Technology for illiterate community game guards

Chris_Yes

2019/07/06 05:47

Good day,

What are the available wildlife monitoring technologies that are appropriate for illiterate game guards/rangers?

lievbirman

2019/07/06 16:50

Interesting question. Are there a lot of illiterate rangers?

Chris_Yes

2019/07/06 19:18

Yes, the majority are illiterate.

lievbirman

2019/07/06 20:16

Sounds like an opportunity to develop some very visually appealing and gamified software.

Chris_Yes

2019/07/06 20:47

Exactly, I have started with such in some conservancies in my country, Namibia. I wanted to find out what others have done.

matt.hron

2019/07/08 16:46

In reply to Chris_Yes

Hi Chris,

CyberTracker (https://www.cybertracker.org/software/introduction) is a free software app that can use icons for entering monitoring data tied to GPS waypoints. You can design and customize the screens with icons for data entry to make it easy for illiterate rangers to use.

Chris_Yes

2019/08/03 22:07

Thank you Matt,

However, I find cybertracker to be a bit too ancient. It has not been updated for a very long time it seems.

mattzig

2019/08/22 16:01

Indrani Medhi Thies has done some of the early groundbreaking work on interfaces for people with low literacy: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/indranim/publications/

There's a group at UCL that has done some relevant work on conservation, with communities with low literacy: https://dl.acm.org/author_page.cfm?id=81553376456&coll=DL&dl=ACM&trk=0

https://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/research/research-centres/excites

Though there's an argument to be made that we often over-estimate the literacy barrier in designing technology. When people are really motivated they're good at figuring out how to use technology. Sometimes the real problem in "ICT for development" projects is that people are just not motivated to use your software, more than technical illiteracy. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/p753...

Let me know if you have trouble accessing any of the papers. Good luck!

Chris_Yes

2019/10/10 14:23

In reply to mattzig

Thanks a lot Mattzig,

I only had a chance to see this message now. These are quite interesting papers. really good. You equally make a good point about the motivation, maybe the users are just not motivated.

I saw your profile and it is pretty interesting.

Jack Sparrow

2019/10/12 11:22

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