Despite the importance of literacy to most aspects of life, underserved communities continue to suffer from low literacy rates; especially for globally prevalent languages such as English. This is particularly problematic since English literacy is an important skill for increased access to income generation and higher education opportunities in these communities. Teaching English in underserved communities can be challenging due to a variety of obstacles. In this paper we report on our work with a primary school in Tanzania, with migrant workers in Doha, and with a school for the deaf in the USA to address some of these challenges using web technology and mobile phones. We developed a web-accessible content authoring tool that teachers can use to create and modify English grammar exercises, and a simple game that students use on a mobile phone to practice the content uploaded from the authoring tool. Our solution is primarily intended to increase the motivation for practicing English grammar among students, and thereby enhance English literacy in underserved communities. Feedback from teachers and students in all of our field studies indicate this solution is affordable and has significant potential to enhance the English classroom and homework experience.
Crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo of fer project organizers the ability to market, fund, and build a community around their campaign. While offering sup port and flexibility for organizers, crowdfunding sites provide very little control to donors. In this paper, we investigate the idea of empowering donors by allowing them to specify con ditions for their crowdfunding contributions. We introduce
We present MAQSA, a system for social analytics on news. MAQSA provides an interactive topic-centric dashboard that summarizes news articles and social activity (e.g., comments and tweets) around them. MAQSA helps editors and publishers in newsrooms understand user engagement and audience sentiment evolution on various topics of interest. It also helps news consumers explore public reaction on articles relevant to a topic and refine their exploration via related entities, topics, articles and tweets. Given a topic, e.g., "Gulf Oil Spill," or "The Arab Spring", MAQSA combines three key dimensions: time, geographic location, and topic to generate a detailed activity dashboard around relevant articles. The dashboard contains an annotated comment timeline and a social graph of comments. It utilizes commenters' locations to build maps of comment sentiment and topics by region of the world. Finally, to facilitate exploration, MAQSA provides listings of related entities, articles, and tweets. It algorithmically processes large collections of articles and tweets, and enables the dynamic specification of topics and dates for exploration. In this demo, participants will be invited to explore the social dynamics around articles on oil spills, the Libyan revolution, and the Arab Spring. In addition, participants will be able to define and explore their own topics dynamically.
Garbage is an endemic problem in developing cities due to the continual influx of migrants from rural areas coupled with deficient municipal capacity planning. In cities like Dhaka, open waste dumps contribute to the prevalence of disease, environmental contamination, catastrophic flooding, and deadly fires. Recent interest in the garbage problem has prompted cursory proposals to introduce technology solutions for mapping and fundraising. Yet, the role of technology and its potential benefits are unexplored in this large-scale problem. In this paper, we contribute to the understanding of the waste ecology in Dhaka and how the various actors acquire, perform, negotiate, and coordinate their roles. Within this context, we explore design opportunities for using computing technologies to support collaboration between waste pickers and residents of these communities. We find opportunities in the presence of technology and the absence of mechanisms to facilitate coordination of community funding and crowd work.
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