I was at the World Innovation Summit on Education (WISE 13) in Doha, Qatar, last week. The week before I was speaking at the Internet Governance Forum in Bali, Indonesia. At both these events reliable, high-quality, available-on-demand broadband is a precondition for what the people there want to do. For example, everyone at WISE 13 had great expectations (or fears) about MOOCs. Some even went so far as thinking that MOOCs could be some kind of conspiracy against the developing countries, whereby our people would be limited to MOOCs, some kind of poor substitute for real higher education.
The problem is that the precondition does not exist in most developing countries. Unfortunately, at these fora, there is little knowledge about the availability of broadband in the relevant countries and what is needed to ensure the necessary preconditions.
Pakistan, for example, does not have a lot of broadband connectivity. In addition, YouTube has been banned in Pakistan for more than a year. It ain’t MOOC, but that means no one on Pakistan has access to Khan Academy, the largest educational video provider in the world.
At WSIS 13 they simply did not talk about broadband or Internet access. That was not too bad. At IGF, they had a few sessions where the people who were talking about broadband were quite uninformed. What is the solution?
Comments are closed.