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Where's Babeldaob? November 19, 4:30 p.m.
100 Porter Hall (Gregg Hall)
Speaker: Joseph Mertz
This past summer, two rising seniors in CS and ECE traveled to the island nation of Palau to create a web-based application that could manage student assessment data across a school system. After 10 weeks of work, the school system was able to analyze data and produce reports in 2 days instead of 3 months. Reports that hadn’t been ready until October were now available before the 4th of July. This is not all the students accomplished, however. They also scuba dived with schools of sharks, toured WWII ruins and ancient monoliths, learned to slow down to match the local pace, socialized with folk from around the world, picked up a bit of the Palauan language, and ate fruit bat soup.
Since 2004, Technology Consulting in the Global Community has sent 49 students from all 6 Carnegie Mellon colleges abroad to provide assistance in computing, information systems, and advanced applications. For 10 weeks each summer, Carnegie Mellon students travel to technologically-underserved countries such as Niue, Palau, Ghana, India, and the Philippines. While there, the students work in partnership with local government, school, or NGO leaders to use technology more effectively in their organizations.
Living and working abroad, and being invited to become part of an organization in a foreign culture can be a rewarding experience. Doing so in a developing community with limited resources and significant challenges can be life changing. In an increasingly connected world, it is important for more students to have these global experiences, which better prepare them to be leaders at home.
In this talk I’ll outline the capacity-building consulting model the program is built on, describe the outcomes the students have achieved, explain our plans to significantly expand the program to involve more students and faculty advisors, and show photos of the interesting places our students go.
Joseph Mertz is an Associate Teaching Professor in the H. John Heinz III College and the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. He designed and teaches Technology Consulting in the Community in Pittsburgh and Qatar. He also created and directs the the international Technology Consulting in the Global Community summer program that sends university students abroad as technology consultants with government ministries and non-profit organizations in developing communities. His primary teaching interests are in courses and projects that make students aware of community development challenges while teaching strategies and methods to use information and communication technologies to address those challenges.
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