Get Booked on the Digital Hero Book Project
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Access to ICTs is one of the most important areas of development in countries like South Africa. ‘It’s vital for education’�’ we’re told. ‘It will empower people’�’ is another common refrain. But what that actually translates into, in a tangible way, is often left unsaid.
The Digital Hero Book Project is exactly that ‘ a tangible example of how ICT in African schools and communities can be used in conjunction with community projects to directly benefit the people involved.
Hero Books are not a new concept. Hero Booking is a process whereby a child or adult becomes the author, illustrator and editor of their own hero book. Hero Books are a form of memory work, a process of setting up a safe space for an individual to tell a story. This process of story telling can take place under a tree or in a community centre, or it can be made tangible by making a map, drawing pictures or writing the story down in a book, like a Hero Book. Memory work is important in helping people take control of their stories, empowering them and allowing them to tell their story in a positive way.
Memory work first started in Uganda, where people who were living with HIV and AIDS, but had no access to treatment, and realised that they needed to document their lives, family histories and traditions for their children before they died. These memory works, in the forms of books and boxes became important legacies for their surviving family.
As access to anti-retroviral treatments has increased across Africa, memory work has evolved into a low-cost way for people to document their lives and live positively, as well as providing an important psycho-social support.
The Digital Hero Book Project aims to integrate this support into the curriculums of ICT-enabled schools in Cape Town, South Africa, and put hero books into the digital arena.
Through projects such as Khanya, the award-winning ‘Technology in Education’ initiative and tuXlabs, a partnership between the Shuttleworth Foundation and South African schools, over 800 schools have become ICT-enabled since 2001. Thirteen thousand educators have been trained to effectively use ICTs for curriculum delivery, and 430,000 learners now have access to ICTs as a result.
The 14 month-long Digital Hero Book Project pilot aims to enable children in these schools to create digital hero books, and publish them online on community-based pages. Through the site, authors can engage other ‘heroes’ to share their experiences, affirming one other by recognising their common challenges and ways of overcoming them.
The benefits of this project go beyond the psycho-social ‘ creating digital hero books will allow children to learn basic word processing, web editing and designing, audio and image editing and software application skills.
The ICT-related learning is also an important part of the project. DHBP aims to use, wherever possible, open source software and the toolkit and all related resources will be released under a Creative Commons licence. This means that the underlying principles of the Commons will become part of the curriculum of those learning and creating the Hero Books.
At the moment, the DHBP is being incubated by the Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford University. Other partners include as well as being partnered by Khanya, REPSSI, who provide psychosocial support in 13 Southern and Eastern African countries, and Molotech - a South African not-for-profit company.
However, DHBP still needs added funding to cover their shortfall for the pilot. For more information and to donate to the project, visit Molotech’s site.
Photograph: Ntombi Mdingana (14) with her Hero Book, by Melanie Siebert, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0