Author: Nick Martin

Nick Martin is an educator, technologist, and social entrepreneur with over ten years of international development and peacebuilding experience. He is the founder and CEO of TechChange, a Washington DC-based social enterprise that provides tech training for social change. The TechChange model for technology training has been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, Economist, Fast Company, PBS NewsHour and more. Nick is a PopTech Social Innovation Fellow (2013), an Ariane de Rothschild Fellow (2014), and an International Youth Foundation Global Fellow (2009). He was also the runner-up for the Society for International Development’s prestigious Rice Award which honors an outstanding young innovator in the field international development under the age of 32 (2014). Nick is an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown and George Washington Universities where he teaches graduate courses on Technology for Social Change, Technology for Crisis Response, and Mobile Phones for International Development. Nick received his BA with honors from Swarthmore College and holds an MA in Peace Education from the United Nations mandated University for Peace (UPEACE).

Zombies have started to make their way into the DC Metropolitan Area! Yesterday the TechChange team delivered another FrontlineSMS simulation, this time set against the backdrop of a Zombie Apocalypse. The training was part of Challenge Accepted 2012 a weekend conference for undergraduates hosted by Americans for Informed Democracy.

Participants were divided up into teams of the Zombie Control Task Force (ZCTF) and tasked with responding to the sudden appearance and spread of zombies in the city. They then had to set up the FrontlineSMS platform and determine a strategy for communication between field workers and HQ, and civilians in need of treatment (all while avoiding a roaming Zombie).

Participants were asked to consider workflow questions such as:

How will you alert civilians when new information becomes available?
Should all civilians receive the same information? How will they be grouped?
What types of information will you need to gather from you field workers? What strategy will you use to ensure adequate communication between HQ and the field?
How will you verify the integrity of information from the field?

We’ve found that this is a great way to learn the potential and pitfalls of a tool like FrontlineSMS while keeping things engaging and fun. We’re excited about running more of these in the months to come (especially now that we have all kinds of new zombie equipment:)

If you’re interested in learning more about our courses and simulations consider signing up for our next online course TC104: Global Innovations for Digital Organizing. The course starts May 14th and there are sure to a few zombie scenarios in that one as well:)

Next monday (Feb 20th) we begin the TechChange four week certificate course on New Technologies for Educational Practice. I’m excited to announce that rockstar educator Daryn Cambridge, Director for Knowledge & Digital Strategies at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict adjunct professor at American University will be co-facilitating with me.

We’ve got an amazing group of educators, administrators, practitioners lined up from organizations like Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, UN University for Peace, USAID, Catholic Charities – Refugee Services, German Agency for International Cooperation, Close Up Foundation, IREX, Teachers College, Plan Finland, Graduate School, Marymount University, and more.

We’re also thrilled to welcome a number of guest experts to the course who will be giving presentations, fielding questions and interacting with the class. A list of confirmed speakers so far (with a few more on the way):

● Rafi Santo, New media & learning theorist Doctoral Student in Indiana University’s Learning Sciences Program.
● Julie Lindsay, E-Learning & MYP Coordinator at Beijing International School. Co-founder Flat Classroom Projects
● Noble Kelley, Executive Director of Teachers Beyond Borders
● Rangan Srikhanta, Director of OneLaptop Per Child Australia

We’ve got an excited four weeks planned: we’ll be playing some video games for social change, learning about all kinds of new tools for classroom practice, diving a little bit into theories of social learning, active learning, connectivism, hosting twitter chats, discussing tablets and e-textbooks, trying to figure out if m-learning is for real, exploring case studies like Khan Academy, CodeSchool, engaging in online scavenger hunts and so much more.

There are still a few spots left so register today to reserve your spot and hit the ground running!

In the fall of 2011, TechChange facilitated its first series of online courses. The courses were each three weeks long and covered the following topics (we will also be running these courses again in the Spring):

Participant Demographics

In total, we had 170 participants from 43 countries and the response has been remarkably positive. Participants came from a range of organizations, including:

Voice of America	World Bank	IREX
USAID	World Pulse Media	Mercy Corps
Plan International	Freedom House	UNDP
World Vision	Concern	Notre Dame
International Rescue Committee	International Youth Foundation	Teachers Without Borders
International Red Cross	Office of the First Lady of the Dominican Republic	Radio Station in Haiti (Minustah FM)

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We’re excited to announce that we’re partnering with the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) for this Friday’s event (9/16) on Sifting Fact from Fiction: The Role of Social Media in Conflict. Held in Washington, DC, this event will examine the power of social media for change by bringing together experts, activists, and policy-makers to look at cutting-edge tech for conflict management and peacebuilding.

Events of global importance should include a global audience. To complement the event’s live webcast, we’re spending this week aggregating questions from you, the online audience, in Tweets, anonymous emails, and YouTube videos. We’re also collecting questions from the 46 students from 26 countries in our online class Tech Tools for Emergency Management, and we want to hear from you! Once we get your input, we’ll put it on our live Participation Map, which will be featured during the event.

Ask NPR’s Andy Carvin about tweeting revolutions in the Middle East, the State Department’s Alec Ross about the new front on US Digital Diplomacy, the EFF’s Jillian York how Egyptian and Tunisian youth hacked the Arab Spring. That’s right, we’re crowdsourcing questions for Clay Shirky of Here Comes Everybody, while keeping it short enough for Brian Eoff of Bit.Ly. John Kelly of Morningside Analytics will map out the online discussion, and social media experts Marc Lynch (@abuaardvark) and Sultan al-Qassemi (@SultanAlQassemi) will reality check it.

What are you waiting for? There are four easy ways to participate:

Email your question and location to chris@techchange.org with “Question” as the subject. Please note if you want your question to be anonymous.
Tweet your question and location with #USIPBlogs and we’ll post it right away. (Sample: Question from #location for @panelist. #USIPBlogs)
Post it in the comments section below
Film a video question and upload it to YouTube. Send us the link via either of the two methods listed above.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

– The TechChange Team

We’re excited to start our online course on TC103: Tech Tools and Skills for Emergency Management. We have an incredible group of participants enrolled in the course: 46 people working in 26 countries from organizations like Mercy Corps, UNDP, Voice of America, Concern.net, German International Cooperation, Inter-American Development Bank, African Union Commission, World Pulse Media, SpanAfrica, World Vision, Plan International and more. From professors to practitioners, policy makers to first responders, you all represent an amazing cross-section of people on the front lines of emergency management. We will also have 6 small group moderators and three guest experts supporting our learning for the course including Patrick Meier of Ushahdi and Laura Hudson Walker of FrontlineSMS.

How can digital activists harness new technologies, tools, and platforms to be as effective as possible in their work?

Digital organizing has arguably been at the heart of the recent protests in the Arab world. In the case of Egypt, a successful campaign run by online activists contributed to bringing hundreds of thousands of people to protest and force the resignation of President Mubarak. Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, wrote: “We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race. More people can communicate more things to more people than has ever been possible in the past, and the size and speed of this increase… makes the change unprecedented.” We can expect that any issue worth demonstrating about in the future will be organized online and its success will weigh heavily on how well the Internet and other technological tools are leveraged.

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This past weekend Dr. Michael Gibbons and I taught a 20-hour graduate skills institute at American University’s School of International Service entitled Applications of Technology for Peacebuilding. Students came from a variety of AU programs, including the International Peace and Conflict Program (IPCR) in the School of International Service, the AU Business School, and the AU Law School.

We at TechChange were especially excited about this course, as it allowed us an opportunity to incorporate a variety of new tech-based tools in the curriculum, both those created by TechChange and others. The inclusion of these tools was designed to foster collaboration, allow for course materials to be accessed in innovative, non-linear ways, and to give students an opportunity to participate in hands-on simulations using some of the same tools (e.g. Ushahidi) currently being used by practitioners in the field.

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This holiday season we’re taking a break at TechChange from bringing you the latest developments in technology, education and social change to focus on something a little more fun.

Over the years I’ve been fortunate to travel a fair amount by plane and in that time I’ve developed a strong love for the SkyMall catalog. Lets be honest, who doesn’t enjoy reading about the latest innovations in dog castles, personal massage devices, and Big Foot statues? On a recent flight I came across a number of new technologies designed to make our lives easier. I figured why not write a blog post to document these revolutionary breakthroughs and provide some gift ideas for this holiday season?
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I just got back from the International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM 2010) held at Tufts and Harvard Universities. The conference brought together key members of the NGO community, United Nations Agencies, private sector players like Google and Microsoft, and academics from various institutions. A number of TechChange friends were also in attendance: USIP, FrontlineSMS : Medic, Development Seed, Ushahidi, ICT4Peace Foundation, and UN Global Pulse. Also met some new friends including the folks at Digital Democracy, the Konpa Group and more.

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