All play and no work??
Realised earlier that I’ve not posted much up about work recently – so just to reassure you that I am doing something (or rather trying to do something!), here’s what I’ve been up to…
My ability to launch our Moodle site has been hampered somewhat by a variety of network issues and problems that I’ve spent far too much time chasing up and not getting far! I’ve not worked out how the network is set up here (I’m unsure that anyone knows). We have 3 different proxy servers, all having different settings (2 allow external internet access, 1 doesn’t, 1 allows the download of mp3′s, the other doesn’t). So to browse the web you regularly have to set up your proxy first. Currently I can access the web, but no https sites (so no email!).
I set up our Moodle server on a machine in our server room, but it’s only accessible from some computers on the network, and it appears random as to whether you have to use the IP address or the machine name (which will become art of the final URL). On my desktop PC, in XP I can access the server on remote desktop using the IP address, but I can’t browse to the network shares using \\10.129.5.10 (the same IP that works with remote desktop) and I can only occasionally access the website (http://10.129.5.10).
Anyway – far too dull and annoying to go into more detail here – just really hoping that it gets sorted out soon so I can get on with some more meaningful work – like actually letting people use the site and the lab (see photo).
Yesterday I met the university president for the first time. It was at meeting for all ex-pat staff at the Uni (of which there are over 50, mainly from India) to explain to us the implementation of the recent Business Process Review/Reorganisation (BPR), and to listen to our input on the problems we thought the university had and how they could be resolved.
Today I ran my first lab sessions for the “Internet and web page development” course that my counterpart usually teaches. He’s away in Addis this week so I said I’d take the sessions this week, on CSS, to save delaying the course. I found out this morning that our head of dept isn’t too happy with me running the class. Not that he’s unhappy with me, more that it shouldn’t have been left to me to do and it seems my counterpart has taken unauthorised leave.
The sessions seemed to go well, about 40 2nd year students per class, but there were a few things I hadn’t realised would happen. Firstly, that my handwriting is really bad – I wrote some bits of code up on the whiteboard and very few students managed to copy it down correctly. Secondly, that the students don’t seem to have had much hands-on computer experience – including just using a keyboard (many had difficulty finding keys). I’m not sure if this is just because of my accent (‘e’ might sound like ‘i’), or just general lack of time with a keyboard. Finally, I hadn’t thought that they may have difficulty with the punctuation, but maybe again this is to do with lack of practice and experience. Fortunately, all things that I can try to do something about in the next lab sessions though!
…so I have been doing a little bit of work!!
The photo above is one of our World Bank DIF (Development Initiative Fund) project computer lab, so you can see that the PC’s are all quite new, with flat screens and good memory/hard drives. Unfortunately some of the extension wiring in the lab probably wouldn’t pass an electrical safety test…
