Alternatives to Violence in Kenya

Following the post-election turmoil in Kenya, Minciu Sodas has been exploring alternatives to violence. We have developed an initiative called Pyramid of Peace (pop). I am part of Minciu Sodas and I am also a trustee of CAWD (a registered UK charity). To learn more about pop and how CAWD is supporting it please see http://phone4peace.blogspot.com/

January 31st - Join us in the chat room

Jan 31st - Hasty update. We are meeting as planned in the worknets chatroom. Do join us. There was an "admin glitch" which prevented the parallel audio-graphic conference. See side panel for worknets chat room link.

New Year - LearnByDoing 2008

This New Year blog was written (but not published) at the start of the year - just before the turmoil in Kenya. We have friends there - for more information about them see Cawdnet NL 44 - Kenya Special Edition

The chat room mentioned below has been a focus for exchanging news and arranging practical help. The LearnByDoing session on 31st January will now be "Communicating with Kenya". It will look at how Mincui Sodas (an online community) was able to respond to the turmoil in Kenya.

New Year - LearnByDoing 2008
It's the new year - so I have been having a quick look through the 2007 entries to the blog before deciding its direction for 2008. Lorraine Duff and I started the blog last July as one of our LearnByDoing experiments.

Comments
I see that we got two comments - which I did not know about at the time. I think Lorraine has investigated blog settings since then so we will know in future if anyone sends a comment - please do - and belated thanks to Andrius and Elfneh for sending their comments.

Who does what
Usually I am the one who generates the words for our blog (often, I confess, in longhand) and the tidy version owes much to Lorraine's intervention. The focus up to now has been fairly narrow, emphasising e-meetings, as you can see from previous entries. This year I think we will take a wider view and include other LearnByDoing activities. The thread connecting them will simply be that Lorraine and I are involved in them all.

Our projects
Lorraine and I have been working together on various unfunded ICT4Ed&D projects for several years. We have only met face-to-face once, so over the years we have explored various strategies for collaborating at a distance. As we don't come under the umbrella of any organisation there has never been any formal training or any IT department to guide us. This means that everything we do is a LearnByDoing experiment (with miscellaneous "help from our friends"). Our links with grassroots projects in Africa came about through personal friendships - and the friendships and subsequent collaborations have relied heavily on communication at a distance. As a result, in our small way, we have developed an unusual expertise related to the realities of ICT4Ed&D (Information and Communication Technologies for Education and Development).

Blogging 2008
At this point I am tempted to try and explain more about what we have been trying to learn and why, but that would take too long. Suffice to say that it all relates to ICT4Ed&D. Anyhow, it is the New Year - time for a fresh start not for looking back. A blog is a blog. It is a diary that other people are free to read and diaries relate to the here and now. (If anyone reads this and wants an explanation of something there is always the comments box.)

Welcome to the WorkNets chat room
So, what next? Thursday January 3rd is the first Thursday of the month. We meet in the WorkNets chat room. Various newcomers would be more likely to turn up if I sent them a reminder. I need an effective system for doing that - I don't know what it should be.

Trainerspod sessions
Thursday January 31st is the new date for our next LearnByDoing (LBD) online session with Trainerspod (previously planned for the third Thursday of the month).


Guest Speaker - John Dada of Fantsuam Foundation
John Dada, director of Fantsuam Foundation (FF) is going to be the guest speaker in January.
(NB -This session now postponed until later in the year to enable January session on "Communicating with Kenya")

Developments at Fantsuam
John will be describing the latest technical developments at Fantsuam. Previously there was a VSAT which served the FF compound - mainly for Cisco training, and also for office use related to FF (including its micro-credit bank), and for a small cyber cafe. That was amazing enough for a rural location in Nigeria - but last time I visited things had moved even further on. Where previously there were turkeys, chickens and goats I saw a tall mast and a beautiful new building (made of compressed earth bricks) to house the server room and other facilities. All this enables ten other sites to access the Internet (three of which will be cyber cafes, if I remember correctly, and other sites include clinics and a hotel). The FF cyber cafe has closed and become another office.

Interests of participants
John will be telling us all about it - with either a technical or social emphasis depending on the interests of people who register for the LBD session. I hope that as John shares the details of FF's pioneering work it will be an eye-opening reality check for people who are interested in ICT4Ed&D, especially those whose experiences are limited to "bandwidth rich" environments. Thanks to Trainerspod we have the facilities of Elluminate so we can show web pages, power point slides, photos and so on - and participants can interact with John using microphones, via typed chat, or in various other on-screen ways. As we learn to make the most of these opportunities the LBD sessions should come ever closer to the value of face-to-face meetings.

Format
I hope to gradually develop the best format for these sessions. I want plenty of participation and exchange of information - but with a clear and well informed focus. My potential guest speakers are practitioners with masses of information to share. They are busy people - and so I want them to be able to participate easily. Last year I tried something which was a bit like a meeting with an agenda and chairman - this year I'm going to try something a bit more like a TV chat show and phone in. Gradually, as we LearnByDoing we will evolve the best way to e-meet through Trainerspod.

Sharing knowledge
We have great people in our network with a tremendous wealth of practical experience. Some of them have already agreed to follow John as guest speakers. Over the coming year I hope to see LBD sessions making positive contributions to sharing knowledge and closing the gap between people who are bandwidth rich and people who are bandwidth challenged. We have a lot of challenges to overcome. 2008 promises to be a rich learning experience.

(written by Pam - published by Lorraine)

Update - LearnByDoing Session with Trainerspod on 29th November 2007

Registration for the LearnByDoing session with Trainerspod is now open.
For more information and to register please click here - please register.
Date: Thursday 29th November 2007
Time: 15:00 GMT - 17:00 GMT (Arrive at 14:30 for tutorial on Elluminate). Please go to WorldClocks to confirm your time zone.
Venue: On-line!
Topic: ICT and Education in Africa - Practicalities in Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana.
Prince Obiri-Mainoo and I (Pamela McLean) will be discussing our plans and experiences related to ICT and education in Africa.

Chats past and Trainserspod future

Chats catch-up
This is written in haste. My intention was to edit down some chats we have had, to make them more "reader friendly". I also wanted to tell about a discussion that Andrius Kulikauskus and I had about the group dynamics of our chat sessions and the benefits and disadvantages of various approaches. However - time has been against me for that, so for now I am simply
mentioning that chats have been continuing, and we do definitely LearnByDoing .

Thursday 29th November
Looking ahead. The next LearnByDoing (LBD) session with TrainersPod is scheduled for Thursday 29th November. Prince Obiri-Mainoo and I (Pamela McLean) will be discussing our plans and experiences related to ICT and education in Africa. Prince and I e-met recently, at a TrainersPod webinar. We discovered overlapping interests because of Prince's ICT training work in USA and Ghana, and mine with rural teachers in Nigeria and Kenya.

This session is going to be participative and very much about practicalities. People who join the session will be encouraged to ask questions and share their own experiences of ICT and education in Africa. I, for one, am intending to learn a lot from the discussion - and I hope others will too.

You can register your interests and comment at the LBD section at Cawdnet Campus. Find out more by clicking here.

The first Thursday and the last Friday
The usual time for LBD meetings in the chat room is 13.00 GMT on the first Thursday of the month. The Teachers Talking Kenya group also try to get to the chat room during their monthly meetings - we are trying to learn how to raise some money for them, to help cover their travel and online expenses. If anyone has any ideas do please let us know. (You can paste a comment here - or email info@cawd.net)

Teachers Talking From Rural Kenya

On Friday September 28th twenty teachers in rural Kenya left their schools early and traveled to Holy Rosary Secretarial College, Tala, where they gathered around the only computer that was online.

At home in the UK I was sitting at my laptop, logged in to the worknet chat room waiting for them.

The teachers were participants from the Teachers Talking (TT) Kenya course - and in August I had been in Kenya teaching them. I have published an edited down version of our chat here.

This TT Kenya initial programme is a COL / CAWD collaboration and consists of a one week course followed by monthly meetings for six months. Before I left Kenya the participants and I had agreed to try and meet in a chat room, next time they were online. We want to continue working together even though we are at a distance - the chat is part of that.

Our chat is about the practicalities of ICT training for teachers in rural Africa - not in theory, but in real life. We were joined in the chat room by a Kenyan living in Sweden, and a Nigerian, still in Nigeria, who had helped me to present TT there.

Please share the chat as widely as you can. The twenty people clustered around that one computer in Tala are experts regarding education in rural Kenya - they are practitioners. They are ready, willing and able to use the Internet in their own professional development, and to share what they know with their colleagues and their communities. Just imagine what a power for change they could be if they could get online more than a couple of hours once a month.

I don't know where to go to get the resources they need to build on their initial knowledge and enthusiasm - but maybe if this information circulates far enough some organisations will be able to help them. Alternatively we could "pass the hat" and collect donations from individuals through CAWD. (To direct an on-line donation to a specific CAWD project, simply name the project in the "personal message" box.)

The first LearnByDoing audiographic e-meeting was held on 2nd August 2007 through Trainerspod

The first LearnByDoing audiographic e-meeting was held on 2nd August 2007 through Trainerspod. It was a "foundation laying" e-meeting, where I (Pam) shared ideas for running a regular LearnByDoing virtual group. The main ideas are on a PowerPoint presentation which can be seen via Google Docs or at the Trainerspod archives where (after creating an account) you can also listen in to our meeting and see what we wrote in the chat box etc.

The proposed structure of the meeting was along these lines:-
Pre-session:

• Informal chat
• Introduction to using audiographic conferencing

Main-session:

• Chairman's introduction
• Outline of proposed LearnByDoing series
  > Structure of meetings
  > Roles and responsibilities
  > Focus of LearnByDoing
• Meeting topic
  > ICT for Education and Development - "Three-legged stool" checklist
• Future planning

Post-session:

• Informal discussions and networking
  

I won't write the meeting up as "minutes" because the archive is available, so this will be a personal account to give you a flavour of what went on.

Altogether fifteen of us gathered through Trainerspod - which I felt was a good number for the initial meeting of a club, or group, which will gradually establish its identity and grow. I was pleased to find a balance of people I was e-meeting for the first time and people that I already knew (F2F or virtually).

I think it is worth looking briefly at the geographical spread of the participants, as I am hoping that as the group grows the LearnByDoing (LBD) participants will come from a mixture of countries representing a variety of cultures. The people who I met for the first time had probably been invited by Asif Daya of Trainerspod and seemed to be in the USA. Those of us not in the USA were from three European countries, and there was also one very welcome participant from India, who had discovered the meeting by coming across the blog. Although LBD is rooted in practical experience in rural Africa, there is a great overlap between work in Africa and work in India, so an exchange of ideas and experience will be most welcome.

Grass roots projects in Africa were represented by Caroline Ifeka and me. Caroline is based in Nigeria but has roots in the UK, and was staying over here. I live in the UK but am involved in practical work in Nigeria and Kenya. Our friends in Africa who rely on cyber cafes were not able to attend, but we are exploring ways to include them as much as possible. They find it easier to be involved in our complementary e-meetings at the Minciu Sodas chat room, and our yahoo group LearningFromEachOther.

Kabissa was represented by Chioma Oruh. This was exciting for me, because way back in 2003 Kabissa helped me to start an online newsletter about a tiny project I was involved with, in rural Nigeria. Kabissa's work of making ICT more easily accessible to community groups in Africa was well known and initially I felt a bit intimidated about approaching Kabissa, but we were welcomed. When our little newsletter was launched I felt a double benefit. There was the obvious practical benefit of having an online newsletter. Equally important was a sense of belonging, acceptance, approval, because Kabissa had "allowed us in". I am hoping that the future direction of the LBD group will be influenced by Kabissa's vision, experience and network.

I don't know everyones full names, so I will have to refer to some people by the identities used in the chat room.

Our meeting also benefited from input from Mireille and her practical suggestions about relevant uses of ICT, which included the site http://www.zoho.com/; http://www.google.com/; and http://www.slideshare.com/. I hope we will explore these in practise as we LearnByDoing.

Sasha, Maria and Repyke looked forward to exchanging practical information, including on-the-ground projects related to livelihoods. This is certainly the kind of thing I hope we will be able to do, once we have established our LBD group. At first, while we are establishing ourselves, and "settling in" to our audiographic e-meeting space, it is probably best to focus on topics that address some of the challenges of e-meeting. E-groups have many similarities with Face to Face groups. When they are running smoothly it all looks deceptively simple - but first they have to be set up to run smoothly - and that is the stage we are at now.

We did not get around to agreeing the topic for our next meeting, but we can discuss and arrange that through the LearningFromEachOther and I will try to get an outline agenda agreed and posted here before our next audio-graphic e-meeting.

Since the initial meeting I have been to Kenya for the local launch of Teachers Talking. The participants are keen to get involved with people and information through the Internet. They hope to visit the Minciu Sodas chat room on Friday 28th September at 3.30pm Kenyan time 1.30pm GMT. They are very limited in their opportunities to get online. How can we best help them to benefit from the riches of the Internet during the precious times when they are connected? I hope we will discuss some of the related issues at our next LearnByDoing audiographic e-meeting on Thursday 29th November 2007.