Mobile phones and radios: effects on transactions costs and market participation for households in Northern Ghana

The literature on agricultural markets suggests that transactions costs are the main obstacles preventing households from participating in agricultural markets. We examine the impact of the recent massive penetration of information communication technologies (ICTs), particularly mobile phones and radios, in developing countries to investigate the role of information in economic transactions and participation in food crop markets. To fully capture market participation behaviours, the current theoretical framework on market participation and transactions costs is extended to include those households that sell and buy in the same time period. We correct for endogeneity and selectivity throughout our models. We used a novel dataset of 393 households in northern Ghana with detailed information on market transactions and ICTs usage. Results show that receiving market information via mobile phones has a positive and significant impact on market participation, with a greater impact for households with a surplus of food crops. We find that radios have a larger impact on the quantity traded. This may reflect the nature of mobile phones in reducing searching costs, whereas radios provide an updated and regular flow of information which affects the pattern of crops consumed and sold. We also emphasise that the most significant factor is how ICTs are used, rather than their ownership.

The use of computer-based learning tools for teaching and clinical purposes: Interactive computing strategy for Iraq

Medical universities and teaching hospitals in Iraq are facing a lack of professional staff due to the ongoing violence that forces them to flee the country. The professionals are now distributed outside the country which reduces the chances for the staff and students to be physically in one place to continue the teaching and limits the efficiency of the consultations in hospitals. A survey was done among students and professional staff in Iraq to find the problems in the learning and clinical systems and how Information and Communication Technology could improve it. The survey has shown that 86% of the participants use the Internet as a learning resource and 25% for clinical purposes while less than 11% of them uses it for collaboration between different institutions. A web-based collaborative tool is proposed to improve the teaching and clinical system. The tool helps the users to collaborate remotely to increase the quality of the learning system as well as it can be used for remote medical consultation in hospitals.

Becoming skilled: The cultural and corporeal geographies of teaching and learning Thai Yoga massage

This paper explores the process of learning an embodied knowledge using the work of Dreyfus and Deleuze. Although geographers have begun to acknowledge the role of embodied knowledges in social life, there have been few in-depth case studies of how these skills are learned. This paper offers a case study of Thai Yoga massage (TYM), a ‘complementary and alternative therapy’ which is growing in popularity in the United Kingdom. Having outlined the case study, the paper explores the cultural geographies of the formalisation, documentation and contestation of the set of techniques that have come to cohere in the UK as TYM. The paper then interrogates the messy corporeal geographies of learning a skill, and briefly considers how more advanced practitioners experience their skilled practice.

Creating teaching and learning in Europe: promoting a new paradigm

The tides of globalization and the unsteady surges and distortions in the evolution of the European Union are causing identities and cultures to be in a state of flux. Education is used by politicians as a major lever for political and social change through micro-management, but it is a crude tool. There can, however, be opportunities within educational experience for individual learners to gain strong, reflexive, multiple identities and multiple citizenship through the engagement of their creative energies. It has been argued that the twenty-first century needs a new kind of creativity characterized by unselfishness, caring and compassion—still involving monetary wealth, but resulting in a healthy planet and healthy people. Creativity and its economically derived relation, innovation, have become `buzz words' of our times. They are often misconstrued, misunderstood and plainly misused within educational conversations. The small-scale pan-European research study upon which this article is founded discovered that more emphasis needs to be placed on creative leadership, empowering teachers and learners, reducing pupils' fear of school, balancing teaching approaches, and ensuring that the curriculum and assessment are responsive to the needs of individual learners. These factors are key to building strong educational provision that harnesses the creative potential of learners, teachers and other stakeholders, values what it is to be human and creates a foundation upon which to build strong, morally based, consistent, participative democracies.