Welcome to Week 5

This week, we are looking both at the application space, namely, m-learning and agriculture, as well as at critical technology aspects. We start with two important talks on m-learning. Dr Aga Palalas tells us about social networking in m-learning. Professor Ally talks about the methods and considerations in setting up m-learning initiatives in your school, college, training institution or university. Professor Prabhakar introduces you to the content management part of a mobile service. You learnt about vKVK. It has a backend for content management called agropedia. You will gain a view of how this content aggregation arrangement works together with the mobile delivery arrangement. Meeta Bagga and Revathi demonstrate the workings.

Professor Runa Sarkar considers the social network aspects of mobile delivery services. She describes a case study of the call blast service (vKVK) and how farmers and their families respond to that.

We then feature a set of optional talks by Awaneesh and Jitesh who have developed some of the echniques used in vKVK call blast services. The techies among you will enjoy these talks. Non-techies need not turn away. If you spend a little extra time, you will get a good idea of how content management systems (such as Drupal) and key open source telephone exchange software (Freeswitch) work together. At the end of it, what you gain is a serious appreciation of how different, apparently disparate technologies, must come together a mobile service that many people can find useful in daily lives- as a farmer or as a student.

We thank you for your participation over the last four weeks. We look forward to your continued participation.

Enjoy the course!