Linking Research to Practice: Strengthening ICT for Development Research Capacity in Asia

✍ Scribed by Arul Chib (editor); Roger W. Harris (editor)

• Publisher: ISEAS Publishing
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 216
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Information and communication technologies have long promised to provide quality education, improve healthcare, allow open government, and solve environmental issues. To realize this potential and influence policy-making and programme design, the Singapore Internet Research Centre, supported by the IDRC, created an innovative research capacity-building programme, SIRCA. The programme supports interdisciplinary ICTD research through the nurturing of research relationships. By bringing together experienced mentors with deserving early-career Asian researchers in an intellectually stimulating environment, SIRCA has fostered a cohort of talent capable of generating the rigorous scientific evidence needed. Their stories, and reflections upon the programme, are told here. If ever it needed demonstrating that ICTs are an indispensible tool for developing an information society rather than a reward for achieving it, then the SIRCA programme has achieved that.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
LIST OF TABLES
LIST OF FIGURES
FOREWORD
Preface
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
SECTION I: MANAGEMENT PERSPECTIVES: INSIDERS’ THOUGHTS ON THE PROGRAMME
1. Perspectives on ICTD Research and Practice
2. SIRCA: An Opportunity to Build and Improve the Field of ICT4D
3. Managing the SIRCA Programme
4. Primary Investigator and Mentor Perspectives of SIRCA
SECTION II: RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES: THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS BY EXPERTS
5. ICTD Praxis: Bridging Theory and Practice
6. Messy Methods for ICT4D Research
7. Ethics and ICTD Research
8. ICTD Curriculum Development and Professional Training: Mainstreaming SIRCA Research Models
9. Multi-stakeholder Perspectives Influencing Policy-Research-Practice
10. From Production… To Dissemination… To Adoption
SECTION III: RESEARCH OUTPUTS
11. It’s the Talk, Not the Tech: What Governments Should Know about Blogging and Social Media
12. Integrating Digital and Human Data Sources for Environmental Planning and Climate Change Adaptation: From Research to Practice in Central Vietnam
13. The Challenge of Working Across Contexts and Domains: Mobile Health Education in Rural Cambodia
14. The Dynamics and Challenges of Academic Internet Use Amongst Cambodian University Students;
SECTION IV: SYNTHESIS AND CONCLUSION
15. Finding a Path to Influencing Policy
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX