2013 Commonwealth Essay Competition

The 2013 Commonwealth Essay Competition has just been launched. Run by the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS) since 1883, the Commonwealth Essay Competition is the world’s oldest and largest schools’ international writing competition. Past winners include Mr Lee Hsien Loong, the Prime Minister of Singapore and Elspeth Huxley.

The competition is free to enter and in 2012 over 8,000 young people, from 400 schools across the Commonwealth took part. The RCS would like to harness the momentum from this Diamond Jubilee year and continue to expand the Essay Competition in 2013.

The theme for 2013 is Opportunity through Enterprise, for more details and to download the 2013 booklet do check out the RCS website.

Mike Trucano’s ten worst practices in e-learning

I have always admired Mike Trucano‘s work, and so it was great to hear him speaking this morning at Online Educa Berlin. His theme was understanding failures in e-learning, especially in the countries where the World Bank is working.

This was his list of the ten worst practices in e-learning:

Dump hardware in schools, hope for magic to happen
Design for OECD learning environments, implement elsewhere
Think about educational content only after you have rolled out your hardware
Assume you can just import content from someone else
Don’t monitor, don’t evaluate
Make a big bet on an unproven technology (especially one based on a closed/proprietary standard) or single vendor, don’t plan for how to avoid ‘lock in’
Don’t think about or acknowledge total costs of ownership/operation issues or calculations
Assume away equity issues
Don’t train your teachers (nor your school headmasters, for that matter)
….for your own worst practice

The really sad thing is that all of these known worst practices continue to be replicated across the world. Hopefully, more people will listen to Mike, and then we can develop much better ways through which technology can really be used effectively to enhance learning!

New GSMA publication on how mobiles contribute to economic growth

The GSM Association, together with Deloitte and Cisco have recently published a useful report (.pdf 3.4 MB) on the contribution of mobiles to economic growth, and they intend to run their analysis on an annual basis so as to provide a barometer of change in the industry and its impact.

Some of the key findings of the report include:

For a given level of total mobile penetration, a 10% substitution from 2G to 3G penetration increases GDP per capita growth by 0.15% points
A doubling of mobile data use leads to an increase in the GDP per capita growth rate of 0.5% points
A 10% increase in mobile penetration increases Total Factor Productivity in the long run by 4.2% points

The Appendices provide much more detail about the precise econometric models used, and it is good to see such detail and transparency. I retain some concerns, though, about the ways in which causality is imputed from what are essentially relationships between economic indicators. This could be the basis of an interesting dialogue about methodologies for undertaking such research, which I guess would depend heavily on ideological premises! However, using this as a starting point, it would be interesting to drill down in more detail to ask what factors need to be in place for the economies of particular countries to follow the general observations noted. From my perspective, we need to learn more about what some of the poorest countries and peoples can do to ensure that they too benefit. In other words, we need to disaggregate the data, and understand in detail about the wider governance structures, infrastructure and social conditions that need to be in place to enable growth. That is, of course, if economic growth is of prime concern!

There is one good call-centre employee at Vodafone after all!

Following my recently highly critical rant about the appalling customer service that Vodafone ‘provides’, I was delighted at long last to ‘meet’ someone who was not only polite and could speak English that I could understand, but who was also able to resolve the latest problem in our relationship. Her name is Mia. I suggest that anyone calling Vodafone explicitly asks for her by name – I guess she is based in India, and she does speak with a slight US accent, but don’t hold that against her!

I know it is not Mia’s fault, but Vodafone’s website is still not functional for some users – I wonder how many more weeks it will take before I can access my account?

Appalling ‘service’ by Vodafone

I don’t usually use my blog to illustrate poor customer service, but an e-mail I received this morning has infuriated me so much that I am putting fingers to keyboard! Vodafone has to be one of the very worst companies for customer service in the UK! Why does anyone still use them? For that matter, why do I?!

I renewed my contract with them a couple of weeks ago, and upgraded my phone. Since I could not do the necessary change-over online, because their website was down, I took my new phone in to a Vodafone shop (in Hammersmith) to ask them to activate the SIM and transfer my data across. “Of course”, the assistant said, “It will only be a couple of minutes”. Half an hour later, when the assistant was unable to do it, his manager came over and managed to get most of the issues sorted.

However, not all of the data was transferred, and I could not access WiFi from the hotspots because of a problem with my account, which they said would soon be activated. A week later, nothing had happened, and so began a series of quite bizarre phone calls with ‘customer service staff’. None of theme were able to resolve the problem. Unbelievably, three out of the four staff could barely speak English, and I kept having to ask them to repeat their questions – really simple things like “What is the first line of your address?” were completely unintelligible. Eventually, I was told that I could not access my account because of a problem with their website that they were fixing, but that they would give me a £5 refund on my next bill because of the inconvenience.

Still nothing happened – I could not access my account online, and still could not use the WiFi hotspots because I could not sign into my account! So, I sent an e-mail, and two days later received the message below:

“Thank you for contacting Vodafone Customer Services
I have checked the online account and can see that you are not able to access the online account however if you are unable to access the account; hence I have escalated this to the online escalation department they will look into this matter.
Your patience will be appreciated in this matter
I trust the above information is helpful.
Kind regards,”

This is unbelievable. First, I am appalled that an e-mail can be sent by a company based in the UK that is so illiterate! Second, I am not told that the problem is being fixed, but merely that the matter is being escalated to the escalation department!

I wonder how many more weeks it will take for them to get this fixed?!