Archive for 2010

Bale Mountains and Sof Omar Caves

Alex March 11th, 2010

At the cave entrance

The other weekend, I had a great trip down to the Bale mountains. Fortunately we were able to borrow car (4×4) for a few days from a friends work in Addis. Bale is known for it’s trekking and horseriding, but fortunately, given that it rained almost the entire time, we hadn’t planned to do either of these activities and spent most of the time driving – our shortest days drive being about 7 hours.

The roads to and around Bale were far worse that we had expected- mainly because most them are in the process of being asphalted, so the ‘road’ that you can use is actually a track next to where the road is going to be. At one point it took us over 3 hours to do less than 100km.

Basing ourselves in Robe, we had a day up to the Sanetti Plateau (over 4000m high) to watch Ethiopian Wolves and then on to the Harenna Forest. The landscape is completely the opposite to that around Tigray – with real forest and greenery- as a result of all the rain. The next day we headed another 120km east to the Sof Omar caves. These were fantastic (see photos below), fortunately we picked up a guy from the local village who happened to be a history teacher at the local high school, so he was able to translate what the guide was telling us. Due to the rain we couldn’t get as far in to the caves as we would have liked – since crossing the river inside the cave would have been too dangerous. The teacher also had a map of the cave system (below) – 17km long – if anyone is interested I have higher quality copies of the images than I’ve uploaded below. Fortunately I’d remembered to take along my little tripod so was able to get some reasonable photos once we were inside the caves.

The next night was spent at the Dinsho lodge which the guide book describes as being like an abandoned ski lodge. It was a little tricky to find, the road builders had removed the signpost so we ended up taking someone from town to show us where to go, on arrival all was dark and locked up (living up to the guides book’s description) , so we went back into town to track down the warden.

The next morning the warden too us out for a walk to watch see Nyala (photos below again!), then back in the car for a drive to Shashemene (home of Rastafarianism apparently) for lunch and up to Lake Langano for an overnight stay by the lake, and few drinks and a swim – my camera battery had long since died by this point.

The highlight for me was certainly getting to the caves, it would have been difficult to get there without our own transport and now that I’ve seen a small part of the Bale national park, I’d certainly like to go back during a drier period for a trekking holiday.

Wolf on Sanetti Plateau

View from top of Sanetti Plateau

Harenna Forest (and a short stretch of flat road)

Inside the cave

Inside the cave

Cave system map (page 1)

Cave system map (page 2)

Nyala in the morning

Nyala in daylight

Cleared

Alex March 11th, 2010

Last week I finally finished my clearance for the University, meaning that I’m now free to leave. Was quite a long drawn out process – you can see in the photo how many signatures I needed in the end.

Now have only 2 weeks left in Mekelle, have a few days in Addis, then return to the UK. Will be good to catch up with everyone once I’m back :-)

35 Years of the TPLF

Alex February 18th, 2010

Over the last week, Mekelle has undergone a bit of a facelift, repainting, rubbish collected and flags put up, all in preparation for the celebration of 35 years of the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF). The road near our house was never quite tarmaced in time, but no-one seems too bothered. Town has been full of federal police, with small celebrations and events happening each day this week.

But today is the big day, the fields behind the Hawelti monument are full of people, most of the town and thousands of people from Tigray and further afield have arrived for a day of speeches. People began arriving last night and stayed up overnight – a huge firework display at midnight then today there is due to be a speech from the Prime Minister.

I’ve been up there this morning already to see what was happening, there doesn’t seem to be any schedule and I’m not too keen on spending all day in the sun listening to political propaganda speeches in a language I don’t understand. Fortunately our house is close enough that I’ll hear if anything significant starts to happen and can then take walk up. I’ll update this posting if there much else to report during the rest of the day.

Clearing

Alex February 18th, 2010

45 signatures from each of the 30+ university departments, plus finance, stores, personnel from all campuses and all in triplicate. That’s all I need for the clearance procedure so I can officially leave the university. Despite still having another 5 weeks left, I’ve heard from others about how unbelievably time-consuming and bureaucratic the clearance procedure here is, so thought I should make start.

I managed to find a secretary who would go round and collect most of the signatures for me (for a small fee), so far I have 30, the remaining signatures needed are for finance, stores etc, so for these I need to sign my computer over to someone else, so I can prove that there isn’t any equipment still in my name and that I don’t owe any department any money.

It looks likely that this will take much of the next week or so to be complete and I’ll be extremely relieved when I finally have everything signed off and finished.

A weekend in Gheralta

Alex February 18th, 2010

Last weekend had my second stay at the Gheralta Lodge, about two hours north of Mekelle. Last time I went was way back in December 2008. Out of the 10 of us we had 9 nationalities, with only Martin and I being from the same country, the rest from India, Pakistan, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Ethiopia and US.

On the Saturday afternoon we played rounders, using the bat and ball which have been sat at the back of my wardrobe for the past 18 months. There wasn’t quite enough of us to make up 2 teams, so we ended up making a cross between rounders and cricket which seemed to work after a few ‘discussions’ about what the rules should be (and rule changes half way through the game).

On Sunday morning, some of us stayed around the lodge playing frisbee and reading, whilst the rest went to visit one of th nearby rock churches. Those who had gone to the churches ha a hard time with the local ‘guide’ and priest. The cost of visiting the churches here has gone up to 100 birr, per person per church, up form 50 birr last year and 20 a couple of years ago. On top of this there are now ‘official’ guides who will charge 150 birr, then another fee just for climbing the mountain (even if you don’t use a guide or go in a church), then a final (variable) fee to get the priest to unlock the church door. All these charges and arguments about how much should be paid always spoil any visit and don’t encourage you to visit again, or recommend particular places to others.

So in the end I was quite pleased I didn’t bother with the church visit – it was one I’d seen before anyway – but it was great to get away from Mekelle, even if it was just overnight.

(l-r) Claudia, Freweini, Mali, Sana and Bea

Experience sharing with Adama University

Alex February 10th, 2010

Adama University - eTeaching website

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to go and visit Adama University – in Nazret, about 2 hours drive south of Addis. I went with a couple of staff from ECBP (Ethiopia Capacity Building Programme), as they have a similar learning programme to what we are trying to achieve in Mekelle.

Adama University is an interesting case in Ethiopia as it now has a German President and several other senior expatriate staff – such as the ICT Director. So they have implemented many changes which have yet to reach other Ethiopian Universities.

Their elearning programme seems to be going well, they have a team of 5 staff dedicated to uploading and developing the elearning materials – more information about their team can be found on the Adama University website. Although they have a very similar approach to the one we’re taking with the Digital Campus project, there are some crucial differences. Firstly, their team are uploading the materials for tutors, whereas we are supporting the tutors uploading their own materials (I have previously blogged about this). Some of their activities and assignments form part of the students final grades, as we are not including the whole course cohort in our program, we are unable to use summative assessment. Their better IT infrastructure and lab access allows them to offer the online courses to many more students.

One the other side, we have our system available off campus too, whereas at Adama their Moodle is (currently) only available through the local network. I’m still unsure that having a centralised team is the best way forward. I can understand it’s advantages, in quality control, consistency etc, but unsure that it will encourage teachers to feel they actually own the course and should be keeping content up to date, participating in discussions etc.

Their ICT infrastructure looks very well organised and they have common computer labs which are open 24/7 – this obviously gives them much more opportunity to push courses out to students and know that the students will get access. We’re trying to push the University here to having similar levels of access times for students, but I think it will be a while yet before Mekelle reaches 24/7 access to labs which have a large proportion of machines fully functioning.

Although it was a long way to go for half a days visit, it was well worthwhile for me to meet the team there and look at the different approaches they are taking.

Getting away

Alex February 2nd, 2010

I feel I’ve been a little quiet on here recently, but that’s not because been being lazy. Quite the opposite in fact. The closer I get to my leaving date, the longer my to do list seems to grow. It’s highly unlikely that I’ll get chance to finish everything I’d like.

It’s only in the last week that I realised I’ve not left Mekelle now since the middle of December, when I had a very brief trip down to Addis for the VSO leavers workshop. But, I do now have a trip down to Adama University lined up for next week, a couple of hours drive south of Addis, so will be good to get away for a few days for a change of scenery, even though it’s still work related. The new intake of volunteers arrive this weekend, so whilst I’m in Addis, I’ll get chance to meet them all.

Progress with the Digital Campus project had been a little slow over the last few weeks, but things are now getting back on track. The next full week of training has been arranged for the second week of March, so just before I return to the UK. We’re also now getting many of the technical issues resolved with the servers, such as implementing an LDAP server to ease the user creation process. Later this week I’m running a Moodle admin training course for people in Computer Science and ICT, so at least staff will have an idea of how to maintain the server properly.

This week, I’ve started the Moodle Course Creator Certificate (MCCC), so I’ll be working on that over the next couple of months. Despite having used Moodle a lot in this job and whilst at the OU, most of this has been from a developer point of view, rather than a teacher. So will be good to learn more about how the various activity modules, which I’ve rarely used, really work. Just need to make sure that I can set aside enough time to devote to this.

Rollercoaster week

Alex January 24th, 2010

The last week or so has seen lots of ups and downs, though overall the balance is more up than down! On both of the last Saturday mornings I ran training sessions for tutors. I was expecting these to be a bit of a nightmare, I’d already had trouble getting all the user accounts working correctly, plus I wasn’t really sure how many people would turn up. In the end around 10 tutors attended each week so was very pleased with this outcome – it could very easily have been that no-one or only one or two attend. Not knowing who was coming beforehand or what level they’d got to made things a little tricky for planning the sessions, but went well in the tutorial-style we used. Some are already creating quizzes and other activities for their students, whereas with some other tutors, they hadn’t attended the training week in November, so we were starting at the beginning.

Last Sunday morning (just over a week ago) we had some visitors from the Ministry of Education, so I explained our elearning projects and showed them the labs – unfortunately (as always seems to be the case) a power outage, in one of the buildings holding the switches connecting the terminals to the data centre, prevented me from showing the terminals in use.

The downsides this week have been the fact that it was uncertain for a while as to whether we’d be able to run the second full week of training for the tutors, as the visitors from Alcala may not have had time to prepare. If they weren’t coming this would have made extra work for me, as I still would have needed to run some extra training to ensure the tutors were set up and ready for delivering courses int the second semester. With all the other tasks I have to do (in the now 8 weeks remaining – not that I’m counting) this would have been too much and I’d have been very disappointed if they had canceled, or delayed until June.

Also a laptop went missing from our office over the previous weekend. A student had left it with one of my office colleagues to fix, but without going into all the detail here (and I’m not totally sure about exactly what happened), he ended up being locked up at the police station for 2 days and has to pay 12,000 birr (over 1000 USD) until the laptop is found. Previously our office was used a lot by other staff to get internet access and to get their laptops fixed, but now all this will stop and the locks are being replaced.

This week we finally made progress on fixing up many of the user accounts that weren’t working, plus getting the server at Ayder campus working again. There were lots of different odd problems with the users accounts, but most re fixed now (just a few odd problems to resolve still). But getting the server fixed was great news (especially at the end of a Friday afternoon). this means we can now get the lab open again and into use. Though now the students are having exams, then they’ll have a 2 week break, so they may not be around much for anther 3-4 weeks. The lab at Ayder now has curtains up, and new carpet is ready to be put in. The curtains seem to match the rest of the room, but I suspect this is more by accident than design.

Anyway it was a good end to a very fraught week, so hoping I don’t have any more weeks like this one.

Monkey business

Alex January 17th, 2010

Campus baboonsOn campus there is a small family of baboons, I’m not really sure where they came from. Although they’re native to Ethiopia, there aren’t any wild ones in this region, so I suspect they’re escaped/released ex-pets, perhaps from one of the amusement parks in town (one used to have a hyaena pit, now turned into a arcade games room).

The campus baboons spend quite a lot of time in the area near my office, out on the first floor balcony, but they often have to be chased off to stop them pulling apart the noticeboards. The other day we heard a lot of crashing noise from outside – it was the young baboon playing with broken glass, then throwing it onto the tin roof below. Very fortunately, and despite licking the edge of the broken glass, the baboons managed to avoid cutting themselves, or anyone else.

Moodle training content

Alex January 16th, 2010

In a bit of a contradiction, project progress has been fairly slow the last couple of weeks yet I have been as busy as ever. We still have number of issues to resolve for us to be able to move forward. Firstly the course content for the training and workshops. It’s been hard for us to get the time to write the Moodle training course material from scratch, so we’ve now made the decision to buy a license for the MoodleBites for Teachers training course. Purchasing the license means that we can install the materials on our own Moodle server and gives us much more flexibility than paying for individuals to take the course online and in a specified time period.

There are actually far more materials, covering more aspects of Moodle, in more detail, than we really require for giving to our tutors. So we’ll need to spend some time adapting the materials to take out the sections we don’t want or need to cover at the moment. But having all the materials means that those who are interested in learning further have the option to do so. As time is passing very quickly and it won’t be long before I head back to the UK we need to try and make sure that the tutors can follow the training with only remote assistance. I’m a little skeptical that this will work, so am hoping that I can cover as much as possible before I leave.

We’re also still a little disappointed with the amount of materials that have been uploaded by the tutors, to make the project successful we need to demonstrate much more. I’ve been given many reasons as to why people haven’t been able to upload, either they don’t have the materials yet as they’ll write them as they deliver the course next semester, they don’t know what course they’ll be delivering next semester, or simply that they haven’t had time. All of these excuses are a little disappointing as we were very clear when we were giving the introduction and face to face week in October and November that we’d need people to be working on their second semester courses and that they’d need a day per week to commit. The only one that was raised as an issue at then was the time commitment necessary.

Another issue that has been taking up much of my time is getting the user accounts working correctly. Many of the user accounts on the server simply don’t work, and the process of creating new accounts has, in my mind, far too many steps and so is far too error prone. I figured out what the problem was with many accounts, simply the ownership of the home directory was wrong, so these were easy to fix. But there are still a handful of accounts that I just can’t figure out why there is problem. Am hoping that Mike will get chance to look into this in the next few days.

Although we may be having problems with delivering the workshop training materials, if we get the accounts working properly for students then we can start to have an impact. The lab at Arid is now open, Elfu, one of the IT experts in the Engineering College, has moved her desk into the lab, so the lab can be open all during the normal working week and she’s making sure all the terminals are up and running. For the second semester, we’ve had agreement that the students will have responsibility for the key for opening the lab, so they’ll be able to use it as much as they like outside the normal working hours.

Next »