Our business plan for the pilot is up, click here! https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B1lXfhLPwxGTY3lQWDhKaFBGcGM

What is TextUP?

In fragile states like Liberia and Bosnia, tens of thousands of public servants, such as police, teachers, and transportation officials, struggle to do their jobs. To increase the effectiveness of their agency, I propose a utility to deliver just-in-time vocational training via the simple feature mobile phones already in their pockets. This concept, tentatively called “TextUp”, is a social enterprise based on a subscription model, the public servants pay a small fee per month.


Click here for more on this concept.

To use TextUp, a public servant starts by texting to an advertised number, receives a reply asking her to register. After registration, she is free to text in questions. An example may be: “Where can I find the district office to get school books?” or “To conduct a proper arrest, what do I need?” Answers are sent back via text or voice. After a free trial, the public servant pays via airtime minutes (no traceable currency transactions) for the subsequent months.

Content will be curated from an network of former or current public servants posting to an SMS-based social network platform. Examples of such platforms include Snaptu from Israel (just purchased by Facebook) and MXit from Zimbabwe and South Africa. “FrontlineSMS Learn” in is piloting general learning via feature phones, I am in contact with them. Other examples of successful uses of feature phones for learning include the English literacy program by the BBC, called Janala. It is a subscription based service, same as I propose for TextUp. In 2011, I conducted a survey for a text-message based youth education program by SMSOne in India, called eduVARTA. I assessed demand for this subscription-based service, and the sample of people surveyed did show strong demand, the results suggested people would pay 100 rupees, or one month extra of a mobile phone bill, for the service.

For security encryption employed by gambling companies for their feature phone games and betting will be used. Because of security reasons, user information cannot be released, but heatmaps of requests can be created. This real-time data could be used to inform top-level reformers, aid agencies, and NGOs where to help. The vision is TextUp can help create actionable data that can strengthen fragile states on the micro and macro level.

Smartphones and Informal Learning

My masters paper is on the link between informal learning (what we do for most of our learning) and smartphones. Much of the paper's focus is state support for access to wireless internet, but it includes studies on the effectiveness of learning on smartphones.

Click here to read

Returning to work

After nearly a year of leave, I've returning to the topic of training young adults with what they have "in their pocket," their mobiles. I now have the chance to rework the statistical analysis!

I've also returned to class at Stanford. My thesis is on a topic related to my India research. It is training people via smartphones.

Slides are here.

My research is on the intersection of government support for mobiles for informal learning and the goal of increasing per person productivity via this informal learning. A specific example of government support include statements in education policy documents supporting mobiles and learning. Another example is the creation (and financing) of mobile learning platforms. I will also examine government regulation on wireless carriers, do governments ensure they are operating in competitive ways (for cheaper mobile bandwidth)?

Designing Education Tech Tools for Underserved Children

Please check out the Blog for our class related to this research: http://spring2011mobilelearningunderserved.blogspot.com/

And you can see my professor's projects, Pocketschool and the homework management system.

Early Data

I'm going through some of the background section of the data collected for the colleges, here are (partial) results for two colleges, coded as I 1 and W 1 to keep them confidential.

The questions in the chart are:

1) Distance between the student's house and Pune (the nearest major city of over 3MM people).
2) Financial Background. Parent’s income source.
Farmers earn about 2500INR/month, government workers can earn triple that, private jobs
(rural areas) like mechanic or laborer about the same income as farmers, sometimes less.
3) Educational background of the family.
Has anyone in the family completed (up to) high school graduation?

One surprise: Many of the parents are farmers, but they are also high school graduates!

This was very unexpected; I will dig around more for possible explanations. From 2005-2008, I worked in Andhra Pradesh among rural immigrants who came to work in the city of Hyderabad. The group with whom I worked with most were day laborers, they were the grown sons and daughters of farmers. Some of them finished 5th standard, and I met two who finished 7th standard. No one had a high school diploma. Is Maharastra really that different from A.P.? Or am I wrong about A.P. and more farmers have high school diplomas.

Data Processing

So far, the early results from the surveys taked in India show the rural college students value (in terms of rupees per month) potential job skills training and listing services as much as they value their mobile. These student spend about 50 - 100 rs per month on their mobiles, and are willing to spend that much on a job listing/ skills training service. This finding MAY CHANGE as I get through more of the data in the set.