David Bornstein, the author of ?How to Change the World? and contributor to the Fixes blog here at The Times, has written a spectacular post ? ?Where YouTube Meets the Farm? ? describing Digital Green, a successful effort to extend the reach of social workers and agricultural extension services in India through community-shot videos that explain innovative steps taken by farmers to boost yields or income.
You can sift the videos on the organization?s YouTube channel or the ?Farmerbook? on its Web site. What you?ll see is one hub-and-spokes node in what I?ve been calling the??Knowosphere.?
Read on for an excerpt from Bornstein?s piece that I found particularly exciting, followed by my views on how this same model can be extended to other important areas, particularly construction:
From Bornstein?s post:
One of the great paradoxes in today?s world is that information is so easy to transmit ?few places on earth are beyond the reach of cellphones or televisions ? and yet our efforts to get life-saving, livelihood-boosting information to people in a form that sticks, a form that will actually change behavior, are frequently disappointing.
That was a problem that gripped Rikin Gandhi, a young American-born software engineer, while he was working in Bangalore for Microsoft Research India seven years ago. Rikin was interested in how rural telecenters might be used to spread education and information about health and agriculture in remote areas. A colleague suggested he investigate the application of the?Digital StudyHall?model in rural Karnataka. Gandhi did just that ? and his experience led to the creation of?Digital Green, a platform and process for extending knowledge and influencing behavior that has seized the attention of many development experts?.
Kentaro Toyama, Gandhi?s boss at Microsoft, recalled: ?He came back and said, ?I think I have something that is much more effective than traditional agricultural extension.? So we wanted to evaluate it.?
They set up a?controlled trial, comparing Gandhi?s approach with a standard ?Training and Visit-based? extension approach. Among 1,470 households in 16 villages, they found that it increased adoption of some agricultural practices sevenfold over control villages. The research indicated that the cost to get one farmer to adopt one practice dropped tenfold, from $38 with the traditional approach to $3.70 with the video-based model.
Now I?d love to get together and brainstorm with Engineers Without Borders, Brian Tucker of Geohazards International, Roger Bilham of the University of Colorado (who co-created the simple but illuminating posters to the right) and others to create a similar system for disseminating knowledge about safer, but cheap construction techniques in the world?s crowding disaster hot spots.
There are heaps of great ideas out there, including the designs and initiatives of Elizabeth Hausler, an earthquake engineer who founded Build Change, a clearinghouse for safer structures attuned to the norms of different countries, including Indonesia, China and Haiti.
I created the video below with my older son and information from Santiago Pujol, an innovative engineer at Purdue who found that simply rearranging common building materials can produce a far more durable structure.
It demonstrates the collaborative potential of the Internet in linking an earthquake engineer, a student adept at After Effects software and a communicator.
But the next challenge is getting such videos ? ideally made locally ? seen by the masons and builders who are busy mixing mortar and laying bricks. In many of the world?s most vulnerable regions, construction is being done with no input from an engineer. Can this population be reached before weak walls crumble? I?m sure there?s a way to employ the Digital Green model. I?ll report back soon.
adriana lima victoria secret fashion show SEC Championship Rick Majerus Cotto vs Trout Robin Givens Gus Malzahn
কোন মন্তব্য নেই:
একটি মন্তব্য পোস্ট করুন