Hello! As some of you may know, I'm currently working with a non-profit organization called Pratham in Bangalore.
One of our largest annual programs is the Annual Status of Education Report [1] that we conduct. ASER is a collective snapshot taken by about twenty thousand volunteers and represents reality at that point. The idea behind ASER is not just to take a snapshot for display or to merely make a statement. It is more than that. This is our country, these are our children, and the snapshot is to inform ourselves, the people of India, so that we understand the situation first hand and act to change the picture. The ASER results will be taken back to the districts and villages so that people can think about what to do next. We will extend a helping hand to the various levels of government to change the situation. This year, we plan on doing this in October or thereabouts and I had a few questions I wanted to ping the group-mind about: How can we use this exercise as a channel for use of technology to simplify the process of data collection and what kind of technology can we use? Can we use this channel for the distribution of technology and if so, what technology? Can we use this channel to experiment with some technology and if so, what, how and why? As of now, we have considered the use of optical mark recognition to simplify the collection and aggregation process. Thoughts on this? Thank you. -Gautam [1] http://www.pratham.org/aserrep.php -- Please read our new blog at: http://blog.prathambooks.org
