The Institute for Technology and Social Change is a private company based in Washington, D.C. Its web site offers a course catalogue focused on technological innovation. Timo Luege is a communication specialist who has spent the last seven years working for the humanitarian and development sector, a period during which large-scale disasters intersected with the rapid rise in mobile communication.

(No, this is not a post about the Apple keynote meltdown.) When I started organizing live webcast events for the first time in 2006, they required extensive technical preparation, specialized software and hardware, and – most important – a group of really smart people gifted with more than a little bit of luck to pull off each event.

We went up the Semnoz this afternoon, taking our two-and-a-half year old baby on a no-pram-allowed walk for the first time. In addition to the usual suspects (cows and goats, mostly), we also ran into Benoit Pereira Da Silva, an application developer at the helm of a contraption he uses to code and walk at the same time. If I understood correctly, he has programmed the drone to document his walks.

I first heard her described as the “lady who did MOOCs in a refugee camp”. It was completely ambiguous what that meant, but certainly sparked my curiosity. Barbara Moser-Mercer is a professor at the University of Geneva and a  cognitive psychologist who has practiced and researched education in emergencies. I finally caught up with her at the Second European MOOC Summit.

Fahamu Pecou (b. 1975) is an artist/scholar based in Atlanta, Georgia whose works comment on contemporary and hip-hop culture while simultaneously subverting it to include his ideas on fine art.

EPFL’s Professor Pierre Dillenbourg heads the Center for Digital Education. He demonstrates the use of a Simpliquity Tinkerlamp to teach logistics training, and explains how research has moved from developing an expensive, specialized device to using a simple webcam and paper. Note: interview and discussion are in French.

The negative impact of aid on development has been a recurring and controversial subject in recent years. Drawing on her extensive research in this field, Masooda Bano asserts that there is a strong negative correlation between foreign aid, and voluntary organisations’ ability to mobilise communities. Masooda Bano is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Department of International Development &