Tapping school/college students to create and stimulate use of local information resources

In today's Information age, business, employment and career advancement opportunities will increasingly flow to those with information seeking skills and the ability to exploit the available information to their advantage. In this context, it is important to inculcate amongst the public at large, an information seeking culture as well as an awareness of the tremendous potential of information in improving the odds of success, be it in business or personal activities. This will eventually result in demand for more information, newer and better channels to access the information and help create wealth through the application of information.

How do we inculcate an information seeking and information utilisation culture?

• Use students (and teachers) in schools and colleges as the powerful agents of change
  
• Adopt a bottom-up approach by first initiating the teachers and the students into the information culture and then empowering them to initiate others (their families, friends and other individuals and organisations in the neighbourhood)
  
• Expose school students to information seeking skills as well as information collection, organisation and publishing methods by co-opting the students into these activities and weaving the activities around the curriculum wherever possible
  
• Develop the school/college as the instrument to provide the local neighbourhood with access to information of relevance to individuals and organisations in the locality as well as beyond through online media (blogs, web sites, groups, mailing lists etc., classifieds platform a la Craigslist) as well as print, radio and local cable channels

What will the students do?

• Students will create databases of information relating to their locality and issues of immediate importance to the residents of the locality (neighbourhood, city, state or even country)
  
• Students will learn how to gather information, analyse it, organise it and publish/disseminate it to those who can use the information to their advantage.
  
• Possible focus areas to start with include
  
  • local geography (creating a map of the school and its neighbourhood, a local GIS database with information on population, soil, climate, flora & fauna, pollution levels, civic facilities, utilities, infrastructure etc.)
    
  • local history (mapping history starting from the present day and going back in time)
    
  • local arts, crafts, literature, cultural traditions, practices etc.
    
  • local businesses (create an online directory of local businesses, maintain a local classifieds web site and publish a daily neighbourhood blog online or even a weekly/monthly newspaper including advertisements from local businesses/traders to meet costs
    
  • availability/price of basic essentials, rental values, land values in the neighbourhood and comparison of different products and services and merchants in the neighbourhood
    
  • generating local neighbourhood census data with the students collecting the data themselves
  
  
• The college students can focus on creating more value-added information including economic and financial information, scientific and technical information and tracking the activities of all local councillors and legislators etc.

Each school/college does all of the above for its neighbourhood and the schools form a network so students can interact with their peers in other localities and share information and experiences through blogs, online groups and web sites. All the local databases (GIS data, classifieds etc.) can then be integrated together to create larger city-wide, state-wide and nation-wide databases. These databases can then be commercialised with the school/college serving as the information consultant to local businesses and organisations by helping them address their specific information requirements using the databases and undertake customised market research surveys or polls, or develop customised databases as well. All of this can generate sizeable revenues for the school/college as well.

The benefits

Students will

• learn to work with large amounts of information in different forms (text, numbers, graphs/charts, maps, graphics, images etc.) and present them in a clear and simple manner across different media (print, audio, video, online etc.) to those who need the information or can use it to their advantage
  
• learn to asses needs, ask the right questions and come up with practical solutions to real issues and problems of direct relevance to their community
  
• hone their analytical skills to seek the information they need, interpret and analyse it, and exploit the insights gained to make informed choices and decisions
  
• learn to collaborate with peers, superiors and subordinates and work as a team towards achieving common objectives
  
• work on meaningful projects of the kind they will encounter in the work place in the years ahead
• develop expertise in their specific areas of interest (both in terms of subject matter as well as in performing specific tasks) and be able to evaluate career options
  
• gain an appreciation of how businesses work and possibly light an entrepreneurial spark in them as well

In an earlier post, I had described an idea to do much of what is mentioned here by working with students undergoing a Bachelor's course in Economics in colleges.

Getting students involved under the aegis of their institutions will of course require the active co-operation of the managements of schools/colleges as well as the teachers and this is going to be no mean challenge.