 It's good to be here. I recognize some familiar faces. And unfortunately, for those of you that were excited to see Ramita, she is unable to make it. Some of you meet her at an opening conference several years ago, up in Logan. So she's been along for the haul as we've been collecting this data. And she actually made it to the USA trying to come to a conference. And is now in the process of having an arranged marriage on the East Coast. And so that's trumped this conference. So why did I get involved in this study of localization of OER? My background is in literacy. And I was really interested in looking at strategies to help rural people sustain their learning plan after they graduate from literacy courses. So lots of times literacy projects are funded by international donors. And when the donors leave, then the materials are gone, the teachers are gone, and learners are kind of left to their own ends. And you find in these villages, there's very few reading materials in the first place. So that's the big question. How do we sustain this? And the big thing that people talk about is a culture of literacy. How do we really change the mentality so that people are self-learners and they're able to be their own teachers in a sense, or at least engage in the strategies for their own families and their homes? Increasingly, we have seen that there are these rural community centers in developing countries. I'm guessing that if some of you are in here, you might have a background in this. So we'll have some dialogue later, but I'd love to hear what you see. I first got interested in this in Pakistan, where several people said, hey, we need to create libraries. We don't have money to buy lots of books, but if you could help us get a couple computers, we could put content on computers. And in Nepal is really, really rugged terrain, and increasingly, they're doing wireless mesh networks across the tops of mountains. So we're finding that people are getting connected. They just don't know what's quality content. So there's about 2,000 community centers that we were looking at, and 200 or more of them have access to ICT and occasional internet. It's not always consistent. There's a lot of blackouts, and they call it load shedding in Nepal. So that's an issue, but when they are connected, what content can they get access to? So we've learned that if content is digital, that more people can share it. There's not a competitive use. David Wiley's talked about the calculator metaphor, or the single book metaphor, that not many people can share at the same time. Whereas a health manual that's digital, everyone can be used at the same time. So the definitions for this study, I'll just real quickly talk about localization, OER, which I think most of you know, and then knowledge workers. So localization we define as being tailored to the culture, to the religion, to the place, basically to the needs that the locals view as the most important in their area. And that does change. It's not always defined the same place to place. And then OER in that shell is the ability to reuse, redistribute, revise, or remix the content. This is one example, a pilot that we started working on, open content for development, where we were digitizing and making accessible some literacy materials. Basically they were PDFs and wikis that people could reorganize, translate, add in their own kinds of pictures and make useful to their own needs, for their own needs. And then knowledge workers are really the brokers of information. And in Nepal, they had this, what they call the CYC, a community youth club. And they're primarily youth anywhere from the age of 18 to 30. And they essentially would check out to villages and find out what are some of the issues that people are interested in learning about. They'd come back and then do their own kind of content searching, they'd localize it themselves and then they'd go back out and share it in group settings or maybe one-on-one, depending on the need. So I was interested in finding out to what extent and how do these people localize the content that they're sharing with the people in Nepal. And what strategies are they using to actually make this content useful? And then just real quickly, I can look at Method and I can share this with you more later so I'm not gonna go into depth. But I was real interested in the practical use of it. So really the everyday involvement that they have with OER and how they're making those useful on the ground for the people they work with. So I had been working in Nepal for about 10 years, a little over that. And we had about 10 centers that we had previously been working with. So we figured that was a good place to engage people and to start finding out the strategies that they were using. And then to find out more than just those 10 centers, we did do a snowball sample where we, through referral, were able to interview more people. I'm gonna skip this and I can share it. Well, real quickly, I'll just point at the big ones. So we did site visits, we did interviews, focus group discussions, and then we collected whatever artifacts we could, actual manuals or videos that have been made, any kinds of educational tools that were being used. This was one manual that was localized the summer that I was there. So last summer, about 15 months ago, I was there. And we were able to engage people in the process when they were actually localizing this manual. Several experts from several different areas were in the process of deciding how to localize this economic literacy tool. And this probably is also less interesting to you, but I will share this if anyone wants, I guess you'll make it available right through the website, so you can see how I analyze all the data. Since our time is limited, I'm gonna hop to the results and then hopefully we can have dialogue around this. So we collected this data, like I said, just one year ago. And by the way, sorry, these were, there were four Nepalese people who worked with me to conduct the interviews. Sometimes we found that we couldn't do it in the local or in the national language of Nepali. We needed to go from English to Nepali to Noori or to whatever other dialect there was and then come back up. And so there were a lot of ways that we had to cross check the data that we were finding. So to the extent, that's what I'll cover first and then I'll cover the how that we found that they were localizing. First, we realized that it depended primarily on the definition that they gave. If they thought that it was more about geography, that we would have to kind of match what they were defining as localization with the content and see how did they adjust those tools. Sometimes we found that it was more about religion. Other times we found that it was about the local culture in their community. Sometimes it was an issue of age, like something that was relevant for elders as compared to something that was relevant for youth. This was in our discussion where they're talking about what is the definition of localizing. We found that it would reflect local resources. So sometimes they had certain temples or they had certain religious practices in one area or historical dynamic in that area and they wanted something to give respect to the God of that area. And that was really important for people to resonate with the content that was being shared. Also that it would reflect their language. We talked about that you'd find these local dialects down in certain villages and it was important that it not be in the national tongue in those areas. You can see this manual we're looking at that summer had been translated into several other indigenous languages. Then incorporating the culture. Sometimes that is religious and sometimes it's broader than that and sometimes an interpretation of Hinduism or of Buddhism or sometimes Christianity depending on what people embrace. These are like higher mountain people would have a different kind of cultural practice than people who are in the center of Nepal. So gender sensitivity. That was also a big issue that came up for some people that you needed to make sure that in a nation where women are second class citizens that the content really reflects an equal engagement of women in those practices or those issues that they're trying to cover. So one example would be like sanitation or something and I guess women because they are usually less educated they felt needed to be represented as washing their hands not portraying a man. So they could say this is also women's issue not just a man's issue to consider those practices. Religion which is tied to culture but also different and then the geography and shared problems. One big issue in Nepal as in other developing countries is like water collection. Sometimes it's political issues. So if they could gather around one topic and you could have up to date information about certain crises going on in their community we would find that would make the content that much more relevant. If you could include clippings for newspapers or radio broadcasts then people would really gravitate together toward that content. This is a micro credit group. Many people have incorporated economic literacy into their programs and everything to them comes back to finances. So you need to talk about it like a numeracy component. Okay and then one thing we in one area they talked about how vocalization means reflecting the unity the ways that people come together like in an inner city Kathmandu area we found that one class reflected many many different religions and different languages and different economic backgrounds. So they had to always focus on how are we the same and that's how the class could learn effectively together. Whereas in some other communities they needed to amplify the focus on the ways that they're diverse and addressing the individual needs. Otherwise they wouldn't feel like their need was getting met in the class. So I thought that was interesting that some people would define it as unity and other people as diversity. And then also that it occurs on a continuum. So I grouped the centers that we had evaluated in a high degree, medium degree and low degree of localization. The high degree they talked about localization it actually was a term that they knew of. They basically said everything is localization. And this is an inner city area in Kathmandu and they said we don't do anything unless it involves some local experts they go actually and have class out on site. So even if they're getting some OER tools that they might have printed off the internet or they found content online they always take it to their local community and they adapt it in every lesson. Another place they were working with women can you see that at all? Okay sorry it's a female instructor teaching rural housewives in a semi-urban area outside of Kathmandu. And what we found is that the women just didn't get it unless it was in their language. Essentially they had to talk about the PC they had to use terms like this is your home. Inside your home you have cupboards. Inside your cupboards you group together your clothes or your toothbrush and other things. And that's what you can do with technology is you can use it like you would use your home and you can file away different content related to different areas of importance in your lives. And anyway so they said they had to change the language to reflect the daily things in the people in their lives. Sometimes there was a medium degree of well-closation and Gorka it was one village in the mountains that had a good bus route it was on a paved road. So they were able to get access to more materials they had more hard copy materials in other places and what we found is that the way they would supplement some of the tools they already had is they would actually take pictures and create their own content. They really liked to photograph events in their own community and go interview people and share these kind of podcasts of elders and experts with other people in order to instruct. I'm worried a little bit about time. Let me just tell you there were basically several levels of the extent that people were localizing. And in some really remote places we found that they were localizing less because they didn't really know how to make it useful. It was like if it was too dense of material it was really hard for them to parse it out and to break it down into bite-sized digestible pieces for the people at the more remote level. And in this area we talked with a lot of formal teachers and they said that they felt pressure from the authorities to actually stay directly to the national curriculum that was given to them. They hadn't ever been given what they felt was a passport to localize. So we talked about that with some of the district officials in the area and said, you know, is there a reason that they are not able to? Excuse me, sorry, I thought that was off. Anyway, so sometimes there were authority issues that prevented them from localizing. And then occasionally we would find that at a very grassroots level where very few educational opportunities existed, they felt kind of hampered. They felt like it was out of reach for them. Generally, even if leaders came out with some open educational resources it didn't seem feasible for them to localize it. So then how did they localize? I think this is one of the most exciting things to talk about. First of all, they would determine learner abilities and needs. So this meant that a local engaged with locals was the best way that they could really determine what locals needed. And then they would engage locals in actually collecting content. So that was sometimes through interviews, sending them out on field trips to identify some of the issues going on in their communities. Sometimes they would translate into the local vernacular. So that includes the indigenous tongues. And sometimes it's even beyond that, it's some of the common terms that they understand. They would allow people to write in to a central place and they could express some of their concerns. Like in one area they said they'd gotten a lot of requests about treating snake bites. Several people had gotten bit in that area. So that became an important way that they could ask the facilitator, the knowledge broker, to do more research on that area. This reflects some of the writing in and sharing with the facilitator. They sometimes do a Google search. They can do a broader internet search for a content match. But it's often difficult for them to decide what is quality and what is not quality. They'll sometimes pool textbooks together. They have like an after school program where students will bring in all their aggregated textbooks and then those knowledge brokers will sit through and try to find from existing resources materials that complement so examples or activities that are related to what the learner's needs are. And then a really important thing in Nepal was to bring in a bunch of the local experts and then to invite them to comment on the content that has been collected and is being shared. We found this especially in Pakistan that if the mullahs of the local area were not abreast of what was being taught in the classes, then pretty soon people would start boycotting the program. If they felt it was too progressive or if it was not appropriate to their Quranic understanding, then basically it was thrown out. And then they would embed the content within a learner's profession. Sometimes that's what speaks to them the most is people who are involved with farming and everything kind of comes back to seed and to whatever work that you're doing in your agrarian life. This is a merchant and one facilitator found that if she could speak the language of the merchants and package everything in their terms, she had a really high attendance and people coming to collect content from her center. And recently they have digitized a bunch of the archives in Nepal. That's allowed people to search from some of the historic and higher level literature, but it's not interactive and it's somewhat difficult for the knowledge brokers to work with, but it exists. And they've occasionally used it. And then this is the last one. Some of the outlets that they would use to share their localized content, they have wall newspapers where they actually would put together all the information that was really useful or relevant to their needs and post it on the wall. Sometimes it was even just an 1.5 by 11 printout that was about crop prices or about job vacancies or about certain agricultural issues with pesticides. Anything that was relevant and current, they would post in that way. It was a great way for them to share their localized content especially when there was load shedding or especially if the internet had gone down. So video and audio files, they would have gatherings at night where everyone would gather around one computer and then they would watch a video that had either been created or that had been found that trained around a certain issue. Community radio broadcasts, this is an increasingly popular thing in South Asia where they have just local people like these knowledge workers responding to letters or to conversations that they've had in the community and it's one of the most popular ways that people share information. And often the content that they've collected is through the internet that they then broadcast out through the radio. And mobile phones increasingly are being used although in Nepal it's not as popular as it is in India or in Pakistan. TV browsing, this is where a TV station in Kathmandu was able to respond similar to write in requests and then they would do a training kind of like Khan Academy which would be on the TV at a specific hour in the evening. Some wiki posting, that's especially among the kind of college-aged kids that are a little more literate than those in the rural areas. Some web posting, big letter books, that's really popular for the more remote people where they just print off 8.5 by 11 stories but in big letters so it was easier to read especially around critical issues. Lectures and seminars where they'd bring in, say a police leader from the more urban area to talk about the impact of drugs or tobacco or alcohol, print out sheets that they'd send home with people and then they'd become an ambassador to teach those in their village. And then any other appropriate technology if people had MP4s or if they had the ability to run a CD-ROM in their own more remote village then they'd send those kind of tools home with them with more content. So that's an overview of some of the practices and the extent that they are localizing. Let's talk. Does anyone have any questions or insights? Is anyone doing work in this area? I'd love to collaborate or share strategies. Yeah. I'm not doing work in Syria. I was curious how did you get started but where did your, what was the genesis of this? You said you've been working for 10 years. Yeah. So I initially went over there doing like a review or an evaluation for a literacy organization and at the time they were launching a health literacy manual and basically we brought stakeholders from all across the nation to start talking about how do we make a health literacy manual accessible to a nation with so many different languages and different geographic issues and different religions and we found at that time that to have a really good manual that's localized to everyone's needs was impossible. That unless we could engage them in creating their own kind of separate manuals or their own print houses out in these remote places then they're going to be stuck with a national kind of curriculum that would meet some of their broader needs but it wouldn't be tailored to the specific needs of each person. Anyway, that's when it got on my radar. That was in 1998 and I kept on being involved in literacy and I met David Wiley in 2004 right on the heels of a return when lots of people were saying hey, we wanna use technology and that was out of my league. I felt totally clueless how to support them and I also felt like it was competing with some of the needs. I thought if they don't even have pencils in some of the remote places, why should we even leap and talk about PCs, right? If the electricity isn't consistent or dependable why should we try to go through that angle? But when we started having meetings then with some of the stakeholders in non-formal education in Nepal and overwhelmingly people said it's not like you can say that there's a chronological order to development. It happens all at the same time and if a computer is a resource that works for people perhaps we can work through those who are more literate and use that as a tool to help literate people but we could compliment the economic activities. They could start maybe finding out about market prices and selling their goods online. One community was really excited about selling Mandarin origins to Japan and making like 10 times the amount of money as if they were working through them instead of working through a trader. We found that people were more interested in getting health information. It was really current up to date, especially about HIV AIDS or some other current issues where the literature didn't, that they had in those rural areas didn't cover it. So that's when it was really the people started pushing it and I got interested and met David Wiley and pulled into working at OER. Thanks for asking. Did someone else have a question? Yeah. So I'm a little confused. So just first clarification question. Yeah. So is this study about like literacy program? So in a sense that you wanted to educate people about reading and writing as opposed to, because I see some are about videos and audios. Yeah. Right. So in these remote communities, my first involvement was through literacy programs, but then we started looking at the places where literacy programs happen, which are these rural community centers and really those centers serve people from the literacy programs, but also the broader community. And we started working with the leaders of the community centers who are youth, who are literate already and who are then brokering knowledge or kind of sharing the information that they find that could help other people who come to solve their own problems. So it's connected to the literacy programs, but the OER is really being used by people who are already literate and who are trying to help those who are lower literate or have less access education. And so those resources, OERs are not really limited to the subject of literacy education, but broader social. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. And it's finding a way to simplify that content to make it accessible for a broader audience. Sometimes the OER, like if you look at MIT courseware and some of these other OER repositories, it's great information, but it's dense and it's sometimes inaccessible to people who are lower literate and maybe in a very different kind of infrastructure from where those makers of content come, you know? So it's finding a way to empower really the people in the middle to find those good tools but then to make it useful for people down on a lower level. Yeah. How much of all this activity that you've been able to identify different ways they're adapting it and using it and so on and so forth really depends on having found OER as opposed to just giving them access to content which you then said regardless of the license test or anything else, whether you're like, look, we need you to adapt, this is important to you. Yeah. How strong is that connection really? Or is it more, you know, we as people believe in literacy and health education and we're now getting the tools to make that relevant and then you just kind of stand back and let them figure out what to use. Yeah. I think it's some of both. I think that the OER, like they are probably less aware of licenses and what's labeled what. It was tapping them into the knowledge that there's all of these other existing repositories and they don't have to recreate the wheel if they can tap into any of those. But then there's still some of this other kind of blurred random information that they're getting and then they're pulling in. And I think that somehow they're able to do some of both but I would say it's much more in the non-formal arena. And what was your particular question with them? That did... I mean, I was just kidding because you, I guess because you used the OER course, for example, it seems to me especially like some of the healthcare manuals were most developed explicitly by the organization as OER with this intention, right? Was it just, wow, these things are here and you know, chances are they would love for these to actually get in the hands of people. We're just gonna presume it's okay if we empower folks to do it. Yeah. So yeah, they were created prior to OER existing, but then they're trying to digitize them and then put them into a wiki format so that they're more interactive or more usable or able to be modified and tailored to the needs. They, in the past, I've seen, like saved back in the 90s, people would literally cut and paste with scissors and then go to a photocopying machine and make their handouts. And that is still used a lot, but if they can do it sometimes through computer research or pull from a broader data bank, then you can find that it can be more useful. I guess just, sorry, one follow-up to that. Would you say that maybe an outcome of your research is that it would be helpful if more resources were in fact created explicitly with the idea that these are the kinds of derivatives that might be created by these people with these tools so that you could turn them there first? Yes. Or something, is that a question? That would be awesome, yes. And we've talked about that in Nepal, especially of the different ministries, like Ministry of Health, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Finance, if all of those ministries were creating their own educational tools in the OER format, it'd be so much more able, it would be able to be localized a lot easier, but it's bringing people on board and then it's this question of funding it and training the people to be able to do it and creating the will and the will, WILL, not the round W-A-T-B-L, you know. But I mean, maybe it's some of both, but the will, you could argue, is out there. We just need to help people do it. I think we need to stop. I think there's another presentation right now, right? But I would love, if anybody wants to talk more about this, I'm so open to learning and sharing best practices from what we've learned and what you've learned too. Thank you. Thank you.