Hello!
Last week I started my first post with an email list of five – filled with mostly test accounts. 🙂 A week later, I’m glad to have interested people signing up.
A warm welcome to you again.
In last week’s post I introduced two series of writings that I have planned. Today, I begin with one of them, Vidarbha Diaries, which is about a digital awareness initiative that a small group of us voluntarily setup in October 2021. I want to share with you about a course that I designed and I’ll quickly give you an overview of it’s subtopics.
In taking up this work, I had put myself yet again out of my comfort zone, by relocating to a region where I knew nobody, had no prior help nor support system. During the second half of the pandemic.. when schools and colleges were still not allowing gatherings or workshops. Once again in life I found that I had nothing but my passion to do good work to fall back on.
“Why did you choose this place?”
The Central Indian region of Vidarbha has been of curiosity to me since 2010. That’s ever since I quit my dream job at the Big Four for the simple reason that I wanted to apply my mind to social causes rather than corporate/personal profit. I don’t fully remember the extent to which my interest in Vidarbha was generated by journalist P Sainath, whose writings had a profound impact on me back then. Those were days when I knew I didn’t want to build my personal earnings in my privileged world. And so I had quit but I wasn’t sure how to make a shift, or what I wanted to do. That’s when many of Sainath’s writings on poverty, structural inequalities and his travels across rural India with his insights on regional imbalances, the region of Vidarbha in his award-winning work probably caught my attention. It is possible that Vidarbha stayed with me all these years since then. Moreover, I had wanted to work in a Marathi-language speaking region. The dialect here is Varhadi, with strong roots in Marathi.
Because I’m often asked about WHERE this region really is! Comprises 11 districts in the state of Maharashtra, India
“You should work with teenage girls. Their lives are severely affected by social media”
During the pandemic when I was relocating again, I had the chance to start somewhere afresh. And instead of Mumbai, my comfort space, I felt the time was right to spend some time in Nagpur (the capital of Vidarbha).
I knew nobody there. I initially lived with the parents of a good friend, who were only too happy to take me in and to have some company in their quiet retired lives. During my initial days, I interviewed nearly 50 people, in my efforts to figure out how I could play a meaningful role there, with a community-orientation, given all of my skills, previous work experiences and current interests.
And slowly the answer became clear: that I could design and deliver trainings on how to be safe online.
The people I interviewed in Nagpur often spoke to me of how various forms of digital media had exploded into their lives during the pandemic, and forced them (and their children, families) to go online. They would tell me at length about the impact this had on their lives, on their changing personal relationships in almost every setting. A number of complex social scenarios had cropped up. People experienced dissimilar degrees of freedom in the online world vs the offline one – and this was not easy to reconcile. I could cleaerly see that my role within the Global IT team of a charity could combine with all of my other community work, to now create, design, deliver 2-hour long trainings on digital safety in local languages.
In more posts in this series, I will write about how this shaped up and why. Stories that people told me. In today’s post I will smply leave you with an overview of the course structure, because I suspect you might find some of the sub-topics and themes relatable to your own life.
What was I doing in these trainings? And what was the course I’d developed?
Digital presence had clearly become inevitable for everyone. How does one use digital space? From where does one learn how to navigate the digital space? What are the issues and challenges people face day-to-day (for example, digital frauds)?
My workshop was divided into 3 sessions:
(1) where participants talk for about 30 to 60 minutes – stories from their lives, experiences with everyday phone usage
(2) I talk for the next 30 minutes – on the economics of internet and address some of their stories shared
(3) Live practical demo: I demonstrate a select few phone settings (for example, how to restrict who sees your profile picture on WhatsApp? How to prevent people from adding you into groups without your consent?) and participants fix these settings along with me, on their own devices
My course was always in Marathi or Hindi. And the slides I used had more visual items and consciously less text-heavy, again with the intent of making it community-friendly. The topics under each of the three sessions:
First session (time: 30-60 mins)
| Ice breaker: Both the trainer and participants would introduce themselves. To make it interactive and understand the participant groups’ relationship with technology, a few prompts were helpful, such as – |
| What do you think digital is? |
| What is your relationship with digital? |
| How do you use digital technologies? In which context can it be used? What kind of issues or problems you have faced in the digital space? (Replies would often include digital frauds, stalking, and so on)o Who do you think uses technology more: Rural India (here we would share visual stats on how phone is the primary digital device and how in 2020 alone, 227 million people in India used one) or urban India (multiple digital devices used by 205 million in 2020)? And moreover, 71 million children in the age group of 5-11 used technology in 2020. We would simply use these prompts to generate conversations on usage patterns. |
Second session (time: 30 mins)
| The basics of technology |
| What is the internet? What is client and server? |
| What is data? (examples of data is practical formats – photos, videos, text or audio)Where is data stored? What do optic cables look like? (photo shown)What is a data center and where are they located in the world? |
| What is an IP address? Who is an Internet Service Provider (ISP)? Why is it a term that often appears in draft legislation on internet governance today? |
| GAME TIME! Game to demonstrate how data is accessed from devices. Role-play on client-server. |
| Online frauds and crime Phone de-addiction tips: how to disable notifications; apps and advertisement relation and addiction; Home screen- limiting the number of apps on it; Using the Digital Wellbeing to track phone usage and timer to self-control app usage Digital Economy How money is generated through multiple ways on the internet, Legislations: IT Act and guidelines How one can learn about the Act and know about roles and responsibilities of platforms, regulators, intermediaries What are internet shutdowns |
Third session (time: 30 mins)
| How do apps collect data? What becomes of it? |
| 10 tips for students for digital citizenship and internet usage. 10 tips for parents (co-viewing content, family media agreement, avoiding device as rewards, phone passwords) |
| Signal messenger vs Telegram vs WhatsApp vs Facebook – a comparison. How to make a switch in our choices? |
| ACTIVITY: asking people to open WhatsApp (as an example) and help them understand settings |
| Including status, last seen, how to stop people from making you add to groups, how to save phone space (disabling media auto-download) SAFETY & SECURITY o Trolls o Friend requests o Blocking unsolicited requests o Dress-policing o YouTube settings (time watched) |
I hope this gives you an idea of what was at the core of our workshops. I’d love to know what you thought, feel free to reply. In future posts, I’ll be sharing with you feedback I received, some specific stories and examples. Above all, what I learnt from it. Often times volunteering sounds cooler than it is. None of us worked on a paid/honorarium basis, this could not have been easy. Expect more on that, too.
Until next week!
Janani