Nepal: the great digital divide

Mobile cellular growth is slowing worldwide. In developed countries, the mobile market is reaching saturation levels with an average 116 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants at the end of 2010 and a marginal growth of 1.6% from 2009-2010. But the mobile penetration in developing countries is huge. The developing world is increasing its share of mobile subscriptions from 53% of total mobile subscriptions at the end of 2005 to 73% at the end of 2010.

In the context of Nepal, compared to fixed telephone subscriptions (2.81), mobile subscriptions (30.69) is relatively very high and expected to grow rapidly. But Internet users are still very low, due to lack of access to computers and the Internet. Where they do have the Internet (mostly in urban areas), it is expensive, unreliable and has a low bandwidth.

Nepal is a mountainous country where most of the countryside is remote  and about 86 percent of population lives in rural areas and dependent on subsistence agriculture for their livelihood and availability of electricity is limited to about 18 percent of the total population, while the rural population has just about 5 percent. In Africa, an estimated 90% of the rural population remain without electricity.

The disparity in access to ICTs between the world's richest and poorest countries,  the difference in people's chance of getting training and skills that will enable them to use ICTs effectively - the Digital Divide is evident. While more than 94% of people in Norway can access the web, a mere 0.5% in Ethopia do. Even though number of countries, including Estonia, Finland and Spain have declared access to the Internet as a legal right for citizens and 71% of the population in developed countries are online while only 21% of the population in developing countries are connected.

The access to technology is crucial. 'A global explosion in the use of mobile phones with over 5 billion subscriptions', 'double Internet users since 2005..': these are definitely some of many encouraging facts. The technology however needs to be affordable, sustainable and scalable. In Nepal, the financial, social, geographical, political and infrastructural challenges are greater and even though there are opportunities to implement technological interventions, impact is hard to achieve.

Internet Users per 100 inhabitants
Year | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010
   %     0.20  0.24   0.31   0.38    0.45     0.80   1.14   1.41    1.73   1.97   6.78

Fixed Internet subscriptions per 100 inhabitants
Year | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010
    %      0.05     0.06     0.08     0.10      0.11     0.16     0.22     0.28        -              -          -

Fixed Broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants
Year | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010
    %   -         0.00    0.00   0.00   0.00    0.00   0.00   0.04   0.03   0.05    0.38

Fixed telephone lines per 100 inhabitants
Year | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010
     % 1.09     1.19     1.28  1.42   1.56   1.78     2.20   2.47   2.79  2.76  2.81

Mobile subscriptions per 100 inhabitants
Year | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010
   %  0.04     0.07     0.09  0.31   0.44    0.83    4.16  11.52  14.53   19.02   30.69


(Source: ITU and Upgrading Development: Can technology alleviate poverty?)

Mobile Learning: lots of 'Now' and the glimpse of the 'Future' 2011

"A Practitioner Symposium presented by The West London Lifelong Learning Network & The College of North West London, 28th September 2011." This FREE event focused on Mobile Learning in Further and Higher Education and most of the attendees were from London colleges. (#MobileLearn2011) This event took place at the College of North West London, Dudden Hill Lane, London, NW10 2XD.John Cook (@johnnigelcook) from London Met discussed the challenges of promoting active and deep learning with mobiles. Slides found here. The focus of this talk was on the reuse of the context of one subject (urban education) in another (language learning) through a reconfiguration of the required scripts/information within the mobile device mediated augmented space for learning. Later, Carl Smith showed some example videos of augmented reality, work done by his colleagues and others.
Steve Boneham from JISC Netskills and Doug Belshaw (JISC infoNet) presented on 'Implementing Mobile Learning in Your Institution' (slides found here) and explained the rationale for institutional mobile learning and share some examples of good practice from the infoKit.
One of the holy grails for mobile learning researchers is to come up with models and categorisations that enable widespread acceptance and uptake of mobile learning; models that can be contextualised but serve as an accepted framework. These range from the very general - for example, “‘permanently online’, ‘frequently online’ and offline’” (Shrestha, et al, 2010, p.341), conceiving of the mobile phone as a ‘terminal’ (Ford & Leinonen, 2010, p.196-7), or the detailed: (source found here)

The most engaging and interesting talk by John Traxler (@johntraxler) explored the looming crisis of identity and direction for the mobile learning research community. The mobile learning research community is about ten years old. According Traxler, the community is now at a tipping point, a vindication, a culmination, when the work of researchers, practitioners and activists will bear fruit, when we will bring in the harvest, when we will finally address scale, sustainability, equity, blending and embedding. The community has however worked largely within institutional contexts, positioned at the vanguard of technology enhanced learning, buying into the rhetoric of 'innovation' and working from the top down, working mainly in small-scale, fixed-term subsidised projects staffed by enthusiasts. These developments took place when technology was scarce, difficult and expensive; now technology is ubiquitous, cheap and reliable and what we will see in the next ten years will not be a continuation of the trajectory defined by the previous ten years.
Later, I (@sunnysujan) went out for a Turkish meal in Baker Street with John Moore (@jptmoore), Dough (@dajbelshaw), Julie Usher, Nick Dennis and Shirley. After the meal, John and I went out for a few beers.