Off to India!

Many thanks to David Nguyen for setting up this blog!

As I write this blog entry from Singapore on my stop-over enroute to India, I can't help feeling encouraged by the progress that we have made and the lessons that we have learned since the MILLEE project started in mid-2004, even though these steps are understandably miniscule in the larger scheme of things.

For those who don't know about MILLEE, here's our one-para elevator pitch: the MILLEE project targets disadvantaged children in the developing world who do not have the opportunity to attend school regularly because they need to work for the family in the agricultural fields or homes. We believe that by making lessons available in the form of mobile games on the cellphone -- which is the fastest growing technology platform in several emerging economies -- we can potentially complement the public school system (which is not generally viewed in some regions to be effective) by making educational resources more accessible to this segment of learners, and at times and places that are more convenient to them.

Our work is currently focused on India and on English as Second Language. English is a "power language" in India that is used by people in the upper classes. The lower-income groups, including the "dalits" (or the "untouchables"), believe that knowing English gives their children a ticket to a better life.

We are fortunate to be working with fantastic Non-Government Organization partners who are among the leading experts in rural education in India. Urvashi Sahni, who runs the Study Hall Educational Foundation in Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh), helped us to bootstrap this project and introduced me to the educational obstacles that disadvantaged children in India face. For the current phase of the project, we have been working with the Mysooru Literacy Trust in Mysore (Karnataka) to perform our technology design and evaluation on a larger scale than our previous pilots in Uttar Pradesh.

I also can't help feeling lucky that the MILLEE project has attracted the interest of students from many universities all over the world, including the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (India), the Indian Institute of Technology at Guwahati (India), the London School of Economics (UK), Stanford University (USA), and of course, the University of California at Berkeley (USA). Several students from these universities will join me on my doctoral dissertation fieldwork this summer. This international development project is indeed international in the nationalities that make up our team!

On looking back, I also can't thinking that I have gained a lot from the two years that I've spent completing graduate work at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education. As someone who's pursuing a Ph.D. in computer science, it has taken a lot of effort to get to the point where I can have a coherent conversation with researchers in language and literacy, including second language acquisition, which I originally knew nothing about. The preparation to undertake this multi-disciplinary project has been a long haul.

I am catching my flight to India in a few hours. This will be my 6th round of fieldwork in India, and also my longest. I plan to spend 11 weeks at a village school near Mysore to field test our cellphone software prototypes. We also plan to engage in another round of participatory design with the rural students, and this time, we hope to get their teachers, and the broader village community such as their parents, involved. We are also going in search of indigenous knowledge, e.g. to understand the traditional Indian games that these kids play, in order to incorporate this knowledge into our game designs.

We have been planning this round of fieldwork since 2006 and formal preparations started in March 2007. I am so grateful to one of our team members, Siddharth Bhagwani, who arrived in Mysore a week ago to make sure that the accommodations, logistics, etc. are ready for the arrival of the rest of the team. In fact, many of my team members are among the most capable students who have ever accompanied me to India. But the task ahead is also the toughest that I have ever embarked on. I hope that all I have learned in the last 6 years of graduate school is enough.

I have to go now. I will be back online again when I am in India and have Internet access.

Wish us good luck!