Alex Little

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.

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.

After the previous two long weekends for Christmas and New Year, we now have a third for Orthodox Christmas. Officially only Thursday 7th was a public holiday, but many people have taken Friday as holiday too. My second Christmas in less than two weeks was a fairly quiet affair, visiting my colleague Samrawit and her family for lunch, drinks and cake.

For the last month the main road near our house going down into the city centre has been in a state of turmoil. At the beginning of December it was a reasonably well maintained tarmacked road, then, one night, the diggers moved in. Day by day more and more tarmac, earth and rocks have been moved, bulldozered and steamrollered. The road is the process of becoming what appears to be a 6-lane motorway and probably explains the demolition of the roadside houses and shops last year. I’ve been reliably informed that the reason for the roadworks is the 35th anniversary of the TPLF (Tigray People’s Liberation Front) sometime in February. The TPLF headquarters are at the end of our road and the road-widening is to allow for the planned parade/show. Rumours are that the Ethiopian prime minister is going to be attending.

With the road closed, all traffic, from cars, taxis and bajajs up to buses and articulated trucks have been diverted down the narrow, dusty side roads. It has also meant that our university service bus stop has moved and what used to be a regular easy-to-find service has now turned into a daily game of bus stop hide-and-seek. The bus may or may not stop at the same place it did yesterday or the day before that. Additionally, even if it did stop in the same place two days running, it may stop at completely different times. Not even my Ethiopian colleagues really seem to know where and when the bus will stop.

Happy New Year! (Although in the Ethiopian calendar it’s still 2002, 2010 won’t be reached until Sept 2017)

We celebrated with meal out with some friends from work, letting some fireworks off in the street a little early as our friends children were getting tired and needed to go to bed. We were little concerned to start with about letting fireworks off in the street, we were quite near the military communications facility, plus all week there’s been the Ethio-Sudan Joint Border Commission Conference, so there’s been a high police and security presence in town with all the visiting ministers and Sudanese Ambassador. We didn’t think that some loud explosions late at night in the centre of town would go down very well, but we had been reassured that all would be fine and fortunately it was.

After the fireworks, we celebrated midnight at a local bar with a flaming sambuka and despite Thashika’s best efforts at burning the place down after dropping hers on the floor, we had a fun night. Not a single attempt at singing Auld Lang Syne was made.

One the way home, with the blue moon I got a few decent photos of our house and street just lit by moonlight. But the photos look a lot brighter on my camera screen than they do on my laptop screen… see how this looks on your screen:

If anyone feel like a challenge, work out when the next blue moon will be in the Ethiopian calendar. The Ethiopian calendar starts on 12 Sept with 12 months of exactly 30 days each, then a month of 5 or 6 days depending on whether it’s a leap year or not. Post your answers below.

A belated Happy Christmas to everyone!

Despite being quite a long way from the cold snowy weather in the UK, we still managed a reasonable attempt at a (vaguely) traditional Christmas. This year we invited people over to our house for dinner, drinks and games. A few volunteers from nearby (well, Mike had a 2 day bus trip to reach us) towns and other friends and colleagues from Mekelle joined us. Everyone contributed to the food and drink, Mike (a different one) made some great roast beef and Daan and Anita brought roast potatoes and lots more, then we had meat and veggie chillis plus veggie curry. Our drink of choice was mulled wine – it’s one of the only ways to make the local wine drinkable, and dessert was a selection of cake, panna cotta, jelly and angel delight.

After a bloated afternoon we were ready to play a few games in the evening. Pass the parcel was first, though no-one seemed too keen on the forfeits we’d put in between some of layers. Then we played the chocolate game (the one where you roll a die, if you get a 6 you put on hat, gloves and scarf then eat as much chocolate with knife and fork as you can before someone else rolls a 6), our improvised die may have accounted for the high number of sixes that came up.

So in true Christmas fashion, two days later we’re still working our way through the leftover food and drink.

roast beef and potatoes

Mike, Martin and Mike

Marcel

We’re still having a few problems with the server over at Ayder (Health Sciences) Campus. It’s made more problematic by the fact that the contractors digging up one of the nearby roads cut through the fiber cable linking Ayder to the main campus. So not only is there no internet at Ayder, there is no network connection to the Moodle server to allow staff there to be uploading their courses and activities.

On Friday and Monday I spent several hours (about 7 or 8 in total) on Skype to Eduardo in Barcelona who is helping us to get the server fixed. Things are made a little easier by the fact we have 2 identical servers, alpha and bravo. Alpha is (generally) running fine at Arid campus and bravo is the broken server at Ayder, so the plan was to make a copy of alpha onto one of the spare disks, modify it slightly (name, IP address etc) then use this to fix bravo.

The clone had already been made – to one of the 4 physical disks in the machine. All I needed to to do was switch the disks around to test the clone, then take the cloned disk to Ayder. Unfortunately we couldn’t get the cloned disk to work and on Friday it took Eduardo and I a little while to figure out what the problem was. It turned out that the way the disks were numbered on the server label:

didn’t actually match how the were referred to by the operating system, so rather then switching the disk in positions 0 and 2, we should have been doing 0 and 1.

Finally we got this issue resolved and the disk ready to take to Ayder, plus a few other backup options that Eduardo had come up with in case this disk didn’t solve the problem.

On Monday, I took the disk over to Ayder, got on Skype, and spent a few hours messaging Eduardo (and a little later Mike) and we managed to get the server booting up correctly. In the end we managed to fix the problem without needing to use the disk we’d had the confusion over on Friday.

But unfortunately all is not quite finished. The terminals at Ayder aren’t yet connecting to the properly. So next job is to get that resolved.

All of which means that we still haven’t been able to get the lab open for students to use, but hoping to be open properly in the next week or so. Still much more work to be done, so will keep us all busy for the coming weeks I’m sure.

Despite the fact I’ve been really busy recently and have got a lot of work done, it still only feels like 5 minutes since I arrived in Ethiopia, yet I only have around 3 months left on my contract. The fact that I’ll be leaving soon was made more pronounced by my attendance at the VSO Leavers Workshop in Addis earlier this week. I’ve just over 3 months to go until my end of service, but I’m sure this time will fly past, so I need to start making preparations for what I do once I come back, jobs, house & catching up with everyone.

Out of around 12 people on the workshop I’d seen most people before, but only knew a couple by name, so felt very strange that I’d been here for over a year now and I still don’t know all the volunteers. The distance and remoteness of some placements, plus the fact I rarely visit Addis probably explains this.

Now that people at work realise I’m leaving, suddenly I’m told, “you can’t leave, we need you to do X, Y or Z”, despite that fact they could have asked me to do X, Y or Z at any point over the last 15 months rather than wait until now! I’m still unsure how sustainable my work here has been, as I’m here all the time it’s very easy for people to not take responsibility to do things for themselves. I still find that I spend much of my time chasing people to do simple tasks.

Anyway, best get back to X, Y or Z…

Last week, Oliver and Haileleul from the Engineering Capacity Building Program (ECBP) in Addis came to visit our elearning project in Mekelle. They are working for the elearning development program for ECBP, setting up eCompetence Centres at other universities in Ethiopia and are looking to develop a similar program in Mekelle without duplicating the Digital Campus project work.

All seemed to go very well and we’re currently in the process of writing a proposal for the training of more staff to become elearning experts, to be presented to the University management in the very near future.

Their most successful program so far seems to be at Adama University, where the Engineering College has been turned into an independent Institute of Technology. The (German) director and senior management have really focused on improving student computer access, by setting up 600 terminals open 24/7.

The ECBP approach taken to develop elearning course content/materials is slightly different to our approach with Digital Campus. We are training teachers to set up and upload their own courses and teaching materials, with the support from pedagogical department, whereas the eCompetence Centres allow teachers to take their materials to the centre. The centre staff then do much of the content development and uploading for the teacher. There is good reason for this difference, the ECBP approach has a stronger focus on multimedia content, whereas we’re looking at much more basic content uploading and activity creation. Expecting all staff to have the facilities, skills and time to produce multimedia content is simply unrealistic.

There are pros and cons of each approach. Sending your content off to a centre for transformation into online activities can increase the technological complexity of the activities or content developed (e.g. multimedia or flash animations), increase quality (questionably) and consistency between courses. Also it is easier to set deadlines for course production. However I have concerns that staff then have no sense of ownership of the online materials related to their course, for example, that regular updates are made and that staff participate in and monitor forum discussions. It may mean staff then don’t consider it to be part of their jobs to be involved with the online aspect. I have to ad that the ECBP approach does have the teachers working with the elearning team – it’s not a case of the teachers dropping off the materials and walking away from any further involvement.

Training teacher to produce their own online content and activities means that you can have a smaller team supporting the elearning development, providing advice and training but not the ‘doing’ and this woul dhelp to reduce the direct cost to the university. We hope it would also motivate the teachers to encourage their students to use the materials and activities if the teachers have gone to the effort of creating them. The danger is that teachers won’t have the time or skills, or it will be considered to be more work force upon them by management. Maintaining a baseline level of quality and consistency between courses may be difficult.

So, which do you think is the better approach? Or should there be a mixture between the two?

I hope that I’ll get the opportunity to visit Adama university early in the new year, with some staff from Mekelle, as I believe there will be a lot we can learn from their experiences. I think that the success of their program may be mainly due to the efforts put into providing 24/7 open access computer labs to students, something that’s yet to be achieved on anything but a very small scale at Mekelle.

Ethiopian Telecoms Company (ETC) started to provide a pre-paid mobile internet service several months ago, though as I (usually) have a good connection at work, I’ve never really considered purchasing a dongle and setting up an account for myself. However, my housemate Martin, with not having a computer, let alone internet connection through work, recently set himself up with CDMA.

The dongle comes with a driver/installation CD for Windows, so this morning I thought I’d have a go getting it set up on my laptop running Ubuntu 9.04. Getting it all set up proved to be much more straightforward than I had anticipated. Here’s what I needed to do:

1. Install wvdial (I have Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook remix, so if you have the normal desktop version this step may not be necessary): sudo apt-get install wvdial

2. Plug the CDMA dongle into a USB port

3. At the terminal enter: sudo wvdialconf

4. Then enter: sudo gedit /etc/wvdial.conf

5. In the text editor change the block that reads:

; Phone =
; Password =
; Username =

to be:

Phone = #777
Password = etc
Username = etc

Then save and close the editor. Note that the username and password should be in lower case.

6. At the terminal enter: sudo wvdial

7. Without closing the terminal open the browser and you should be connected.

Now that it’s working I have the opportunity to spend huge amounts of money using the internet whilst at home. I’m not sure of the exact tariff, but given our usage so far it seems to be around 0.5 birr per minute (approx 2p).