Archive for the ‘Conferences & workshops’ Category.
Here is the presentation I gave at the eLearning Africa conference last week. The photos on each slide are all pictures I’ve taken over the course of the project so far, since August 2009.
Giraffes at Chaminuka Game Reserve
Another really good day at the conference, most of the presentations and discussions I attended today revolved around the use of open source software. There are some particular issues with using open source software in Africa, for example the fact that although there is huge amount of help available to support people when trying to implement software, much of the help and documentation is online only – which can make it difficult to access. In one of the presentations some of the audience were still a little sceptical about how you can get something for free – surely there is a catch?
Late in the afternoon, I gave my presentation about the Digital Campus project. All went well and I was really pleased with the response and how many people had questions about the project. I finally met more people from Ethiopia, the Head of ICT from Jimma University and the Curriculum Expert and Pedagogical Editor from the Ethiopia Civil Service College in Addis. I’ve also been approached about setting up some study/tutor partnerships with universities in UK and Canada, so the tutors and students in Mekelle can pair up with tutors and students abroad to share teaching and learning experiences.
Overall the conference has been well worth attending, it’s the first conference I’ve been to for a long time and differs somewhat from the much more technical and programming focussed conferences and workshops I used to attend whilst at the OU. Now need to make sure I get another presentation accepted for the eLearning Africa 2011 in Tanzania.
Saturday was a day free for me, so after being at the conference much of the week, I headed out to a game reserve (Chaminuka) about 30km from Lusaka and had a relaxing day there, by coincidence I met several other people there who had also attended the conference – but we managed to avoid talking too much work.
Dancers at the opening plenary
Brief run down of the sessions I’ve been to today…
Opening plenary
Conference was officially opened by the Vice President of Zambia and other opening speeches, including the Anglican Bishop of Gambia talking about the use of Facebook and Twitter – not something I was expecting.
Implementing and Sharing Open Source Repositories
With all the JISC conferences and meetings I’ve been to over the previous few years, I thought (hoped) I’d heard the last
about learning object repositories and metadata, but apparently not. The main question for me that came out of this session was the fact that much of the talk seems to be about how institutions can push out their OER content, but little about how to encourage people to make use of the available content, or evaluating how much this content is really used.
Research Networks on ICT4D
For me this was the most interesting session of the day – possibly because it broke away from the normal series of powerpoint presentations and was more of a discussion forum. Tim Unwin (Royal Holloway Uni, London) had several interesting points to make:
On the last point Jophus Anamuah-Mensah (TESSA project, Ghana) talked about the fact that African researchers seem to have lost a lot of the collaborative culture which previously used to exist.
Improving Mobile Learning Environments
At the conference there are many presentations and sessions about mobile learning. Much talk is made of the fact that so many people in Africa have a mobile phone and that they are cheap. Unfortunately this still isn’t the case in Ethiopia, where mobile ownership appears to be noticeably lower than other African countries. Many of the projects presented make big assumptions about the type of devices that students have access to, for example, owning internet & java enabled mobiles. From my very unscientific assessment, I would put student mobile ownership at Mekelle Uni at less that 30% and these tend to be only basic/entry-level voice/SMS enabled phones (I ought to include this as part of our student surveys/questionnaires once I return to Mekelle next week).
I’ve also heard about a couple of project integrating Moodle and SMS, but both of these seem to rely on either a subscription service, or with good cooperation from the telecoms provider, something we’re unlikely to be able to make use of in Mekelle.
General Comments
Auditorium at the Mulungushi Conference Centre
After 24 hours travel (London – Addis – Harare – Lusaka), yesterday afternoon I arrived in Lusaka, Zambia for the eLearning Africa conference, where I’ll be presenting the Digital Campus project later this week. The conference starts properly tomorrow and today I attended one of the pre-conference workshops, on policies for successful elearning programmes.
My impressions so far have been very good, having Ethiopia as the only other sub-Saharan Africa country that I’ve visited, Lusaka couldn’t be more different to Addis, everything appears much more up together and organised. The roads and traffic seem far less chaotic, lined with advertisements for various mobile operators. We were even given free sim cards when we were waiting for our baggage – such a contrast to Ethiopia when getting a sim card is quite a tedious process and certainly not cheap.
The conference is huge, but show how small the world is when one of the first people I met here is a PhD student at the OU Business School. I’m going to have a tricky job of deciding which presentations to go to, as there are 10 parallel sessions. The contrast with Ethiopia is made even more pronounced talking to some of the other participants from other African countries where they seem to be much further down the road than Ethiopia in terms of elearning implementation and technologies.
Assuming the wireless stays up and running well I hope I’ll be blogging regularly. For anyone reading this who is at the conference, my presentation is on Friday afternoon (track 56A1).
Earlier this week I spent a few days working Cambridge doing some volunteer web development work for Aptivate. They are in the process of developing a new low bandwidth site for CDAC (Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities), this particular site is aimed at the victims of the Haiti earthquake and is to help ensure that aid and relief agencies are able to communicate well with local communities as they rebuild their lives. The site isn’t yet finalised, so can’t put the url up yet, but will do so once it’s ready.
As an aside, OpenLearn now has a course on “Using Voluntary work to get ahead in the job market“.
Much of the past couple of weeks have been spent making sure I’m ready to head off again to Ethiopia to work on the Digital Campus project. En route, I’m going to the eLearning Africa conference in Zambia, where I’m giving a presentation next Friday. Looking forward to getting back to Mekelle to see how everything it going there, seems like quite a lot of progress is still being made. My plan whilst I’m there is to help support the phd students and the ICT team, but also planning how the project can progress into the next academic year.
Hopefully I’ll be back blogging a bit more regularly over the coming few weeks!
Hopefully I’ll be around in Ethiopia in September later this year so I can attend ‘Barcamp Ethiopia‘.
On Friday I gave an “Introduction to OpenLearn” presentation at the Italian MoodleMoot08 in Padova. The first day started in true Italian style – about an hour late – though to be fair this was actually more due to the fact there had been a train strike in the morning which had delayed a lot of the people arriving. The transport strike also explained why my bus from the airport to Padova on Thursday had been free, I’d tried to buy a ticket from the driver but he refused my money and just indicated for me to sit down, so I spent the hours journey wondering if the ticket inspectors would get on and I’d get fined! Fortunately not, and it was explained to me later that the refusal to take money is unofficial strike action by the drivers, for fear of robbery if they are carrying cash.
I was the only English speaker at the conference, but thankfully John Hannon (English teacher from Bari )translated everything on the fly for me, for the benefit of the entirely Italian audience of about 200 teachers. I just about managed to understand some of the other presentations, with help from little translations from the people sat around me.The conference was also being webcast – so I’m hoping that the replays will appear soon. [Update 15/5/08: the replay of my presentation is now available at: http://www.videoserver01.unimore.it/p85167542/, my talk starts at about 1'08. Presentations from the other sessions are also available - all in Italian 
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My presentation seemed to go really well, I certainly had plenty of people asking me about OpenLearn and our tools (especially FlashMeeting), so I gave a few demos when I could get on a PC with an internet connection. A wireless connection wasn’t available, which meant there was virtually no-one using a laptop on the audience (so no complaints about noisy keyboards), still I managed to grab a machine with in connection so I could give a few demos of FlashMeeting (or the FM project as it’s now officially called), though it was a little tricky with no web cam and no speakers!
Roberto Pinna from the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) dept at the Università del Piemonte Orientale gave me a demo of their MeetingPoint application – it’s a web based video conferencing tool, so similar to FlashMeeting although it uses the opensource Red5 server (rather than the paid-for Flash Comms Server). The main differences (that I can see) are that MeetingPoint doesn’t record the meetings for later replay (as far as I’m aware), but it has a plugin architecture, so if there’s a tool you’d like to embed then you can do so – or (for example) replace the provided whiteboard application with something else.
Luckily I had the time to spend the rest of the weekend in Padova as it’s a really nice city – not far from Venice (but far fewer tourists), but plenty of historic monuments, and being Italy, churches. It’s home to the second oldest university in Italy (Bologna University had opened 3 or 4 years before) and where Galileo taught and his observatory it still standing. Some parts of the old university are still standing (see my pics) – the crests you can see in some of these picture are the shields from the previous directors of the university and faculties.
Other sights I got to were the Basilica di Sant’Antonio and Cappella degli Scrovegni. St Antonio relics, seem to consist of slightly more gruesome relics than I’ve seen before (usually bits of bone), including his lower jaw, tougue and larynx… hmmm…
Far less grim were the botanical gardens – “regarded as the most ancient university garden in the world”.
Spent the last couple of days at the OpenLearn conference, which was all quite interesting, although maybe not directly relevant to my day-to-day work – the things that were really relevant I should know about already!! – but interesting nonetheless. I won’t write about all the presentations I went to as there was some active blogging on all the sessions – so pointless for me to replicate all that here. The sessions I found most interesting were… John Seely Brown, Alan Cann, Erik Duval, Ray Corrigan and Tony Hirst.
One thing I did notice was that whereever Open Educational Resources (OERs) were discussed it generally referred to content – and essentially static content at that. Whenever tools were discussed they were as a surrounding/supporting activity rather than being OERs in their own right – as mentioned in the wikipedia OER article.
I’m currently at the OpenLearn conference and have helping with the live blogging effort on the Ochre website. However I’m finding this a little tricky – I’d be fine taking notes then writing up later, but my brain doesn’t work quickly enough to form sentences worth posting up as people are presenting. Think the best bet for me is to listen to the presentations then write up my overall thoughts at the end.
Think I may be making thing even harder for myself by writing to this blog and the Ochre blog at the same time…!
Spent the last few days at the Future of Web Apps conference, and, as with the previous one in February, loads of excellent presentations and lots of food for thought. Also managed to wrangle myself a place in the workshop sessions, which were well worth it. Here were the highlights for me…
Steve Souders (Yahoo) on high performance websites, excellent tips on how to improve the response time in your web app. This was all focussed on improving the speed of the front end, rather than the more usual approach of improving backend speed (with database optimisation etc) – but as he demonstrated, the gains are much more significant when applied to the front end. Steve also gave a workshop on the same subject – his presentation slides give all the info you need – rather than me repeating it all here. Steve’s team have built a plugin for FireBug, YSlow, making it easy to show how your web app scores against his 14 rules (see the presentation for details of these rules). The only one of these rules I would question, for all but the biggest of web sites/apps, is the Content Delivery Network (CDN). Out of interest, I ran YSlow against our OpenLearn site and there is definitely some scope for improvement.
Dion Almaer (Google) on Google Gears, this was broadly the same as I’d heard at the Google Developer Day and I’m still not totally convinced it will get huge take-up. The reason being that I think it’s only really relevant for a small slice of web apps – eg for salesmen-out-on-the-road apps – or maybe I’m being unfair, being able to use GoogleDocs when not online would be good. I am quite interested in the WorkerPool with thread-like JavaScript, and would be fantastic if this could be implemented in JavaScript generally. I should probably mention that I do actually like the fact I’m not always connected to the web!
Robin Christopherson (AbilityNet) – I think this is the first time I’ve been to a mainstream web development conference where there’s been a presentation highlighting how to develop for visually impaired users and I’m sure (hoping!) his demo of screen reader software (especially the reading of the image names on the Amazon tabs) was an eye-opener (excuse the pun).
Heidi Pollock (BluePulse) on the mobile web and all the associated complications and headaches due to the sheer number of different web browsers used on different phones and the screen size you can actually work with. Before her presentation I would have had no idea where to start designing an app for mobile phone, now I do, but whether I want to cope with all those headaches is another matter!
John Resig (JQuery) gave an insight on the future of JavaScript (v2). Though I have a voice in the back of my head telling me that it’s just converging with Java, for example, optionally giving variables types and being able to import packages of classes. However, ignoring my fears that this is reinventing Java, it will certainly be good to see some more ‘real-programming’ type principles applied to JavaScript. I did learn Java before JavaScript, so maybe I’m biased anyway. Another thing John mentioned and is applicable to the work I was looking at alerting user to a new MSG message with a beep, is the implementation of <video/> and <audio/> tags in HTML 5.
Joe Walker (DWR) on Comet and attempting to get over the hurdle of the fact that the web is a pull technology. This is something we had to address with MSG, being able to push new message notifications and presence state changes out to the user. We achieved this by use long running connections, only returning if some needs pushing out to the client, or after around 45 seconds. So I’ll need to look into whether comet can give us a better/different approach.
Tom Coates (Yahoo) showing FireEagle (though it’ll have a different name on release), a way of sharing your location, so relevant to me with the MSG – Google Maps integration. Essentially it provides a service that applications and devices can use to either write or read your current location. So you could have your mobile phone automatically update where you are now (using GPS) and have this fed out to Twitter. This could be a really good one for us to look at for MSG and auto updating your location rather than relying on someone remembering to go update their location. As Tom pointed out, there are loads of potential privacy issues/concerns (“Burglary 2.0″ was mentioned during the Q&A), but they seem to have done a really good job of addressing and anticipating these.
And last, but by no means least, Michael Kowolski’s (Kitsite) workshop on Interface Design for Web Apps, reminding us just how critical a good user interface is – and he wasn’t just talking about the graphical design. Everything he mentioned ought to be common-sense, obvious and in-built to web app developers/designers, but to me it highlighted just how often and easily it gets overlooked. Creating a easy-to-use and intuitive interface actually requires quite a lot of thought and planning, the fact that the user doesn’t have to learn the interface is a *good thing*.
It did make me think that Moodle has a way to go in this respect, I know that Moodle has ‘themes’, but essentially this is just changing the CSS and a few graphics, and that’s not really changing the interface. Michael is going to post the presentation up soon (here), and it’ll be a good one to look through again.
All in all, a thought provoking few days, and makes me wish I had far more time to investigate in detail all I’ve found out. The final thing I’ve learned is that I ought to get into the habit of blogging live, rather than leaving it till I get home and trying to remember all the excellent stuff I found out about! (or take better notes…)
