Talk, smartphones, notebooks, and brown paper

This chapter discusses orality and literacy as cultural constructs enabled in different ways by technology in traditional village environments in Bangladesh. The villages have been part of an international information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) project between Monash University in Australia and Oxfam, an international non-governmental organization (NGO). There is a continuum of different practices involving oral, textual, and online knowledge around the creation, preservation, and pluralization of traditional information and knowledge involving not just traditional villagers, but other players, such as researchers and developers. Innovation involving ICT needs to take account of this ‘information ecology’ and its impacts on the development of sustainable solutions. In fact, the preferred medium for information and knowledge sharing is not necessarily the most technically sophisticated one, highlighting the importance of working at the grass roots in social-technical projects in international development. These issues are considered within a theory and teaching model known as the Monash Information Continuum.