Alexandra Samuel has published an interesting exercise which she did with her students: "This is an in-class exercise that I developed for The Internet and Politics, a third-year undergraduate political science course at the University of British Columbia. It was received very enthusiastically by the students, and succeeded in fostering a solid grasp of the material.The exercise had four purposes:

1. Complement course reading on the use of diverse telecommunications technologies as development tools. 2) Expand discussion of ICTs beyond a narrow focus on the Internet. 3) Develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills. 4) Foster a sense of ownership of development issues and challenges." For this exercise she dug up some interesting projects: Cell-phones in Bangladesh The hole in the wall in New Delhi The simputer in rural India Solar computers in Cambodia Community radio in Sri Lanka

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The german anthropologist Thomas Hauschild is doing reasearch in italy about mythical and magic traditions in south italian society, reports Informationsdienst Wissenschaft (german).

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A study by geneticists and linguists backs the assumption, that the click sounds in some african languages are more than 10.000 years old. A deep genetic divergence between the click-speaking groups is consistent with the hypothesis that clicks are an ancient element of human language. If, in fact, San-Hadzabe separation dates back to a time prior to out-of-Africa expansions of modern humans, clicks may be more than 40,000 years old, reports The Independent. Via Anthropology in the News

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This article from National Geographic also reports from that case.

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Wired has some notes about UN programs trying to push IT and Internet skills in Afghanistan, especially for woman.

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The peer-reviewed journal about the internet (with strong emphasis on global development of the internet) has a new issue. Among the new articles one about the Internet in China one about Cybercafes in Uganda, and a book review about Japanese Cyberculture may be of interest.

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