Latest News Updates on our work in Ghana and around the world.

Here is a post from Trina Gorman:

Last month, Cliff and I went to Ghana to develop partnerships with local organizations and to conduct a usability study on the device. Our goal through usability was to answer the question: How can we improve the Talking Book to make it easier for illiterate people to use?

We spent time in two villages – one slightly more urban than the other. Andy would teach a group of new users about the device and how to use it. He would then ask them to perform a task, for example to find a message in the health category.

We found that many variables influence how quickly a user learned – everything from their age and education level to their familiarity with other technologies (like a radio, mobile phone) and how close they lived to an urban city. Comfort and repetition were also key – we often saw significant improvement after letting users take the devices home for the evening. The accent of the system language was also important for some – the closer the accent was to their immediate village, the better.

There were many interesting similarities to life here in the states. For example, children learned with impressive speed. But have you ever tried to teach your grandmother how to send an email? Teaching an illiterate elderly woman how to use the Talking Book is precisely the same. She needed to believe the device was valuable and she needed to have the determination to keep trying.

Below are two videos to give you a glimpse into our work. The first shows a user performing a task after Andy’s teaching – you’ll notice at the end she successfully finds the message. In the second, Andy debriefs his thoughts after our weeklong effort. I think we all left pretty satisfied with what we found – it was encouraging to see users learn from eachother and we made some nice improvements that will make the device even more effective.

Thanks to the generosity of five volunteers, we have a new website!

• – Jeremy Britton and Tanya Breshears from ZURB led the effort—using their seasoned expertise to create our new web strategy. The new design speaks for itself.
• – Two web masterminds, Jonathan Smiley (also from Zurb) and Mark Otto (who works at Twitter), contributed their exceptional developing skills—making our new site elegant inside and out in just a few hours.
• – You might wonder how we possibly landed such a priceless gift. Luck? Good timing? Not at all: Michael Busch—another Twitter employee and the brains behind our Audio Content Manager. Michael was the catalyst that started the entire project and the glue that held the team together.

We cannot thank them enough for their remarkable contribution—one that will have a substantial and lasting effect on Literacy Bridge for years to come. Note that ZURB is known for being benevolent when it comes to social issues: read about their annual event ZURBwired (http://www.zurb.com/events/wired). Join us in thanking this team for all of their help!

When we interviewed Nadowli Kuubataanono, a farmer and traditional birth attendant, she spoke about how she uses her Talking Book for health, agriculture, and livestock.  But Nadowli also used the Talking Book to present her concerns about girls dropping out of school and migrating to the cities for work.

She hopes Talking Books can help governments and people everywhere to better understand the issues that are important to people living in remote villages — people without literacy skills or access to electricity.

I am going to use this opportunity to plead to the government about our daughters’ education. As a member of the food committee, we don’t want all of these efforts to go in vain, we don’t want to see the children that we care for come out with nothing in the future. I want the government to hear our cry because our girls a lot of times stop in the middle of schooling and run away to Accra.  Some suffer and die there and are not able to return and continue with their education. This situation hurts our school system. I would like the government to do something to stop it, because others come back with diseases like AIDS and transmit it to others. I don’t want the efforts we put in their education to not yield something for all of us. We want our children to have good education, and pass school, so they can one day become teachers, doctors, and nurses; that will make our suffering mean something. This is one of the problems I want to talk about.

One of the many benefits of these devices is that, people like us don’t know the USA or even Accra [capitol of Ghana] for that matter; but we are able to say something in to this device and the message will be carried to some one some where to listen to it. I hope that some one will listen to this message and may be able to help solve problems affecting girl child education, and that is another benefit of the device.

Look at me, I don’t know any where I can go or what I can do to say something into the air so the government can hear our problems and fight for us so that we can keep our daughters from going to Accra and other big cities leaving school behind. But now that I am saying this into this machine, I am hopeful that some one will hear and may be able to help us stop these kids from running away which will lead to the collapse of the school.