Technology and Global Development
15-502
Spring 2009
Research Assignment
Assigned:
January 13, 2009
Community Selection Due:
In class, January 15, 2009
Report Due:
Before midnight (via email to one or both instructors), January 29, 2009
Please make sure the professors receive your submission.
Assignment Objectives:
Before you begin to work on a technology (or other) project in a developing community,
you need to learn as much as you can about the community that you will be working
with—from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The objectives of this
assignment are as follows:
1. To help you become aware of what kind of information you should collect and
where you should find it.
2. To encourage you to seek out and make use of people who know about the
community you seek to partner with, and also know about your locality so that
they can act as cultural translators.
3. To enhance your skills in researching information and writing relevant reports
that effectively communicates the information.
4. To engage your critical thinking and analysis skills in assessing the validity of
information sources and discussing the retrieved information.
5. To teach you something about a developing community you didn’t know much
about before this assignment.
Assignment:
Choose a developing community that you have never visited and know very little about –
you can’t have grown up there or have many relatives there etc. Imagine you are a staff
member working with the TechBridgeWorld (www.techbridgeworld.org) group at
Carnegie Mellon University. Your team is preparing to travel to a developing community
(the one you chose) at the invitation of a local non-profit organization who has asked for
your team’s advice on how computing technology can be used to improve access to
health-care in their community. You have been assigned the task of preparing a 5-page
report to help the traveling team prepare for their trip.
Report Requirements:
You are expected to submit a 7-8 page report (10-point or 12-point font, 1” margins, A4
or letter page setup, and appropriately spaced). Your report should be no longer than 5
pages in content (not counting the title page, acknowledgements, and references) and
should include the following components:
Title page including author and author affiliation
Country overview (1 page)
Community overview (1 page)
Technology infrastructure in the community (1 page)
Overview of healthcare in the community (1 page)
Travel guidelines and recommendations for your team traveling from Doha to the
developing community (1 page)
Acknowledgments
References
A good example of a report written about the Vihear Suork commune in Cambodia can
be found at: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mbdias/cambodia/CambodiaReport.pdf . Please
note that you may not choose the Vihear Suork community for this assignment.
Your report should be compelling and factually based. It should present statistical data
about the country and community but also include cultural information and information
about the lives of the people living in that community. Please note that your goal is not
to simply find information and report it verbatim. Instead, you should critically analyze
and summarize the information you collect and then present your summarized analysis in
a compelling manner.
You should also be creative in your use of images and in the formatting of the report.
Overall, the report should tell a clear and compelling story about the community your
team is preparing to visit so that they can be better prepared for their work in that
community. Your report should be converted to PDF format and submitted to one or both
of the instructors via email before the deadline. It is your responsibility to make sure the
instructors received your submission.
We recommend you make good use of the Library and Academic Resource Center in
completing this assignment. The instructors and TA for this course are also at your
disposal to answer questions. Please make sure you cite all sources of information
clearly and accurately.
Collaboration:
You are not allowed to collaborate with anyone else on this assignment. Your report
should indicate all sources of information used for completing this assignment.
Grading Criteria:
The entire research assignment will count towards 10% of your final grade and will be
graded out of 100 points as follows:
Formatting (was the format of your report compelling?)
10%
Language (spelling and grammar – also compelling writing style)
10%
Information content (how well did you cover each of the sections?)
o Country overview
10%
o Community overview
10%
o Technology infrastructure
10%
o Healthcare overview
10%
o Travel guidelines
10%
Sources of information, acknowledgements, and references
15%
Summary and Analysis (how well did you summarize
and analyze the information you collected?)
15%
Helpful Hints:
1. Enjoy the assignment! Choose a developing community that interests you so you
enjoy learning more about that community. If you want a helping hand getting
started, talk to the instructors or the librarian about where to start.
2. Take the time to first find relevant sources of information (this can be
publications, people who know something about that community, movies, etc.)
and gather as much relevant information as you can. If you have questions about
some information you discover or have difficulty understanding something you
read, ask the instructors to help you – we are happy to help ☺
3. Be creative in seeking sources of information – everything you need to know has
not necessarily been published in academic settings. In fact, much of the
community life in developing communities has not been published in academic
publications so you will need to look more broadly.
4. The librarian and ARC are valuable resources available to you – use them wisely!
5. Organizations such as Kiva.org that provide stories of families in developing
communities can be a good source of information for parts of your report.
6. We encourage you to also talk to others who may know something about the
developing community you chose – interviews are a recommended source of
information for this assignment.
7. When you are writing your report keep your audience in mind.
8. This assignment will be a good building block for your final projects – make sure
you learn how to write a good report through this assignment.
9. Make sure you think about what biases the different sources of information might
have when you are analyzing the information from that source.
10. Try to validate each key piece of information from more than one independent
source (some sources of information will simply quote information from other
sources – in those cases, the information sources are not independent).
11. Pay attention to dates and assess how current information is from each source.
12. You are not expected to comprehensively report information about this
community – this is never possible. Your goal should be to do due diligence in
seeking and reporting available information. You can add qualifiers to different
parts of information in your report as needed – this is part of the critical analysis.