Poster: Localized Content for Village Schools

Abstract

Studies on global Internet connectivity report that only 40% of the world population has access to the Internet [1]. While Internet connectivity has the potential to provide numerous educational opportunities, there is often a lack of educational content that is relevant with respect to the culture and language of those attending schools in largely disconnected communities. Inspired by the problem of sharing relevant educational content within and between schools, we extend VillageShare to facilitate content sharing between village schools that are networked together via low-bandwidth wireless links. Originally designed to localize social media content in a single community [2], the extended version of VillageShare operates across multiple sites to ensure that relevant educational content is 1) highly available to local users and 2) made globally available using a robust synchronization protocol. This design enables village teachers and students to create regional repositories of relevant digital curricula that are accessible even during network failures and outages.