State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Guest Post By Phil Cruver

This is a continuation from Collaborative Learning in Paksitan Part 1 which introduced the concept of collaborative learning using enhanced video technologies.

Educators can also provide students with links to their lectures and assignments to tag as a class project. With this technology they can tag “chapters” and “topics” within the media file with a descriptive text for each tag. Additionally, all tags can be exported and distributed as a blog.

Once students tag a portion of a video or locate a tagged section of a video that is relevant to what they wish to learn, they may want to share the link with others. They can embed this as a deep link on their website, blog, or even in an email message. When other students click on the deep link, they will be taken not to the beginning of the video but to that precise section within the video.

Rather than conducting a search for keywords or tags that describe an entire video, students can conduct deep searches for tags that describe specific sections within a video and then immediately jump to that precise portion of the video clip. This saves time and facilitates education because students don’t have to watch a five-minute video to find a five-second nugget of information they need to understand.

How do these deep technologies specifically enhance learning?

• They increase the granularity of indexed media, allowing specific parts of video lectures to be more easily remixed, linked, and reused.
• They engage students to co-create content via annotation of lectures.
• They make media as an instructional tool more efficient since reading or reviewing streaming video is more time consuming than print media.

Also, these deep technologies enhance the educational content. The more the commenting and annotating, the more valuable the learning asset becomes as the wisdom of numerous and diverse interested parties add layers of collective intelligence to the video. Furthermore, specific moments of time within these videos can be instantaneously identified and retrieved with the Learning 2.0 Platform search engine.

Consider the opportunity for enhancing the quality of education in Pakistan by harnessing thousands of video lectures produced by the top teachers throughout the country. This digital archive could be searched as indexed meta data by key words within the annotations. Not only would this video library compliment and extend traditional learning but it would also scale giving millions of students access to a quality education.

Hopefully, Learning 2.0 will be adopted in Pakistan as a complimentary component to the upcoming national curriculum, which would help foster a new culture of learning. It would be a positive step towards educating its students with the new literacy they will require for competing in the flat world global economy they inhabit.

Cross post from Basit Ali’s Blog

Ufone has launched its Urdu SMS services and that’s what I call convenience with simplicity. We all keep sending messages in roman Urdu but keeping in mind that the mobile usage has gone way beyond the very basic literacy level, we need solutions that keep things in Urdu or even use picture illustrations for getting a message through. As far as I remember, Ufone is not the first one to launch such translation service, for example Mobilink is already running their SMS translation services.

How it works

For all your message recipients, who cannot understand English script, Ufone has come up with this very useful yet simple service. Simply send a message to 424 written in roman Urdu and you will receive a response translated in Urdu text. If you want to send the message to someone else, type [recipient number] [space] [message in roman] and the service will attempt its best to translate it word by word in Urdu script.

To give it a shot I sent a simple message from a Ufone number to a non-Ufone one and it was delivered within a few milliseconds. Here was a simple test run:

Source Message:

Received at destination as:

Most cell-phones out there in the market do not have Urdu-keypad and do not have Urdu typing support in their firmware/OS, but they have capacity to display Urdu messages. In these circumstances, the service can be a hit.

The only problem in this service is the use of roman combination and users’ habits. Ufone has a software at the back end that is translating these English character combinations to Urdu. In case it doesn’t find your desired combination, or you spell a certain word differently, the translation will not work perfectly. For example I’ve seen people using “Hay”, “He”, “Hey” and “Hy” for the same word “??” in Urdu. But once people start using it, they will learn the right syntax. I was expecting a detailed guideline or user-manual on Ufone’s website, that I couldn’t find.

Each message translated will cost Rs. 2+ Tax. Here are the details: