As researchers working in different subareas, we explore alternative approaches to designing with communities. In particular, we are enthusiastic about moving away from focusing on a community's needs toward building on its strengths. However, our varied experiences with assets-based design across …

Home care workers care for at risk populations but feel under-supported themselves. How can HCWs support each other while isolated in patients' homes? We worked with HCWs to design tech that can connect workers with each other.

It is increasingly in vogue to describe research as community-engaged, but the incentives of academia often misalign with the needs of communities that academics purport to serve. This leads to abusive and exploitative work under the guise of engagement. To address this probem involves more than …

Action-oriented researchers aim to design and evaluate how technology can be used to improve the lives of underserved populations around the globe. However, improvement is a value-laden concept with normative, causal, and methodological assumptions. As researchers, we should examine how different …

In Cameroon, no exam is more important than the baccalauréat, which serves as the gateway to professional and higher-education aspirations. We build on existing literature on practice tests to evaluate how SMS-based quizzes could help students prepare for the baccalauréat. We find that students used …

ICTD interventions targeting practitioners fit into a common typology that can be understood as how these interventions interact with the situated and social aspects of practice. I discuss how a Communites of Practice lens may intersect with other theoretical lenses in ICTD and related fields, to …

We created a system to send regularly-spaced, multiple-choice questions to students' own mobile devices to help secondary school students in Cameroon with exam practice via either SMS or WhatsApp. Students' participation rates were heavily impacted by trust in the intervening organization and …

Their results were surprising. With all the hype around Internet messaging services like WhatsApp, the researchers were expecting WhatsApp to well outdo old-school SMS text messages. Yet, SMS beat WhatsApp for mobile phone test prep!

Anthony Poon, a Cornell Ph.D. student studying information science, is working on test preparation technology initiatives to improve high school graduation rates in Cameroon.