Karaoke for social and cultural change
| Pages | 121-130 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14779960680000286 |
| Date | 01 August 2006 |
| Published date | 01 August 2006 |
| Author | Payal Arora |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
Karaoke for social and cultural change
I. BUILDING CONTEXT
Education in India
Prior to 1996, Indian education policy focused
more on equity through access, making some sig-
nificant strides. By 1987, the Indian government
had set up 530,000 primary schools, providing
access to 95 percent of the young population across
80 percent of villages (NCERT, 1992, p. 42) In spite
of this success, India faces significant challenges in
attendance, retention and dropout rates: about 20
percent of children enrolled do not attend school
regularly and about 40 percent of those who enroll
drop out before completing the primary cycle.
When accounting for gender, caste and class, the
disparity is more alarming (p.94). Hence, the idea of
quality centeredness in education gained serious
momentum, highlighting several concerns, one
being that of production and distribution of educa-
tional content (p.133). According to the World
Bank India education sector reports (1996; 2001),
textbooks, reputed to be of poor physical quality
and readability, are often the sole available reading
material for most students. Around the same time,
there has been international pressure to make edu-
cational content more engaging and relevant to the
local populace for creating better-prepared future
citizens (OECD, 2001). This raises key challenges
in the Indian education arena, with a focus on
reducing the gap in education outcomes across
states and amongst groups through meaningful
content.
Meanwhile, the reputation of India as the IT hub
has energized some of the state governments, espe-
cially in the South of India, to promise e-literacy to
its people by 2015 (Biswas, 2004). This is being done
to reduce the digital divide as well as to adhere to the
Info, Comm & Ethics in Society (2006) 3: 121-130
© 2006 Troubador Publishing Ltd.
Payal Arora
Teachers College, Columbia University, NY, USA
Email: payal@post.harvard.edu
This account demonstrates the key challenges faced in producing engaging educational content for information and
communication technologies (ICT) deployed in rural India. The ‘Stills in Sync’ (SIS) project aims to enhance literacy
through the revival and proliferation of popular regional folksongs with social awareness themes in rural India. This
product entails the use of the Same Language Subtitling (SLS) karaoke feature that won the Worldbank Development
Marketplace award in 2002 and the ‘Tech Laureate’ honor from the Technology Museum of Innovation in 2003. This case
study highlights the struggles faced in the production process as we sought to negotiate localism with scalability. The
paper is meant to stimulate discussion and further research on the process of digitalizing cultural and educational con-
tent in muliple languages for literacy gains and empowerment. I attempt to give three-dimensionality to current buzz-
words in education content creation using ICT: localism, relevance and engagement.
Keywords: folksongs, literacy, technology, language, engagement, localism, India
VOL 4 NO 3 JULY 2006 121
To continue reading
Request your trial