Category Archives: Development

BBC World Service Poll on Globalisation

Posted on February 7, 2008 by Tryggvi Thayer

The BBC has published the results of a poll on attitudes toward, and experiences of, globalisation that they conducted in cooperation with GlobeScan Inc. and The Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA). (See the story on the poll on BBC … Continue reading →

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SimCity on the OLPC laptop

Posted on November 10, 2007 by Tryggvi Thayer

Update: I didn’t dig deep enough to see what was really meant concerning constructionism and SimCity – see here – makes more sense now. Game producer Electronic Arts has donated the original SimCity to the OLPC project (read more here). … Continue reading →

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School laptops in Nigeria – Microsoft or Linux?

Posted on November 10, 2007 by Tryggvi Thayer

The Nigerian government has finalised a plan to make 17,000 Intel Classmate PCs available to school children. The project then took some strange twists and turns regarding the operating system for the laptops to run on. A strange series of … Continue reading →

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Googling the MDGs – some interesting trends

Posted on September 3, 2007 by Tryggvi Thayer

I recently conducted a very simple experiment. It is by no means a model of academic rigor, but interesting nonetheless. I conducted a search on Google Scholar of “Millennium Development Goals” for a few specific years. The results hint at … Continue reading →

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The OLPC laptop – educational tool, technical revolution or both?

Posted on August 26, 2007 by Tryggvi Thayer

As distribution of the OLPC project’s XO laptop nears, has the shift of attention from the educational aspects of the project to the technical aspects injured the project? When Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab started talking about their plans … Continue reading →

Posted in Development, Education, ICTs, Leapfrogging development | 2 Comments

What does Bono know about “aid” – and what is “aid” anyway?

Posted on July 4, 2007 by Tryggvi Thayer

Several weeks ago I had planned to post about a two year old interview that I came across with Kenyan economist James Shikwati that apeared in Der Spiegel. I don’t remember how I came across that interview, but apparently others … Continue reading →

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