As part of sorting out the details of what to put into a mobile computing ‘roadshow’ for secondary pupils, I’ve been trying to find links to materials about the impact of mobiles in the developing world. Some of them will fit into the page and the later acccompanying slideshow rather well, and that’s good. The students will be presented with the wider picture than they normally see and think about, namely their mobile and them, so that they can appreciate how the impact of the mobile is greater outside of the developed world than in our world.

During the pulling together of the materials I keep thinking that it would be interesting to do a project with a team of students here, and a group of students, or workers in another country, so that together we can build something greater than the sum of us. However, while that will not happen today, or perhaps even this year, it would be nice to keep track of these resources that I’ve got so far, so that they are not stuck inside the ‘blog’ of Bloglines.

The W3C had a useful Mobile Web Initiative conference in 2008 and many of the papers and posters provide good background. Kiwanja.net provides a database of articles about the impact of mobile both globally and within specific regions across a variety of projects. The Putting People First blog had a good round of links relating to the ICT4D Africa Gathering meeting in April 2009. The Putting People First blog is always a good place to look for this kind of material actually.