Egranary as a Digital Resource in Uganda: Preliminary Findings

In this paper, we address preliminary findings from a digital literacy study on the use the portable digital library, eGranary, currently being conducted in a rural Ugandan school. The eGranary system is an intranet that comprises a 750Gb harddrive with specialized browsing software, which can be attached to a PC or a local area network. It contains approximately 10 million educational documents, including Wikipedia, which can be searched like the internet (see www.egranary.org). Drawing on theories of new literacies and identities, the two research questions we are addressing in our current project are as follows: (i) how does eGranary function as a placed resource in Ugandan society? (ii) to what extent do identities shift as teachers learn from and contribute to global knowledge production? These research questions are centrally concerned with the innovative use of educational resources to promote social inclusion in poorly resourced regions of the world.