Pics from Fantsuam now on Picasa

The photo on the left was taken in the Knowledge Resource Centre at Fantsuam (the people are Emmanual, one of the participants in my Self Directed Learners group, and me).

There are more photos (on Picasa) from when Marcus and I were at Fantsuam. They include photos of a nursery school with some computers. The school belongs to Mr Perry - another member of the Self Directed Learners (SDL) group. As well as joining my group Mr Perry spent time with Marcus doing some hands-on learning about constructing eco-domes, and is now hoping to build one himself.

By the way - on a Learn By Doing note - this is the first time I have added a photo to a blog. It's one of those "simple when you know how" things (but earlier today when I didn't know how and I was trying to find out and was having difficulty... well then it didn't seem simple). I wanted to find out about photos because my SDL group have learned how to do blogs, and they have already started to add photos. Now I'm catching up.

Visiting Fantsuam

I started writing this blog entry last month when when I was in Nigeria, but didn't get a chance to post it while I was there.

At Fantsuam

I am bandwidth challenged at present, here with Fantsuam Foundation in North Central Nigeria, so there may be some delay in posting this blog.

People and Place

The People and Place project is up and running www/peopleandplace.co.uk The photos there from the Children's CC (Computer Club) give a flavour of Fantsuam, and are an example of information sharing between four schools, on three continents.

The Self Directed Learners

My main challenge here is to help create the first Dadamac Self Directed Learners (SDL) group at the Fantsuam Knowledge Resource Centre. I spent the first day and a half struggling to get people to share their learning needs, and failing. Today, with John Dada's help, we hit on the idea of describing our personal learning journeys. This has lead to really rich reflection and discussion.

Informal Learning

One of the group members pointed out the importance of learning from our peers. We discussed how much we learn from our peer group throughout life. We also considered how much we had learned at home before starting primary school. This discussion helped us to recognise that learning is not only what is taught in a formal manner in school or college. The experiences of home learning and peer-to-peer learning has helped people to understand what we mean by informal learning. It also helped us to discuss learning by doing, and all kinds of alternatives to formal class teaching.

Internet

Now we have recognised the richness of peer learning we are ready to use the Internet to widen our peer group, and consider what we want to learn and how we want to learn it. In our discussion someone mentioned unreliable peers which lead usefully to the issue of reliability of information sources on the Internet.

Chatroom

I will try to introduce the learning group members who I am working with here to the chat room www.worknets.org/chat/base/. I will lead the usual First Thursday of the Month meeting, on October 2nd, from the Fantsuam Knowledge Resource Centre. I am hoping the Fantsuam Learners will become part of a wider peer group thanks to the Internet – starting in the chat room. Please drop by to welcome them if you can and join in our discussions about informal learning.

World Without Poverty

I have brought sixteen of the Mohammed Yunus “Creating a World Without Poverty” books here (thanks to Chris Macrae). My idea is to give some to John Dada (director of Fantsuam Foundation) and also get some taken down to my friends in Oyo state.

Ecoshelter

I arrived here on Tuesday (September 23rd) with Marcus Simmons of Ecoshelter. He has come to learn and teach about construction techniques. This week has been orientation, buying materials, visiting the site, meeting the team and so on. Practical construction training is scheduled for next week.

Comparative costs

Ricardo and other members of the Minciu Sodas Includer development group would have loved to be included up at the main house this evening. A couple of people were discussing the minutiae of comparative costs of different mobile phone networks, cyber cafes, and phone access to the Internet. This is exactly the kind of information the Includer group are looking for.

In my hut

I am writing this in my hut by the light of an oil lamp - no NEPA (mains power) again. As it is Marcus' first visit John has booked him into a hotel in Kafanchan, with running water and a generator for when the power fails. Marcus is driven back and forth each day, but I think he'd probably prefer to be at Fantsuam Foundation like I am. It is Friday evening, and I will try to upload this over the weekend.



It is now Monday October 6th. I have still not uploaded the blog. We have had serious problems with the Internet connection. It has been erratic, extremely slow most of the time, especially in the KRC in the day time. (It has become an in joke that the service provider is working to American time, so it doesn't get going until they wake up). I have only been able to deal with the most urgent online tasks, and uploading a blog is not one of them.

I have been leaving my laptop at the main house to charge overnight as there is solar power there. Last night and the night before we did have NEPA for several hours down at the fish farm (where my visitor's hut is) but it is so unusual I have really got out of the habit of expecting any.

My Hausa is improving – because people give me informal lessons in “morning greetings” every day as I set out for the Knowledge Resource Centre (KRC). It is about a ten minute stroll from my hut up to the compound where the KRC is. There are various clusters of people I pass every day, and they teach me as I go by. I am ashamed of only speaking English. Many people here speak several local languages. Some speak good English, and many know simple phrases that were drilled into them at primary school, such as “Good morning” and “How was your night?”

“Sannu” is a Hausa greeting that serves well in almost every circumstance, and “Lafiya” is a fairly safe reply to most questions that relate to your well-being, so with just those words I can at least show willing. However, I am now able to be slightly more ambitious in the range of my conversation. I sometimes manage to get in first with some of the well-being questions – even though I'm not too sure exactly what they mean. I think I can now ask after your nights' sleep, your bodily health, your children, your family, your household in general, your work, your afternoon and your day.

What I really like is if I manage to do enough of this back-and-forth question-and-answer session to get to the concluding part of the conversation. At this point the person who I am leaving behind me will say “Sai kin dawo” (meaning “until you come back....”) which seems to be my opportunity to make one of two sounds that I am forever hearing and wanting to copy. I don't know the spellings. One sounds like “e”- but is a wonderfully long sound (I think it means “yes”) and the other sounds like “yow-wah” and is said with great emphasis – so I think it's more extreme than “yes” - it gets used when things are a good idea or likely to work well.

PS Now I am back home. Autumn kicked in here while I was away. The evenings are drawing in and the trees are beautiful. Water comes out of my taps, the electricity supply has been constant, traffic drives straight along the roads instead of weaving around floods and potholes, and strangers pass each other in the street carefully avoiding eye contact. Life is “back to normal”. Tomorrow, I join Marcus and two or three others for a “back from Fantsuam lunch and debrief”. Sannu Marcus!

Blog Action Day to Fight Global Poverty!

I have just learned that today October 15th, 2008 is Blog Action Day to Fight Global Poverty! So here are some thoughts related to poverty and what we are learning by doing.

On Monday I came home to the UK from one of my "working holidays" at Fantsuam Foundation (FF) in North Central Nigeria. When I am not physically at Fantsuam I work with the project there via the Internet.

FF began as a micro finance scheme and has helped thousands of women over the years through its loans. It is now also an integrated community development programme involved in health, education, training, rural connectivity, solar energy, eco-development, and all aspects of family life. My involvement has to do with education and training, including working at a distance with people through the Internet.

FF is in a rural area that knows very well about poverty. The poverty levels are such that loans of only a few pounds can make a big difference. They can help people to set up as petty traders and earn a living. FF also has a programme which supports widowed grandmothers who are supporting at least four orphaned grandchildren. The programme gives them 300 Naira a month - approximately £1.50.

Director John Dada says that at Fanstuam Foundation people learn twice, once by doing and a second time by sharing what they know. I love that attitude. I am a teacher. I like practical, project based approaches to learning and I also know that teaching something well is a good way of demonstrating competence. Another reason why I like the attitude of the rural community projects sharing what they know is because I believe that will be the best way to tackle the issues of poverty.

The Internet allows two way exchanges of information. People who have to cope with the challenges of poverty first hand, on a daily basis, are the experts. We need to tackle problems through exchanging information, not through top-down approaches. People in the so-called developed and developing countries should be "rubbing minds" to tackle issues of poverty together.

Incidentally, I don't believe that material wealth is the only indicator of poverty. I believe there are other kinds of poverty too. Some people for instance are time-poor, others may not have many social contacts and so on. What do we really want for a poverty-free future? What kind of sustainable life styles can we develop together?

I know from the work I do with Fantsuam Foundation that we really can use the Internet to exchange practical information at a distance, and work together even when we are not face to face. I am hopeful that more people who are tackling poverty will come and rub minds with us - either face to face in UK with me, or with John and his team in Nigeria, or with all of us through the Internet - so we can all learn from each other, share our practical knowledge, and make more rapid advances against poverty.

Last week's learning.

Review

It's Friday evening. I'm thinking of what I need to pack when I go to Fantsuam, and thinking about information too, and anything else I need to learn about before I go. That got me thinking about what I have been learning in the last week or so.

Akvo water and sanitation

Today I was learning about the Akvo water and sanitation programme with Mark Charmer and Joe Simpson of Akvo (here's another Akvo link). I am hoping that Dadamac can help Fantsuam Foundation to become a field partner. Potential field partners have to show they can send back good information about their project work.

Photo feedback

Regarding information: I hope the Fantsuam team will enjoy helping the Children's Computer Club to contribute information to the People and Place project . It could be a first step towards providing information to projects like Akvo. I've experimented with Peopel and Places and know how to upload phots there now. I know it looks foolproof - but I managed to fail the first times I tried.

Need-to-know

I hate doing things from written instructions and I am a very reluctant user of any techie stuff. Usually I only learn what I really, really have to use. I hope that the longer I wait to use a bit of new technology the more user friendly it will get. Even if it hasn't got user friendly, if "every one else gets it first" at least there should be someone to show me how the thing works.

Minciu Sodas Pyramid of Peace feedback

Back to Mark and Joe - I also told them about the Pyramid of Peace (PoP) and the brilliant way that Minciu Sodas got feedback during the post election turmoil in Kenya (see this background information on PoP taken from a call for funds prepared during the turmoil) - or go straight here for the video of the acrobats' peace demonstration.

Transition Towns

Yesterday I was collecting my visa, and on the way home went to the Islington Hub to buy a copy of "The Transition Handbook", published in association with www.transitionculture.org. Transition Towns had come up in conversation at the PRADSA workshop the previous week, which is how I knew where to get the book. There is a wiki about Transition Towns They started in the West Country and the place I used to live (Lostwithiel) is listed as a transition town, but I don't know anyone else round here who is interested yet. I want to learn more about them, and perhaps get involved.

Drupal

I have spent several hours exploring some features of Drupal. I did it along with Nikki. We both find it easier to learn in company - even if neither of us really knows anything much to begin wit). Thanks to a link Alan put in for us, we can now set up forums, and we are beginning to understand how pages link together. I also experimented with the list of html commands and discovered how to make the text bold and italic - all very basic, but more than I knew before.

The whole Drupal thing looks slightly less stange and threatening to me now - so next time I get a chance to learn from someone who knows Drupal I shall be better prepared to benefit from their knowledge. I long to pull all our Internet stuff together in one place and have a welcoming Dadamac virtual reception area where people can came and e-meet us, and join in whatever interests them.

Open tractors

At the weekend I was learning about open tractors and such like from the Factor E Farm weblog and through a skype chat with Marcin Jakubowski, supplemented by discussion on Global Villages . I think there is a lot that he is doing which could be relevant to the sustainable community project that John Dada is planning at Fantsuam. I'll be able to discuss this more with John soon.

Photography

Also at the weekend I was learning to operate my new camera. My camera operating skills are about as rudimentary as my Drupal. When I have owned a camera it has usually ended up being used by other people, so I don't learn anything much. This time I felt I had to try harder. I am always asking my Fanatsuam friends to send photos of "ordinary everyday sights" - and it was recently pointed out to me that they would like to see some "ordinary everyday sights" from where I live, so I decided I had better try to oblige. I took the camera with me when I went shopping - and looked at the High Street with new eyes. Hmm - quite a lot to notice that I would never see at Fantsuam. After sixteen photos I ran out to memory. I've put them on my computer, but haven't tried to send them yet.

Connectivism and Connective Knowledge

This week has also been the first week of an online course on conectivism and connective knowledge I enrolled for the free version (no supervision etc), but I'm not doing as well as I hoped. I've read most of the basic information, but haven't got into the interesting disucssions, or gone to any unfamiliar applications to find out more about how they are being used. I really want to be part of this, because I will see how proper professionals run online courses, and how it feels to be a learner there. However this is not really a good time for me to be taking a course. I have a faint, rather unrealistic, hope of managing to catch up a bit over the weekend.

End of the week

So, that is what I have been learning about this week. I am so glad to be able to be part of the online learning community.

One month catch up

It is just over a month since I wrote my "five months catch-up" so this a quick review of current learning, before too much time goes by.

Last week I was at the final PRADSA workshop, in Leeds. PRADSA is "Practical Design for Social Action" and is part of a "Designing for the 21st Century" programme. This was my third PRADSA workshop, so I know there is a lot of expertise there - lots of opportunities to learn.

Already, as a result of PRADSA networking, there is a People and Place project that will help children in Teeside and children in rural Nigeria to learn from each other by exchanging photos.

This time the workshop theme was Power and Participation. Participation (inclusion) is dear to my heart. One of my big challenges is how I can help my community activist and teacher friends in Africa to be included in online groups, and other Internet benefits, given their lack of bandwidth.

I am frustrated by the way I am an information bottleneck. I am so information rich. I pay a fixed regular monthly subscription which gives me access to the Internet from home for as many hours as I want - every waking hour of my free time if I so choose. By contrast most of my friends in Africa have to pay by the minute, the connections they use are painfully slow, and are typically at cybercafes some distance from their homes.

How can I help my friends? How can I use my information riches to benefit them? How can I use the fact that I am bandwidth rich to overcome the fact that they are bandwidth poor? How can I be their "information runner" - doing some of their information-finding chores for them while they are off-line? How can I help them to connect up with the people they need to connect up with? How can I get the Internet to do more of this automatically for me, instead of doing so much of it "by hand" through emails and yahoo chats? How can I find other people who would be interested in helping? At present there are only really three of us, Lorraine, Nikki and me - and we are seriously lacking in the additional online skills that we need.

Obviously I need the help of some techies - but where do I find them, and how do I explain what we need? In the past we have used emails, lists, instant messaging, and miscellaneous other communication tools, plus some wikis and Moodle, and couple of free websites that sadly vanished into the ether without warning. I understand that if we had an implementation of Drupal then that would serve to pull everything together, and a friend has kindly made Drupal available to me and my friends - so we have a Dadamac Drupal, once we know how to use it.

We are at the start of our Drupal learning curve. Fortunately there at PRADSA I discovered Alan and Paula, who know about Drupal, looked at the Dadamac Drupal and gave advice on how to go forward. As a result there was much behind the scenes "learning by doing" today when Nikki and I were together with a few hours and visited Dadamac Drupal.

Over the weekend I have also been learning about open source tractors and other things that could be relevant to my friends in Nigeria (and elsewhere). I hope that when our Dadamac Drupal is running effectively I will be able to drop into it all these odd bundles of potentially useful information - things like the open tractor discussions. I need to do it in a way that makes the information very easy to find, but putting it there must not be not too time consuming.

Nigeria, especially Fantsuam, is at the front of my mind at present. I go there again soon, and I am supposed to be helping the Dadamac team at Fantsuam to set up the online Knowledge Resource Centre (KRC). We need to tackle various cultural issues related to learning as well as the provision of resources. I want to be as well prepared as possible before I leave. I see Dadamac Drupal as an important part of the long term KRC provision so I would like to be a more effective Drupal administrator by the time I travel.

So - plenty of learning to be done - and thanks to PRADSA we are taking some useful steps forward.

Describing Dadamac

I've written a fuller explanation about Dadamac (it's a google doc so there's a bit of signing in involved before reading it).
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dvkjgqm_371x75z6cf7

My current plan is to explore Drupal and then gradually use it to create a tidy web presence, and to give the Dadamac online community a virtual home - meanwhile I will continue to scatter information around using what I already know.

Five months catch up

This is a catch-up of what I've been learning-by-doing over the past five months - since the entry about Pyramid of Peace. It probably won't cover everything - just whatever springs to mind while I'm at the keyboard (There won't be any live links included yet, but perhaps later).

Today the Learning From Each Other (LFEO) group had its regular "First Thursday of the Month" meeting in the worknets chatroom and we used it to discuss the ideas in the Mohammed Yunus book "Creating a World Without Poverty". We now have sixteen copies of the book circulating in East Africa - mostly in Kenya, and we have an informal WWP (World Without Poverty) study group. It was a small meeting today. There were four of us - each in a different location and each interested in the ideas and how to apply them appropriately in practice, in "our own communities".

The WWP group is a new kind of collaborative learning experience for us. The books are circulating. Odd bits of e-mail chat make reference to who has got a copy and what someone is thinking, and now and again some of us have a more formal exchange of ideas through the LFEO list or in the chat room.

In Kenya the WWP group has its roots in the Pyramid of Peace. The post election turmoil died down, and the young unemployed youths were persuaded to stop attacking each other. Now some of the peace activists are trying to help the youths to turn on their real enemies - which are poverty and ignorance. The ideas in WWP are a focus for this - but how do these ideas get turned into practical local action? That is the challenge. That is what we will try to LearnByDoing.

Unusually for me I have been involved in three face-to-face gatherings since March. They were all in the UK: a PRADSA workshop about funding bids, 2gether08, and PCF5. They were all very different, and each time I felt an "outsider" - but each time in a different way. I was suffering quite an identity crisis by the time I had been to all of them.

I was at PCF5 because I had submitted a paper about Teachers Talking. I was happy about the quality of the project and so, originally, I felt confident in my role at PCF5. After all, PCF5 was a joint COL (Commonwealth of Learning) and University of London event, and the version of TT which David Mutua had organised in Kenya had been supported by COL, and TT "is my baby". I thought that I would feel that I did belong.

At PCF5 I was placed in the "Children and Young People" group, because TT is about Teacher Training - but I am nothing to do with any formal Teacher Training Institution. After a day of meeting people who all had strong job titles in big organisations I was feeling very much an odd one out again. Fortunately, on the second day I heard Professor Brenda Gourney talk about the kind of informal communities of learning where I do belong ("places" on the Internet - like the groups I belong to in Minciu Sodas) so I felt more included again.

I like the phrase Community of Learning (CoL). I belong in various online CoLs and I believe they are an important part of the way forward for education in the 21st century. However online CoLs tend to be rather organic, and freely structured, compared to traditional institutions of learning so there is quite a cultural divide between the two. In the last couple of days (through one of my CoLs) I have been pointed towards some useful articles theorising about informal online learning. I have learned a new description "rhizomic learning" which does seem to describe how we learn in CoLs. Rhizomic learning was described in a very academic way. This makes teh article a good "connecting point" between between those of us in the "CoLs" and the established academic institutions. I am hopeful that better communication channels may be opening up.

I have also been involved in developing better communication channels between UK and Nigeria. It is something I have been struggling with since 1999, when I used to help a friend's Nigerian husband to keep in contact with people back home. Now, as part of the Dadamac team I am in regular UK-Nigeria contact, including a weekly online team meeting. The Dadamac team has made interesting progess. We are on our second project and we are getting increasingly confident of our ability to deliver what our clients ask.

We are still trying to classify all the things we do in the Dadamac team and how they relate to each other. This is how things seem to be shaping up at present. There is a network of people which I used to describe as Cawdnet, but has now developed, and changed its focus and becoem something I am calling the Dadamac Community of Learning. That is online, so its boundaries are very porous, and it overlaps other Communities of Learning, especially Minciu Sodas. (To me Minciu Sodas is the best and "richest" Community of Learning that I know. It is the online community where my own learning is nurtured: though the encouragement, example, and enabling of the Director Andrius Kulikauskus; and through the discussions with other group leaders and members.)

Various educational initiatives have already developed though this network, usually linking with Fantsuam Foundation. In connection with Dadamac CoL there will be Dadamac Local Communities of Learning. The first one is developing at the Knowledge Resource Centre (KRC) at Fantsuam. We are experimenting to find out what people want to learn and how their learning can be enabled through the KRC. We are building on education/training work we have done together previously in UK/Nigeria collaborations. Dadamac links in various ways with Fantsuam Foundation, including the Children's Computer Club, but I won't attempt to clarify the details here. We are very happy to see benefits starting to come to Fantsuam as a result of Dadamac initiatives.

Once we know how the Dadmac CoL works at Fantsuam we will invite other people/organsiations that we know to collaborate with us as local Dadamac Communities of Learning as well.

At present the online Dadamac CoL is a collaborative network with no formal structure or registration. It is concerned with the exchange of information and the growth of learning - very "21st century".

However, some things do need to be firmly and formally rooted, and have to function in the money economy. To this end there is also Dadamac Limited (a related registered company) which enables us to share out networks and knowledge in return for fees, just as any other knowledge brokers would do.

I haven't managed a full catch up, but the main points are here. I hope to write more often in future.