The content digital divide

Dear Editor-in-Chief,

I would like to describe briefly how the non-profit kindersite project is utilizing digital media content in an innovative way to address social problems. Firstly to answer who we are; the two founders are Ziv Avidor, a technology specialist and consultant to government and corporations and Joel Josephson, an Internet strategist and high tech consultant.

Our concept is to use content on a wide-scale over the Internet or within control groups to understand what constitutes effective and engaging digital content. This will be achieved through quantitative and qualitative research of users usage of the content. Our belief is that a bottom-up investigation will achieve focused and constructive results that will help raise the effectiveness and outcomes of content usage within the social causes targeted.

Initially the team have implemented their ideas in two social projects involving education and the digital divide.

The education project is targeted at gaining answers to the many and critical questions that surround the introduction of technology to early learners (ages 2 to 8) plus answering similar questions regarding the introduction of digital content for the teaching of English as a second language. This, more advanced project, is based around an Internet site http://www.kindersite.org that offers educators and parents of small children a free resource of 1,000s of links to content in the form of games, songs and stories. The content is being graded according to educational and appropriateness parameters.

This project is currently being used globally with 152 officially participating schools in 27 countries plus registrations from about 80 countries.

The second project utilizes an adaptation of the existing technology and focuses on the Content Digital Divide. This project will study how the effectiveness of introducing technology (computers and the Internet) to digitally divided communities can be improved. The project looks at the introduction to technology from a content perspective and will attempt to ensure that the recipients of the new technology are made fully aware from the first exposure, of the personal and community benefits of technology.

The commissioning of content or adaptation will be completed on a local level with the additional purpose of stimulating growth in locally-based content providers.

This proposal has gained the support of potential implementing partners in a number of developing countries including, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Nigeria, Cameroon, Kazakhstan, India etc.

We are now looking to gain corporate and governmental support to help implement these projects on the scale we envisage and be very interested in the comments, sponsorship or practical help of your readership.

Joel H. Josephson, Founder and Executive Director

Kindersite Project

http://www.kindersite.org

Email : [email protected]