Alex Little

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!

After a very uneventful journey home, I’m now back in the cold and wet of the UK – although it is quite good to be back really. Haven’t been up to much since I returned, just getting everything unpacked and starting to get in touch with everyone again.

I have posted up the edited highlights of my photos from the past few months (since I returned in August). These are all just the photos from trips away and evenings out, I’m working on putting another album together to show the work that we’ve done in setting up the new computer labs and training sessions.

Have already started to spend far too much money – ordered 2 new computers (laptop and desktop).
Hope to catch up with you all again soon

Today is my last day in work at Mekelle. Feels very strange to be leaving after such a long time, but think I’m ready to go back – for a break at least. Still no running water at home, though I got a shower at a friends house last night. So there are a few things here I won’t miss!

I’ve been really pleased with the progress we’ve managed to make in developing elearning at Mekelle, especially over the last months, though I’m sure I could easily spend another 10 years here and still not get everything done that I’d like. Now I just have a few days in Mekelle getting packed up before flying to Addis for another few more days and back to UK next weekend. My next blog entry will probably be once I’m back in the UK, after I’ve had a bit of time to settle in again. Will be in touch with as many people as possible once I’m back and looking forward to seeing everyone again

Tutors from Health Sciences and Engineering Colleges

Last week we had our second full weeks training course with our elearning tutors. Jaime came over from Alcala University to deliver most of the training and I was there to help out with more of the technical aspects and generally lend a hand.

It was a completely different week to the previous training week we had back in November. Then it was the start of the training so it was much more hectic and we had more participants – who seemed to flit between attending or not – so it was difficult to manage with everyone working at different paces. In November we gave people plenty of time for practical work as well as giving presentations – but at the end of the week, some people thought there was too much time to work on their own. I suspect that many of these were the people who were more interested in getting the certificate to say they’ve done the training than actually implementing anything.

This week we had a core group of about 12 tutors who attended the whole week, which was almost entirely practical sessions – just a few presentations. Jaime had much of the previous week meeting with the tutors for individual tutorials and catch up, which worked out to be time well spent. The outcome was a very productive week and we now have many courses (around 15) almost fully uploaded on our Moodle server (see: http://www.mu.edu.et/elearning) – many of the courses allow guest access if you would like to take a look. Next challenge is to make sure the student accounts have been created and that they have received some form of induction to the lab.

Unfortunately we still have some unresolved technical issues in the labs which has been making things a little tricky to manage. None of the issues by themselves are show-stoppers, but all the little issues add up and we’ve already experienced the fact that we’re not always told when there are issues – instead people just don’t use the lab. So we need to make sure there are plenty of ways in which staff and students can communicate when they are having difficulties.

Enjoying a meal at Axum hotel

At the end of the week we had a nice meal out with all the tutors at the Axum hotel. Even though it was a Friday night, most places are very quiet – it’s still fasting time in the run up to Easter and many people won’t go out to restaurants/bars if they’re not able to eat meat!

Some of our first elearning students

Today I held the first student induction session for Seyoum’s ‘Marketing Management for Industrial Engineers’ course. All seemed to go very well, we had far fewer problems with the students logging in than I was expecting – I think this was mainly due to Seyoum being able to explain in Amharic what they needed to do.

Just before Christmas I was contacted by VSO asking if they could use my blog to help recruit more IT volunteers. Little did I know that this blog would be the main focus of this campaign! You can find the homepage for the campaign at http://www.vso.org.uk/itroles.

If you’ve arrived here from the VSO website, then I hope you find my blog useful and I hope the postings of my experiences here encourage you to apply to be an IT volunteer too . If you’re thinking of applying and would like to know more about my experience as VSO volunteer, please feel free to contact me, by either posting a comment below or emailing me directly at alex@alexlittle.net.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve been getting involved in a new elearning project at Mekelle Uni. We’ve got funding to build 2 new computer labs for the Health Science and Engineering faculties. I will be returning to Mekelle at the beginning of August, to assist with setting up the labs.

The pilot project, involving 10 tutors (5 from each of Health Sciences and Engineering faculties) and 200 students, will run for the coming academic year. In the next few months we’ll be setting up the labs and providing general elearning training to the tutors. In addition we’d like to offer mentoring to the tutors, giving them a broader range of experiences and advice as they develop their skills in using electronic resources in their teaching.

So… we’re looking to recruit some volunteer mentors, especially those with experience in teaching any aspect of health science or engineering. Given the low tutor numbers, we’re only looking for a time commitment of a few hours per month. So if you, or you know of someone, who would be interested then please get in touch with me.

We’d be very grateful for any assistance, if you would like more information about the project or what the mentoring involves, then just drop me a line.

I’ve been away the last couple of weeks – hence the lack of blog postings recently, so I’ll try and make up for it this week!

The new intake of volunteers arrived a couple of weeks ago, so at the end of their training we had another IT volunteers workshop. Returning to the Red Cross training centre for the first time since I arrived in Ethiopia felt a little strange, but also made me realise how long I’ve been here for now (coming up to 6 months), even though it only feels like 5 minutes!

The number of current IT volunteers outnumbered the number of new IT volunteers 9 to 3. There were 8 IT placements available in Ethiopia for the February intake, only 5 of which got filled, then only 3 new people actually arrived. So there’s plenty of opportunities available if anyone feels like taking some time out from their normal jobs!

Today I met attended a workshop with BTCV to try to decide on the future of the Volunteer Passport that I was involved with a few months ago (especially as I’m not going to be here to maintain it).

The Passport hasn’t been used that much yet – but there are several reasons for this, firstly that it’s not been promoted anywhere yet (many people in BTCV don’t know about it), secondly, it’s functionality is slightly confused and thirdly, it still need finishing off.

The original purpose of the Passport was to allow volunteers to record their skills and experience and then use this as evidence to put towards formal qualifications (NVQs etc) and act as an ePortfolio system. However since we decided to use Elgg as the basis for the system, this opened up the possibility of it becoming a social network for BTCV.

Much of our discussion today was about whether or not BTCV should be providing a social networking system for it’s volunteers (why not just use facebook?) and how it could be justified. We eventually came to the conclusion that it probably could be justified if we had some good use cases and evidence of how it would benefit current BTCV activities, but that the system as it stands would need  work on the interface design (layout, structure and terminology).

If there is anyone out there who is interested in following up this work (especially from a technical/development point of view) then please drop me a line and I’ll put you in touch with the BTCV team

Over the last few weeks I’ve found (or they’ve found me) a number of people who are going to be heading out to Ethiopia on IT VSO placements in September, plus a guy from US Peace Corps who’s already over in Gondar. This set me thinking about how we’d keep in touch/discuss things once we’re all on placement (we’ll be spread all over Ethiopia), and how we’d introduce new contacts to each other.

Using the VSO forums site didn’t really seem appropriate, as it’s only accessible to VSO volunteers, so people from other NGOs wouldn’t be able to join in. So… I’ve set up a new Google Group ‘IT Volunteers in Ethiopia’ that we can all join to keep in touch – anyone else is free to join too!

Not sure if this is the best way to achieve this, but have a discussion area like this seemed to be the most appropriate. Will also have to see if we get internet connections reliable enough to actually check for new messages!

… well, on page 7 of my local paper anyway…