Creole Scrabble

Using the Fab Lab at the South End Technology Center in Boston, students fabricated a set of Scrabble tiles in Creole to be played by their peers in Haiti at the Måtenwa Community Learning Center. This is a video I made to document our efforts.

Five Ways African-Americans Can Use Technology for Empowerment

By Allison Bland

Speaking at the graduation exercises of Hampton University over the weekend, President Obama delivered an important message about the role of technology in our lives. He cautioned the soon to be grads: “With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.” In other words, these students should steer towards being producers of technology, rather than consumers of technology.

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The African Phone : How Microsoft learned having less features can be more

By Allison Bland

In some places around the world, cell phones are sold in bunches like bananas. Sellers walk through crowded intersections, chargers and phones coiled up in a secure braid until it is time to peal one off for a ready customer. Those who can't take the heat of the street find shade under decorated umbrella, offering phones out of bins like a New York City hot dog vendor. Here, and in many places around the world, communication is changing for the better. But the phone that can connect us all is still to come.

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On the Term "Ghetto"

Excerpts from my speech during the orientation of the 2010 Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn program. L2TT2L is a summer learning and teaching initiative headquartered at the South End Technology Center in partnership with the MIT Media Lab to encourage elementary to high school aged youth to become producers of innovations in their communities and to pursue careers in sciences, technologies, engineering and mathematics.

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