ICT, Datafication, Covid-19, Social Listening and AI Technology in Development
This is what we wanted to explore… Thank you for reading

This is what we wanted to explore… Thank you for reading

This will not be our final post on this blog, but our assignment for hosting the blog as a group is over – we are looking back on a successful and enjoyable experience and we hope that our readers can conclude the same with new insights, ideas and food for thought on ICT for development. Big Data, social media, AI, social listening these buzzwords are everywhere – in newspapers, magazines, TV and podcasts. But what do they mean in the context of development? What is digital innovation? This is what we wanted to explore along trending issues, the core and thematic readings for this course and our personal interpretation of it. In our posts, we regularly referred to the blog posts from our peers – we hope that this was useful to highlight the commonalities of the themes in our posts. Blogging provides us with an effective tool to engage with a wide range of audience. However, it has the risk of superficiality and making complex things simpler than the reality. One of the key lessons from the blog’s experience is the importance of balancing the simplicity of the content with accuracy. It helped to start from our own experience of not knowing to imagine a reader/viewer who lacks the basic knowledge of ICT4development without compromising the strict academic touch. 

Blogging about ICT4development is a critical activity that puts us face to face with the deep ethical questions about engaging and protecting vulnerable categories of a society. Many times, we were searchers rather than providing clear answers about some of the critical questions about AI, Facebook and Big Data for development. Thus, we aimed at creating a dialogue with the readers and we hope that we have succeeded at that.

Thank you for taking the time to read our blog and we would love to hear your thoughts. Please do share in the comments below.

Cheers,

Sabine, Stef, Sampurna, Hussein & Mateus