Alex Little

from: https://sites.google.com/site/gethiopia2012/Home

The Google team is thrilled to announce our first g|Ethiopia, happening February 7- 8 in Addis Ababa. We’re looking forward to engaging with this community of developers, business leaders, and entrepreneurs who are as passionate about technology as we are!

For those of you who are interested in our Mobile Developer Challenge, but are unsure where to start, g|Ethiopia has a session titled ‘Intro to Mobile Development’.

A few photos from BarCamp Ethiopia… for our demonstration of the pregnancy calculator, we managed to encourage my friend Seble to test it out (she’s due at the end of November)…

Just gave my presentation at BarCamp….

Am back in Ethiopia for the next couple of weeks – whilst writing this, I’m listening to a presentation about blogging in Ethiopia. Currently there are very few blogs running in Ethiopia (for a list of the main ones visit http://ethiopian-blog.com)

The BarCamp has been very good so far, several hundred staff, students and others from universities and other organisations across Ethiopia, although I arrived slightly late this morning – the traffic was pretty bad – but fortunately I didn’t miss too much. The sessions this year seem to be even more varied than last year, though still quite technology focussed. Quite a few staff and students have made the trip down from Mekelle Uni, so very good to see them here – especially the elearning team and lab attendants.

Have just been to presentation about localisation by Google. Tomorrow I’ll give my presentation about using mobile technologies (smartphones) to improve maternal healthcare. Hoping to get plenty of people to come along – though Google are giving another presentation at the same time, so hope they don’t lure too many people away from attending the other sessions!

Friday and Saturday next week (23 & 24th Sept) is the second BarCamp Ethiopia. Following the success of last years event (see my posts here and here), the event is being run again at EiABC in Addis.

More info about the BarCamp can be found on the blog and wiki pages.

I’m travelling over to got to the conference and going to give a presentation about the work we have been doing recently on using smartphones for data collection and reporting to improve maternal healthcare in the rural areas of Ethiopia, specifically working with the Health Extension Workers. Will post the presentation up soon!

Very brief notes on some the interesting projects and websites I found out about whilst at the eLearning Africa conference last week:

i-call (http://common-sense.at/i-call): Using a dial up voice service, where callers can select their way through a story (interactive decision maze) to teach them about the consequences of their actions. Designed to identify pregnant women at risk. Also using SMS to remind women about their medical appointments. At the specialist level, using Moodle mobile extensions to provide case studies, self testing and forums.

Botswana-UPenn Partnership (http://www.upenn.edu/botswana/): Testing myTouch 3g Android smartphones with doctors and their students. The phones were preloaded with a range of (free and paid for) medical and drug applications. The applications most used were Dynamed, 5 min clinical consult and Epocrates RX. Found that people preferred using phones with slide out keyboards rather than on-screen virtual keyboards.

Mobile learning for applied distance learning, presentation by Niall Winters from London Knowledge Lab: Participatory design methodology (using pen & paper) to iterate the design of mobile applications for health workers before the applications are finally written. Running a workshop “Designing Mobile Learning Activities” on 4th July in London (https://store.ioe.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?modid=5&prodid=39&deptid=111). Also LDIC report “Distance Learning for Health: What works” (see: http://www.lidc.org.uk/news_detail.php?news_id=117).

Digital Opportunity Trust (DOT): Mike and I met with some of the DOT staff at the ICE hub in Addis a few days before the conference. At the conference they presented one of the research projects “Web2.0: Mapping Practices and Perceptions” (see: http://www.dotrust.org/research/publications)

Health Sciences Online (http://hso.info): Repository of freely available health sciences knowledge

OpenECBCheck (http://www.qualityfoundation.org/openecbcheck/): Peer reviewed quality and accreditation for elearning programmes

After a couple of weeks away, here are some of my photos….

From Ethiopia:

From eLearning Africa Conference in Tanzania:

From few days holiday in Zanzibar:

The presentation I gave about an hour ago at eLearning Africa 2011 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania:

Here is the extended abstract of the presentation

After a productive few days in Addis, yesterday I arrived in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, for the eLearning Africa conference. In Addis we had chance to meet with the Ministers for Higher Education and for Science and Technology, and with representatives from the Ministry of Health, essentially to give them an overview of what we have been doing in Mekelle so far, and present our proposals to them. The response was good, though one issue we’re likely to come up against is how to make sure we find the right people/company to work with in Ethiopia, and that they have the correct operating licenses to be able to supply services to universities (or other governmental organisations).

This is my first time in Tanzania, Dar es Salaam is much warmer than Addis, and the rainy season has just started, so the dirt roads are a little muddy. I also seem to have selected a hotel in the mainly muslim area, a large mosque just behind the hotel (which doesn’t serve alcohol). This afternoon I’ll head up to the conference centre to register, although it’s several kilometres out of the city centre, then the conference runs over tomorrow and Friday, with my presentation being on Friday afternoon.

Will post up when I can over the next few days regarding the conference.

Habtom giving his presentation

Another good day at the conference, today things seemed a little more organised, it seems that people had got used to the idea of how the event should be running – the sessions ran a little more smoothly (timings and room bookings etc)

Again there was a really wide variety of topics being presented – but I stuck to going to the more techie ones. First session I attended was about OpenStreetMap (OSM) in Ethiopia. Addis is now quite well mapped out, a company (AddisMap) has been putting a lot of effort into getting the city well mapped on OSM and I think they are hoping to make some money from advertising on their site. They’ve been lending GPS units to taxi drivers to help collect all the data. They also wanted to be able to produce (and sell) printed maps, but are being limited as they can’t yet get a license from the Ethiopian Mapping Agency to print maps any larger than A4.

Early in the afternoon I ran a session on Open Educational Resources – I did a demo of how to download some resources from the internet and get them uploaded onto a local Moodle server – fortunately the internet was working well enough for this as I didn’t have much of a backup plan.

Habtom from Mekelle Uni ICT gave a presentation about localisation and globalisation, discussing how localisation was more than just about having software translated into another language. I found the other day that Moodle has been translated into Amharic and Tigrinya, it’s only for Moodle 2 and there are several sections not yet fully translated – but hopefully more progress will be made soon.

The final session I attended was a live video presentation from Michele Suhlmann, a phd student at University of Groningen – so fairly ambitious to run a presentation in this way I thought, but it worked well. She was talking about the research she has been doing on the social and psychological effects of personal laptop schemes. Interestingly her data was based on interviews with the children at the school in Mekelle where they are running the One Laptop per Child project.

In the evening there was a final party and a local band providing the entertainment. The team from ECBP must be really pleased how well the whole event worked out, the variety of sessions and the enthusiasm of everyone who attended. Hope there’ll be another one next year – or even sooner