Alex Little

Interesting links I’ve found in the last month or so (in no specific order or grouping)…

• xkcd – Sustainable
• Inveneo Buyers Guide to Sustainable ICT Infrastructure in Low Resource Settings
• Offline Moodle Docs package and a Facebook-style theme for Moodle
• jqMobi: JQuery for mobile apps
• 14 Lucrative ICT Skills for African Software Developers and Designers in 2012 | ICTWorks
• Switch to Open Street Map
• Ethiopian Telecoms shortcuts
• Society for Learning Analytics Research and Learning Anaytics 2012 online course

You can see all my bookmarks at: http://bookmark.alexlittle.net/

Like last year, thought I’d post up the books I’ve read this year – those I would recommend are in bold:

• Surveillance: A Novel – Jonathan Raban
• Strange Places, Questionable People – John Simpson
• Alone in Berlin – Hans Fallada
• Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
• The Woman and the Ape – Peter Hoeg
• The CEO of the Sofa – PJ O’Rourke
• The Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson
• The Snowman – Jo Nesbo
• Collapse – Jared Diamond
• ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever
• Spook Country – William Gibson
• The Black Swan – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Hangover Square – Patrick Hamilton
• How To Be Free – Tom Hodgkinson
• Dead Aid – Dambisa Moyo
• Slaughter House Five – Kurt Vonnegut
• Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them) – Al Franken
• The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind – William Kamkwamba
• The Maths Gene – Keith Devlin
• The Girl Who Played with Fire – Stieg Larsson
• Imperium – Robert Harris
• Witch Hunt – Ian Rankin
• Shantaram – Gregory David Roberts
• The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest – Stieg Larsson
• The Falls – Ian Rankin
• The Bottom Billion – Paul Collier
• Mister Roberts – Alexei Sayle
• Hot, Flat, and Crowded – Thomas L. Friedman
• In the Land of Invented Languages – Arika Okrent

For info – all the links go through to my Amazon Associates account.

Recently GearZap sent me a laptop case to review. Usually I just throw my laptop into my bag without really thinking too much – possibly why my previous laptop broke

I don’t really want a full rucsac or briefcase type laptop bag, so the Pat Says Now bag is just right for what I need – a lightweight neoprene bag to keep my new laptop from getting knocked around too much which I can put in my normal rucsac. I’m travel quite a lot for work, so having an extra case will help keep the dust out too. Seems sturdy enough so far, but then I’ve only been using it for a few days – it’ll get a proper test when I go back to Ethiopia next week.

For info here are the other laptop cases available from GearZap: laptop cases and 13″ laptop cases.

Last weekend I arrived back in Mekelle after our training week in Addis. Only a few differences to note since I’ve been back, the new road (I’ve been watching League of Gentlemen again) still isn’t finished, a couple of new restaurants have opened and a few have closed. The price capping that was introduced a couple of months ago has affected the availability of some goods quite a lot. For example in one restaurant, because bottled soft drinks are price capped, they now only sell canned soft drinks. St Georges and Dashen beers are capped, but Castell isn’t, so some places now only sell Castell as they can charge what they like for it.

The thin client computer labs are returning to being open. The lab for Technology Institute has been closed since the break in a few weeks ago and has only just this week been passed back to Technology from Security. Some new lab attendants have started this week, so the labs should be running again properly next week. We also hope to get a second lab open and running before the end of next week, but just need to keep our fingers crossed that the switches needed will arrive in the next few days.

The internet connection, both the fiber access at the uni and the CDMA, have been very slow. Generally they are on, but almost so slow as to be unusable. Many people seem to think the change in management of Ethiopia Telecom means staff are uncertain about their jobs so the network isn’t well maintained. An alternative explanation is that they’ve sold too many CDMA sim cards and increased the bandwidth they claim to deliver far above the actual capacity of the network. Either way, it’s disappointing that the connections are now worse than they were less than a year ago.

During my week in Addis I met several people form IT companies who are interested in providing thin client support services, so it’s interesting to see the types of projects they’ve been working on and that cheaper, more reliable computing infrastructure is now becoming more widespread. There is also talk of some thin client devices being assembled here in Ethiopia – actually the device I’ve seen would run either standalone or as a thin client. This would make the thin clients more mainstream, much cheaper and as they could be paid for in local currency, buyers would be supporting the local economy.

This week we continue our elearning training at Mekelle University, we have the final workshops for two training programme we started in October and hope to start a new advanced group. Hoping that everyone is as active and engaged as the participants were in Addis last week.

In the last couple of days I’ve received couple of emails about web/IT jobs which may be of interest to people reading this blog, one voluntary and one paid…

Firstly, a voluntary short term IT job (sys/network admin & web development) in Tanzania with Mpingo Conservation & Development Initiative. I’ve not got a weblink for the full job info, but can email on to you if interested.

Secondly, (paid) web developer job with Aptivate – international IT development company who I did some work with last summer in Cambridge, see Aptivate website for full details.

Seems to be the time of year when everyone puts retrospectives of last year on their blogs, so here’s my contribution… a list of all the books I read last year:

• The Steep Approach to Garbadale – Iain Banks
• The Closed Circle – Jonathan Coe
• Shadow of the Sun – Ryszard Kapuscinski
• Diary – Chuck Palahnuik
• The English – Jeremy Paxman
• A case of 2 cities- Qiu Xiaolong
• The Tesseract – Alex Garland
• The Dwarves of Death – Jonathon Coe
• The Dog Catcher – Alexei Sayle
• Critical Mass – Philip Ball
• Armageddon in Retrospect – Kurt Vonnegut
• Fermats Last Theorem – Simon Singh
• White Tiger – Aravind Adiga
• The Pig that Wants to be Eaten – Julian Baggini
• The Russian Debutantes Handbook – Gary Shteyngart
• A Mad World, My Masters – John Simpson
• Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell
• The Emperor – Ryszard Kapuscinski
• The Greatest Show on Earth – Richard Dawkins
• No 1 Ladies Detective Agency – Alexander Mccall Smith
• Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
• Ministry of Fear – Graeme Green
• The Shackled Continent – Robert Guest
• New Rulers of the World – John Pilger
• Doors Open – Ian Rankin
• Freedom for Sale – John Kampfner
• QI Book of the Dead

Out of these there are a few I would certainly recommend:
(non-fiction) Shadow of the Sun, Critical Mass, New Rulers of the World
(fiction) The Dwarves of Death, The Dog Catcher (although Barcelona Plates was better), The Steep Approach to Garbadale

Given that I now have a bit of a commute to work, I’m likely to be reading a fair bit more this year, the last 7 books on the list were all read in the last 6 weeks, see my GoodReads page for what’s going to be on next years list.

A couple of nights ago there was an electrical storm just on the other side of the city. Well, we assumed it was an electrical storm, it went on for over an hour with flashes of light every 10-15 seconds, but it also happened to be behind the university, right above the Northern Command military headquarters and airstrip.

I saw this poster on the campus where the Bar Camp is being held. I’ve not yet worked out whether basketball is considered risky or socially useful…

Have been hearing a few critical comments from some staff regarding the Certificate in Online Education and it’s content. Apparently some staff feel that learning about some of the techniques that we have been showing them is beneath them, or they already know how to perform these functions (for example use of graphics editing software). In my mind it’s just another excuse not to participate in the training. It also shows that they aren’t coming to the training with an open mind and consider that elearning is simply a technical issue, rather than a way of truly improving the quality of their course content and activities. I’m quite sure that some staff are capable of using some of the software, but in order to give them a certificate they need to prove is to us by actually demonstrating their skills with the courses they deliver to students.

Unfortunately, it still seems far too common here for staff to receive a lot of training, but never follow the training up by implementing what they have learned.

There are a wide variety of other reasons (excuses) I’ve heard as to why staff haven’t participated in the training, but there are few I believe as anything other than excuses.

More positively, except for the England v USA result, I’ve now found a few good places to watch the world cup matches. Apparently some students here have requested alterations to their exam timetables so they are able to watch all the games. I don’t think they received a particularly sympathetic response!

Otherwise, another busy week, spending much of the time with the new Institute of Technology (officially the Tigray Institute of Technology, but this results in an unfortunate acronym!), working on an action plan for the implementation of elearning into the new institute. They certainly seem to have more commitment than we received from the rest of the university over the past year. But hope that the Institute will be able to set a good example of how changes can be made in the rest of the university.

A team of staff (Joern, Selamawit, Haileleul and Oliver) from ECBP on.e arrived yesterday to begin working with the Institute and the new elearning team here. We’re planning how we can integrate our two separate training programmes for staff (elearning team and the tutors) and assisting with planning the technical/ICT infrastructure required.

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