Uganda ripe for ICTs

I watched a short version of the film, “Uganda: Education Reforms“, in one of my courses yesterday. I don’t doubt that there is an element of propaganda in the USAID produced film, but I was very impressed with the Ugandan reforms presented. Not surprisingly (and not unjustly), Uganda is something of a “darling child” in development education circles.
One of the things that really impressed me is the provisions for continuing training of teachers. As part of the “Teacher Development Management System” (TDMS), tutors travel throughout Uganda disseminating information about developments in pedagogy and education and encourage teachers to be creative in their approaches. Furthermore, the call for creativity is passed on to the students, with teachers actively encouraged to promote independent and creative thinking among their students.
What this all amounts to, at least as it was presented in the film, is the cultivation of a mentality about education and learning that is intended to reach all levels of society, from the teachers to the parents and to the students. What kept coming to my mind while I watched the film was, with the Ugandan vision and approach regarding education, imagine what they could do if they had good ICTs? And what made this question so persistent in my mind was that they seem to have largely cultivated the type of collaborative knowledge development and dissemination strategies that are so often associated with ICTs without having broad access to ICTs.
One of the things I’ve thought about is whether ICTs are a necessary prerequisite to the type of knowledge development activity that we associate with ICTs because, when talking about ICT4D, one often hears things like, “What are people going to do with ICTs when they’ve never sat in front of a computer before?” What the Ugandan example suggests to me, is that there are ways, and in fact concrete examples of, ways to promote strategies that will make ICTs, once they are available, a relatively seamless addition to ways of doing things, rather than a scary new paradigm (which is questionable whether they really ever are, but that’s a different topic).