Evaluating ICT for Education in Africa - Royal Holloway, University of ...

things were „good‟ or „bad‟, without exploring anything of the „how‟ and „why‟that lay beneath the response.Similarly, it was possible to be misled unintentionally regarding the realmeaning of quantity-based responses from teachers. As I noted in myresearch diary in Malawi (03/03/08):„In various interactions with teachers I would ask them to bemore specific about something they had said and wouldsuggest that they gave a number to demonstrate moreprecisely what they meant. This was most telling whencollecting data on their enrolment and attendance figures. Inseveral schools the data was not available and so weattempted to retrospectively construct the figures, basicallyasking them if they remembered what it had been. Whatstruck me was the way they were willing to remember theexact numbers that had been in attendance the previous year,but how it didn‟t seem to be based on fact. They appeared to bejust picking numbers from the air and telling me, for example,“in 2007 we had 116 children attending each day in Standard3b”. It is possible they had incredible memories in everyschool, but it is more likely they were simply confused by myseemingly bizarre request for quantification and so just feltobliged to say something in response, as if they assumed Ithought it was their responsibility to know. It is very unlikelythat they knew, or even thought they knew, exactly how manychildren had been in the class.‟This interaction suggested that the various players were acting out the rolesthey anticipated were expected of them during the research methods andinteractions. This is a significant observation because formative assertionsregarding ICT for education and wider development programmes are madeon the basis of figures reported from participants. It is dangerous to assumethat such figures given by participants have always been constructed from aWestern perspective on quantification.206