Media articles

ICT tools, when used effectively in schools, gives opportunities for the teachers to self-learn and build on their subject knowledge. Eventually it provides the students a new context for engaging with each of these subjects. Bindu Thirumalai, in her piece in The Hindu, explains how innovations in technology have helped educators explore possibilities of using simulations for science and graphic calculators for mathematics, to bring alive and animate certain phenomenon or concepts.

 

In the run up to the UN CSTD meeting in Geneva in May 2012, IT for Change ran a campaign for 'democratising global Internet governance'. This campaign was supported by over 67 civil society organisations and many more individuals, from across the world. An article written on this issue by Parminder Jeet Singh was published in The Hindu, a leading English newspaper daily in India before the important meeting in Geneva.

Icann, the global authority dealing with domain names, is hastening the threat of monopolisation on the Internet through its new scheme
to sell generic words (like .beauty, .books, .search). IT for Change wrote an opinion piece in a leading English newspaper daily about how Icann is getting away with the problematic plan of putting up parts of our language up for privatisation. A day later, the daily published an editorial piece endorsing the same, which can be read here

The article points to how the bidding model adopted by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in the allocation of generic top level domain names is creating monopolies and privatising the knowledge commons.

Read the article here

The article highlights the significance of India’s proposal for the formation of a UN Commitee for Internet-Related Policies (CIRP) in developing countries’ fight for a greater stake in the governance of the Internet.

Read the article here.

Digital platforms and tools can support widespread construction of learning resources. Since digital resources are ‘non-rivalrous', meaning sharing does not reduce their availability, teachers at a systemic level can locally create learning resources and share them across the country to create a resource-rich learning environment. However, Apple's proprietary apps control knowledge creation, sharing.

This paper was written for Plan International's Annual Report, entitled 'Because I am a Girl'. For girls and young women, especially in the global south, ICT access and its effective use provide new avenues in their journeys towards economic empowerment. This paper unpacks some typical myths about ICTs, gender and empowerment in order to explore these complexities, and strongly argues for a citizenship and rights-based approach to ICTs to promote individual and collective empowerment of girls in the information society context.

This article was published in the EgovOnline.net magazine in August 2006. The challenge of the 'Right to Information' is that while such rights may have been translated into laws, the practice of enforcing such rights is one which in many contexts is out of reach for those without considerable access to legal or financial resources. However, it is precisely those with the least resources who may have the most need to have access to such information.