Empowering the Tribe
This image from an ‘ISP’ back ‘home’ is what popped up in my head when I read Kim’s blog post about ‘Tribes’ but then I decided to use this for my 5th post which is about ‘Empowering Connections’ and the example of Wi-Tribe is excellent. Their logo says
‘Create your own world’ and that is exactly what we normally do when we get ‘connected’!
Tribe is explained by Wikipedia as being used in 12th century middle English literature as referring to one of the tribes of Israel and comes from French word ‘tribus’ which was used to describe the original tripartite ethnic division of the Ancient Roman state which ones historian believes to be squadrons of knights, rather than ethnic divisions. Now, whichever explanation may be right, the word to me has ‘powerful’ meaning. It means bringing identity to a large population and it fits well in describing what is happening in large scale across the globe today via Internet.
At my own school, WAB, we have students, behind the Great Firewall, utilising to the max, the platforms like TigerTube, WAB Blogs, Moodle we provide them to facilitate collaboration, online presence and sharing for learning and we see that they use it to the maximum. More than 50K videos in 4 years and in excess of 108000 visitors to their blogs from around the world.
China, the country where I currently work and live has recently been suggested to surpass US as an economic power but remains tightly controlled and shut behind the Great Firewall and we see that not only expats living here but ordinary Chinese too are craving for free access to the ‘Information Highway’ and resort to all kinds of techniques which keep improving at the same pace as China keeps blocking them. Many of my own Chinese colleagues and friends have active profiles on Facebook and continuously access foreign sites to verify the news and information they obtain from Chinese sources.
If I compare that to my country of origin, Pakistan, the trends seem to be similar despite the lack of infrastructure and tardy arrival of broadband technologies. The stats delivered by ‘The Express Tribune” clearly identifies this by finding that half of Internet users in Pakistan connect via mobiles. There is more information on history of Internet in Pakistan on this Wiki article and based on European and UK Educational & Research Networks Pakistan has it’s own connecting all the centres of excellence in research and learning providing access to and sharing of information at faster speeds. Government in Pakistan has realised the potential of technology and access to information in the process of education and learning as much as to launch a scheme of nationwide laptop distribution which I see being ranked more important than access to student loans, training and skills here at the website – see the sequence of link tabs.
Role of connections, information sharing and access to information via technology at our fingertips cannot be better explained than Sugata Mitra’s celebrated TED Talk. It is a bit long hence I will end my blog post here giving you time to watch it completely 🙂
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So, would you say that your students are developing a tribe at WAB? Or that WAB is the tribe? Are they your tribe too, or does it extend further for you?