local mobile phone giant Vodacom, has developed software and data management systems that let clinic workers use their mobile phones to monitor patients' treatment and spot health problems before they become life-threatening.

The phones are equipped with a special menu that enables the HIV counsellors to record data on a patient's symptoms and whether they are sticking to drug regimes. Other factors that might affect their health, such as a lack of money to pay for transport to the clinic, or shortage of food, are also monitored. The information collected is instantly relayed over Vodacom's network to a central database, which can be accessed by the clinic staff through a secure Internet connection. "