Bale Mountains and Sof Omar Caves

Alex March 11th, 2010

At the cave entrance

The other weekend, I had a great trip down to the Bale mountains. Fortunately we were able to borrow car (4×4) for a few days from a friends work in Addis. Bale is known for it’s trekking and horseriding, but fortunately, given that it rained almost the entire time, we hadn’t planned to do either of these activities and spent most of the time driving – our shortest days drive being about 7 hours.

The roads to and around Bale were far worse that we had expected- mainly because most them are in the process of being asphalted, so the ‘road’ that you can use is actually a track next to where the road is going to be. At one point it took us over 3 hours to do less than 100km.

Basing ourselves in Robe, we had a day up to the Sanetti Plateau (over 4000m high) to watch Ethiopian Wolves and then on to the Harenna Forest. The landscape is completely the opposite to that around Tigray – with real forest and greenery- as a result of all the rain. The next day we headed another 120km east to the Sof Omar caves. These were fantastic (see photos below), fortunately we picked up a guy from the local village who happened to be a history teacher at the local high school, so he was able to translate what the guide was telling us. Due to the rain we couldn’t get as far in to the caves as we would have liked – since crossing the river inside the cave would have been too dangerous. The teacher also had a map of the cave system (below) – 17km long – if anyone is interested I have higher quality copies of the images than I’ve uploaded below. Fortunately I’d remembered to take along my little tripod so was able to get some reasonable photos once we were inside the caves.

The next night was spent at the Dinsho lodge which the guide book describes as being like an abandoned ski lodge. It was a little tricky to find, the road builders had removed the signpost so we ended up taking someone from town to show us where to go, on arrival all was dark and locked up (living up to the guides book’s description) , so we went back into town to track down the warden.

The next morning the warden too us out for a walk to watch see Nyala (photos below again!), then back in the car for a drive to Shashemene (home of Rastafarianism apparently) for lunch and up to Lake Langano for an overnight stay by the lake, and few drinks and a swim – my camera battery had long since died by this point.

The highlight for me was certainly getting to the caves, it would have been difficult to get there without our own transport and now that I’ve seen a small part of the Bale national park, I’d certainly like to go back during a drier period for a trekking holiday.

Wolf on Sanetti Plateau

View from top of Sanetti Plateau

Harenna Forest (and a short stretch of flat road)

Inside the cave

Inside the cave

Cave system map (page 1)

Cave system map (page 2)

Nyala in the morning

Nyala in daylight

Ethiopian Christmas

Alex January 11th, 2010

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.

Approaches to eLearning in Ethiopia

Alex December 14th, 2009

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.

25 years on

Alex October 24th, 2009

As I’m sure many of you will be aware, it is 25 years since the reports of famine in Ethiopia appeared on the BBC. But a quarter of a century later (and who knows how many millions in aid) there are new reports about potential famine in these same areas affected all those years ago. The BBC has recently broadcast from Mekelle about the situation (here and here), and Oxfam are again raising money to try to prevent famine occurring again across east Africa. There’s also a report on the Guardian website about the impact of the images sent back from Ethiopia 25 years ago.

From my point of view, working at the Uni in a well-off regional capital, I see little or no sign of the food shortages which are being reported back in the UK. I’m certainly not saying that problems don’t exist, I know that I’m in a privileged position, given my location, job and income – but for me, it’s hard to know how bad the situation is, or is becoming. It’s also likely to be affecting more remote rural areas far worse than where I’m based. There are no reports in the local media about the situation (in either the local language or English language newspapers), so my main sources of information about the problems are from outside Ethiopia, usually BBC & UK newspaper websites or from those I know who work with medical organisations/NGOs and spend more time out in the rural areas. As far as I’m aware the situation at the moment is certainly just about potential famine, and the number of people needing extra food aid (on top of the food aid normally given out) is 6.2 million – which is actually the same as last year.

Since coming to Ethiopia last year, I’ve always been wary about bringing up the subject of the 1984/85 famine. Most people I meet or work with are under 30 and so either weren’t born or were extremely young at the time. Also, those Ethiopians who have been abroad say that all anybody else in the world seems to know about Ethiopia is famine and long distance running and I don’t want to perpetuate the feeling that that’s all anyone knows or cares about Ethiopia.

Yesterday, Martin and I met up with Mike Wooldridge, the BBC journalist who has been sending back the recent reports, but was also one of the reporters here in Ethiopia reporting on the 1984/85 famine. He’s an ex VSO volunteer and his daughter was a VSO volunteer at the Teacher Training College here in Mekelle a few years ago. It was really interesting getting the chance to meet Mike, finding out about the changes that have taken place in Mekelle and Ethiopia generally over the last 25 years and also being able to show him around the University to demonstrate the work that VSO is currently doing.

High Speed Internet – coming soon?

Alex September 16th, 2009

Although there seems to be plenty of talk on the new broadband internet connection for East Africa, for me it only means that Ethiopia will get yet further behind it’s neighbours. Being an undersea cable, it’s natural that coastal countries would be first to benefit, but there has been little (no?) mention of Ethiopia being connected, despite other landlocked countries (Uganda, Rwanda etc) being talked about. The BBC article talks about the expense and slow speed of internet access in Kenya, but if those connection speeds were available at those prices in Ethiopia – that would represent a huge step forward. The new faster connections are a great for some countries, but remember there is still a long way to go in improving internet access across the region.

Lalibela

Alex September 16th, 2009

IMG_0517Last weekend I had a fantastic trip down to Lalibela (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lalibela). It’s one of the main tourist attractions in Ethiopia and, in my opinion, was far more worthwhile visiting than Axum. Although a small city, it feels like a small village, with very few large concrete building common elsewhere. I guess this has a lot to do with it’s UNESCO World Heritage site status – only slight ruined by the huge covers that have been erected over some of the churches to stop them decaying further – I’m sure there are ways this could have been done to fit in better with the local surroundings.

If was only a flying visit for us, 6 of us drove down via Samre and Sekota, this is the cross country short cut, around 300km on unpaved roads against over 500km if you go the paved route. In the entire 7 hour journey we only saw one other vehicle on the road.

On Saturday morning we visited, with our excellent guide, the amazing 11 rock churches in the two main church complexes in the centre of Lalibela. Around 800 or 900 years old, the churches have been carved down into the rock, some consisting of only one solid piece of rock:

IMG_0505

IMG_0521

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The priests here seemed much amiable to tourists, especially compared to some priests at the rock churches around Tigray and Mekelle.

In the afternoon, we took a trip on mules up to another church, Asheton Mariam, around 7km from town. Unfortunately they’d doubled the entrance fee a couple of days before (for the Ethiopian New Year), and we were all a little reluctant to pay 100 birr (approx 10USD) to get in, so actually we didn’t go inside. It may seem a little odd not spending this money but it soon mounts up when you’re visiting many churches, plus all of us had residence IDs, but no discount for that.

IMG_0665Then on Sunday we drove back – stopping off at Yemrehanna Kristos – around 45 km form Lalibela. It’s a church and palace built inside the mouth of a cave, further back in the cave are 1000’s of skeletons of pilgrims who came to the church to die and be buried – over the course of the last several hundred years. A little gruesome, with all the skeletons are just piled up at the back, only one or two having coffins.

The traffic was rather heavy on the trip home, must have been at least 10 other vehicles on the road. It gave me chance to really try out my GPS, so now I have the entire route from Mekelle to Lalibela to upload to OpenStreetMap, plus many villages and towns on the way – few of which we found the name for.

It was a great trip and I’d recommend anyone to go and visit. Being more of a tourist town than Other places, it is more expensive to eat, drink, sleep, but certainly worth the extra money ;-)

Can cloud computing work in Ethiopia?

Alex July 16th, 2009

With all the recent talk about Google Chrome OS and Microsoft office on the web, putting cloud computing back in the technology headlines, I recently read a less well publicised Microsoft story in the Seattle Times:

As U.S. companies begin exploring cloud computing this year, a school system on the other side of the globe has already leapt into the cloud. Ethiopia is rolling out 250,000 laptops to schoolteachers all over the country, all running on Microsoft’s platform called Azure.

The project, as described in the article, seems to overlook 2 huge issues, as do most of the people who have left comments on the article.

Firstly, the internet infrastructure in Ethiopia is just not robust, widespread or reliable enough for teachers to just connect up their shiny new laptops to some data centre in the US. Take for example Abi Adi, a town of around 20000 people, about 3 hours drive from where I’ve been working in Mekelle. A colleague, working in the teacher training college there, tried to get a couple of new phone lines installed to give extra (dial-up) internet access, but was told that all the lines for the town had already been allocated and no more would be available until new lines were installed, but no immediate plans were in place to increase the number of lines available.

And many Ethiopian towns and villages are far less well connected than Abi Adi.

There are obviously other options to delivering internet access through copper or fibre networks, such as through VSAT or the mobile phone network. But again to get these installed, or made reliable for the proposed project, would be a massive (and costly) undertaking in it’s own right.

Secondly, there’s no mention of the training and support that would be need to be given to teachers. The support infrastructure would need to be huge, who is going to fix the machines when they (almost inevitably) get a virus, or overheat after being choked with dust?

My experience of the One Laptop Per Child project shows that the training and support given to teachers and students is absolutely crucial to the success of the project – in much the same way it will be to this new project.

So, do I think cloud computing could work for Ethiopian teachers? Certainly not currently.

It’s not that I don’t like the idea of what they’re trying to do here, but just very wary that it’s yet another white elephant project which sounds good and gets them in the headlines. The money could be far better spent working with ETC (Ethiopia’s sole telecoms company) to improve the general internet infrastructure, and training teachers to work better with the technology already available to them. Only then might Ethiopia be able to take advantage of the possibilities afforded by cloud computing.

Fourth Plinth

Alex July 13th, 2009

img_0205Have had quite a busy last couple of weeks, hence the lack of postings, so time for bit of a catch up…

Firstly a weekend up in London and heading over to the Kingsnorth protest for the day on the Saturday, though all very peaceful & sedate compared to some of the other protests there. (photos).

Then one of my friends who I met in Ethiopia managed to get herself onto the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square last Thursday lunchtime to protest against female genital mutilation. She’d only got on at short notice, so a few of use who’d been in Ethiopia together helped out painting t shirts and buying essential equipment (fake blood, string etc). I got plenty of photos, but Julia also managed to get a mention in the slightly more widely read publications of the Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday.

Finally, I’ve also had several meetings so start off a new elearning project at Mekelle University. The Spanish government (with University of Alcala, Madrid and Lund University, Sweden) are funding a pilot project building 2 new computer labs for the health science and engineering departments. I’ve been asked to manage some of the technical aspects of the project. Rather than building 2 new labs with Windows PCs, servers etc, we’ll be testing out using Sun Ray terminals instead. This should allow the IT dept to make better use of their existing servers, ad reduce the amount of time spent rebuilding and fixing virus-ridden Windows machines. But, there’s a lot to be done and organise if we’re to be ready for the start of the next semester in October.

Still no firm return date for me going back to Mekelle, but fingers crossed it will be soon!

Ethiopia photo album

Alex June 10th, 2009

I’ve put up a selection of the photos I’ve taken so far in Ethiopia – in case you have a spare 5 (or so!) minutes. I’ve not yet had chance to get them all labelled up, but will do when I get the time.

Second (or third?) thoughts

Alex March 14th, 2009

I keep changing my mind as to how appropriate it is to be trying to run an elearning project here in Ethiopia.

On the one hand, I’m running training sessions for staff in how to set up their courses in Moodle, but then very few of the students have access to computers so staff are understandably reluctant to spend time setting up a course that almost no-one can access. To give you some idea of the limited availability I’m talking about, on the Business Campus we have around 3000 students and 6 computing labs. 2 of these labs are open for postgraduate students only (comprising approx 100 students) and 3 of the labs are only for Computer Science students (approx 300 students). This leaves the final ‘DIF’ lab – this is the lab funded by the elearning project I’m working on – and has approx 20 networked PCs, but due to lack of maintenance and supervisory staff it’s not open to students. This leaves a handful of PCs in the library to be used by 2600 students, approx 1 open access PC per 500 students. Even if I manage to get our DIF lab openly available to students, this only increases availability to approx 1 PC per 100 students. Not an ideal situation to be in when trying to promote the creation of online quizzes & discussion forums!

On the other hand, even small steps forward may be useful. Just getting teachers and students used to the idea of online and blended learning and how they may create or participate in online collaborative activities is a good thing in itself. They may currently only have limited computer access, but this situation is bound to improve, or at least I hope it’s bound to improve! Receiving training and having some experience of participating in and creating online courses now may help prepare teachers and students for the future.

At the moment, I’m on the pessimistic whats-the-point side of the fence, but I am writing this on a Friday afternoon and may well have changed my mind again by Monday morning! Also by Monday morning we may have received the timetable for the new semester. The new semester starts on Monday, it’s now Friday just after lunch and no-one (teachers or students) have any idea of their lesson timetable!

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