The Digital StudyHall (DSH) is an NGO that works on improving education for poor children in rural and slum schools in India. We film the best grassroots teachers teaching real classrooms and share the resulting DVDs with poor schools, which are given players and electrical equipment and trained to interact with their students during pauses of the films. (http://dsh.cs.washington.edu)

In this proposal, we discuss a complementary system aimed at "capturing" our students outside school hours. The submitted accompanying figure illustrates a "hybrid network" integrating cell phones and community radios. An example application that can be built on this network is a voice chat system that allows students and teachers from multiple "DSH villages" to "chat" across a long distance: participants can send "input" by simply placing cell phone calls to a "hub server," and receive "output" as they hear the entire community chatting on their regular FM radio receivers, which receive their signal from a local village FM transmitter, which is in turn driven by a local computer, acting as a village "base station," which in turn communicates with the "hub." The "hub" may be run by and embedded inside grassroots leadership organizations such as the schools. The hub runs an open-source PBX system.

Kids and trainee teachers from various villages, teachers and staff from the hubs, and even volunteers from the US may participate in such a "chat room," conducting a wide variety of educational activities, such as science questions and answers, story and book reading, math quiz and game shows, complementing in-class curricula. These chat sessions can also be digitally stored in a database, spliced, and re-used in the future. If properly tagged and organized, the saved content could evolve into something like an "audio-Wiki," benefiting other places at other times.