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CULTURE SENSITIVE IT-EDUCATION FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Our Tanzania research project started in Tanzania in Summer 2000 after which two Tanzanian business bachelors from Tumaini University, Iringa College, started their master studies in computer science in the University of Joensuu. Right from the beginning the idea was to develop culture sensitive Information Technology (IT) - studies for Tanzania and to create IT-capital for developing countries.

The goals of our whole Culture Sensitive IT-education development and research are thus

• to develop activating educational tools and materials for developing countries in ICT and Computer Science, especially in Tanzania, from the cultural context point of view,
• to develop culturally sensitive and socially relevant use of educational technology, and
• to find out ways to bridge the digital divide and add student-to-student interaction between developing countries and developed countries.

Also the final goal is to support the development of the country with co-operation and a cultural approach. This means that the whole project would finally be realised in Tanzania, at a Tanzanian university by Tanzanians themselves. We also hope to give Tanzanian high school students a chance to start studying for the Tanzanian Virtual IT-Certificate while attending high school, the same as their counterparts in Finland are doing.

CASE: ICT Mediated HIV-AIDS Education by Marcus Duveskog

During the spring 2002 I made my masters thesis in Computer Science at a secondary school in Tanzania. The aim of the research was to investigate the importance of introducing programming for Tanzanian students and investigate the added values by doing it. The interest for learning programming was huge among the students. Although the course was to be held in their leisure time, most of the students applied to enter the course.

During the course the students where taught the basics in programming in Java. They were encouraged to develop contextual programs, which resulted in the students making an informational homepage concerning HIV/AIDS. Since AIDS is a difficult subject to talk about for most Tanzanians, this gave the students a platform to work in a creative way with questions related to the problem. Unfortunately the homepage is not yet complete, but it can be found at:

My personal aim is to continue with PhD studies in developing educational tools in a Tanzanian context.

Marcus Duveskog, firstname.lastname@cs.joensuu.fi