The Cultural Last Mile

This project attempts to analyse the Last Mile as a Human Resource Question. There are two research questions emerging from this project that will be investigated:

One is mainly a conceptual-archival investigation into India’s encounter with the ‘last mile’ problem. The term, coming from communication theory, concerns itself with (1) identifying the eventual recipient/beneficiary of any communication message, (2) discovering new ways by which messages can be delivered intact, i.e. without either distortion of decay. The concept is also tied to the developmental project of the Indian nation-state that perceives the democratic project to be accomplished with the help of technology-be in radio or television. Given the chronic historic failure in bridging the last mile, whether in communication theory or in the development projects, the study reinvestigates the model itself, along with its historic failures. This project is being funded by Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

Downloads: Ashish Rajadhyaksha, The Last Cultural Mile: An Inquiry into Technology and Governance in India (Bangalore: CIS-RAW, 2011) download here

Certificate Programme in the Digital Classroom- Christ University: (under the Undergraduate Diploma in Cultural Studies offered by CSCS)- July 2009

As part of the Cultural Last Mile project, CIDASIA along with the Center for Internet and Society (CIS) and Center for Education Beyond Curriculum (CEDBEC), Christ University, Bangalore, is conducting a certificate programme in the Digital Classroom which is being organized by the Department of Media Studies, Christ University. The purpose of this course is to investigate the transformations taking place in the classroom through the process of digitization of the various aspects of classroom pedagogy. While several universities and undergraduate colleges have actively adopted technologies such as making available downloadable versions of courses and class readings, using blogs and wiki as pedagogic devices etc, it is unclear as to how drastic is the change caused by the use of these digital technologies to the conventional classroom space. Is the change no more than conventional content and teaching/assessment strategies moving to new platforms? Or is the change more fundamental than that? These are the questions the programme sets out to explore. This course, to be conducted with media students of Christ University will also see the active participation of faculty from a range of disciplines across the board: education, law, computer science and sociology. It will be conducted over 10 sessions to be divided into five modules:

Module 1: The University and the Class
Module 2: The Public Nature of the Classroom
Module 3: The Digital Native
Module 4: Technologies Of Learning (1): The Institution And The Institutional Repository
Module 5: Technologies of Learning (2) 

The second study is an intervention into India’s undergraduate college spaces and will try and understand the ‘last mile’ problem in the way internet is used for educational purposes. The project will focus on peer-to-peer and two-way movement versus one-way downloads that would convert technological eavesdroppers (i.e. uncommitted recipients) into participants (stakeholders capable of acting upon what is received). It will research and devise an implementation strategy for use of new technology (internet, mobile phone) arising from research findings. The study is supported by the Nokia University.