Alex Little

Just gave my presentation at BarCamp….

Am back in Ethiopia for the next couple of weeks – whilst writing this, I’m listening to a presentation about blogging in Ethiopia. Currently there are very few blogs running in Ethiopia (for a list of the main ones visit http://ethiopian-blog.com)

The BarCamp has been very good so far, several hundred staff, students and others from universities and other organisations across Ethiopia, although I arrived slightly late this morning – the traffic was pretty bad – but fortunately I didn’t miss too much. The sessions this year seem to be even more varied than last year, though still quite technology focussed. Quite a few staff and students have made the trip down from Mekelle Uni, so very good to see them here – especially the elearning team and lab attendants.

Have just been to presentation about localisation by Google. Tomorrow I’ll give my presentation about using mobile technologies (smartphones) to improve maternal healthcare. Hoping to get plenty of people to come along – though Google are giving another presentation at the same time, so hope they don’t lure too many people away from attending the other sessions!

As I’ve mentioned before many of the Health Extension Workers (HEWs) we’re working with have trouble using the Gregorian calendar. Much of the work we’re doing with the HEWs depends on them having a good idea of the expected date of delivery for pregnant women. To help the HEWs calculate the expected delivery date, in Ethiopian date format, for the pregnant women they are working with, we have developed a small application which gives them the expected delivery date based on the date of the last menstrual period.

With the application the HEW can enter the last menstrual period in Ethiopian date format and it will give them and the pregnant woman the expected delivery date in the date format they are used to using in their day-to-day lives.

We’ve made the application available for anyone to download and use on their Android phone – just download the app and install on your Android smartphone.

I should give a big thanks to the developers of Joda Time (a java library for working with alternative calendaring systems) which made the development of the application so much easier!

Any feedback or comments welcome. If anyone is interested in developing the application further then we’re very happy to give access to the source code – just contact me

Friday and Saturday next week (23 & 24th Sept) is the second BarCamp Ethiopia. Following the success of last years event (see my posts here and here), the event is being run again at EiABC in Addis.

More info about the BarCamp can be found on the blog and wiki pages.

I’m travelling over to got to the conference and going to give a presentation about the work we have been doing recently on using smartphones for data collection and reporting to improve maternal healthcare in the rural areas of Ethiopia, specifically working with the Health Extension Workers. Will post the presentation up soon!

Some of the feedback we had from the initial HEW training last week was that some of the HEWs had difficulty in using the Gregorian calendar. Ethiopia has it’s own calendar which is the normal calendar used for the vast majority of Ethiopians (Ethiopian calendar entry on Wikipedia). Given that we’re asking the HEWs to collect date information, we need to make this as easy and understandable for them as possible – for example, to enter appointment dates a few weeks or months in advance. So over the past couple of days I’ve been looking at creating a date picker widget for integration into ODK Collect that will allow dates to be entered using the Ethiopian calendar format, but will store the date in the database as Gregorian. This transformation is hidden from the user and storing Gregorian dates in the database means we can manipulate and compare dates for reporting purposes, which we’d be unable to do storing Ethiopian dates as strings in the database (we can transform the dates back into Ethiopian calendar for final display).

It ended up being much more straightforward than I though it would be, especially with much help from the ODK Community and with the Joda Time java library already built into ODK Collect. I’ve got a first version ready for testing, so if anyone else is interested in having a look you can download the .apk file for installation on your Android phone.

To see the Ethiopian date picker working you’ll need to load up a form which specifies data picker. You can connect to our ODK Aggregate server at: http://hew-datacollect.appspot.com and download the EthioDateTestV1.5 form. Or you can download the original form XML to put on your own server.

This is only a first version, so any feedback is very welcome – or if you’d like the source code then please feel free to contact me (will put it up somewhere once I’ve tested it a bit more). [Update 19-Aug-11: I've now put all the code up as a clone on Google Code at https://code.google.com/r/alextlittle-dc-odk/, so you can see the full changes I've made.]

Finally, here are a couple of screenshots of the Ethiopian date picker running in my Android emulator:

After a couple of weeks away, here are some of my photos….

From Ethiopia:

From eLearning Africa Conference in Tanzania:

From few days holiday in Zanzibar:

For those of you in Ethiopia, ICE Ethiopia has the official launch of their iceAddis innovation hub this coming Saturday (7th May). For more information and how to register to participate, visit the iceEthiopia website.

iceAddis is based at the EiABC campus and is where Jaime and I held the elearning training in February earlier this year:

iceAddis

Over the last few months, we have been looking at ways in which we can move Digital Campus away from being a one-off project and into an ongoing programme. Our focus is now on how we can help improve ICT professionalism, creating more career opportunities and better career paths for those who work in IT.

We have been investigating the various options for this and our plans now revolve around Digital Campus supporting (through a partnership agreement) an ICT company based in Ethiopia to provide quality ICT services. Digital Campus in Europe would stay not-for-profit, but we would like to steer clear of being seen as a charity or donor organisation. Although we’re able to source and provide hardware very close to being free, we would only want this equipment to be used in environments where there is a clear support structure in place. I know far too many donated computer labs either permanently locked up or hardware reduced to doorstops because it simply hasn’t been properly maintained.

Digital Campus Ethiopia (for want of a better name) would initially provide the first line of support, being directly based in the client organisation and Digital Campus Europe would initially provide the second/third line support, but also giving training, work experience and internships, with a view to the Ethiopian based company subsequently taking over this role, building into a viable self-sustaining business. This should help offer a higher level of service quality as well as being able to offer better paid career options to local staff.

The challenges are very high, especially in finding a suitable team of staff (or an existing company) to partner with, as these people will be critical to the success (or otherwise) of the venture. But everyone I’ve spoken to recently seems to see it as the ‘right way’ to go.

I’d be interested to hear thoughts and opinions on this approach.

Although the elearning training went very well, we still have some issues with the lab expansion and opening. Health Sciences is still in the process of recruiting lab attendants to open the lab there, previously they’ve been relying on the goodwill of Tilahun (the ICT team member based at Ayder), but he’s now moved to the main (Arid campus), so opening is rather ad-hoc. The lab at Arid now has 3 lab attendants so should now be open 24×7, although the network connection (between the lab and the data centre) has been quite flaky recently, due to some of the intermediate switches. The other new elearning computer lab at Arid is still under development, as yet the networking and electrical installation isn’t completed, although they were working on it this week. The electrician was surprised that we need over 15kW in this lab to power the 90 refurbished PCs, but seems we will this amount of power given the ratings on back of the old PCs and the CRT monitors.

One of our successes was to improve the boot speed and responsiveness of the refurbished PCs when they boot from the thin client server. The improvement was as a result of some changes to the network switches (they were only operating at half duplex for the ports these machines are attached to), and also to update the protocol used for the display. We’re now using FreeNX, which is proving far quicker than X11. We also tested XRDP which was also very responsive. With X11 the responsiveness to mouse clicks or key presses was so slow as to make the machines almost unusable, now these machines actually appear faster than the SunRay terminals. Much of this is simply my experiences during testing, rather than scientific measurement, and we’ve not yet tested these terminals when the lab and network is under load. So I was very pleased we were able to get the lab in a position where the old PCs would be usable, even with a less than ideal network.

Last night we presented the Certificate in Online Education to another 20 teachers from Technology Institute and Health Sciences. Over the past week we’ve been verifying that everyone has completed the assignments and other requirements. We’re still learning about the best way to deliver the course to get active participation especially when we’re not present in Mekelle. Before coming to back to Mekelle we were a little worried that few teachers had completed any of the assignments or their courses. But actually most had completed what was asked of them, just that we didn’t know – either they’d started to develop a different course to the one they’d first told us about, or they’d created the required activities, but not submitted the links to notify us.

Most of the teachers are now moving onto the advanced course which we started this week. We’re not starting a new basic course this semester, as we’d really like the elearning team to deliver this themselves with our support from a distance, rather than Jaime and I continually running the workshops.

Has been a fun couple of weeks in Mekelle, but hard work and much more to do, as ever. I have a few other blog articles to finish writing and get posted up, so hope to do this over the next few days. With such a short visit, I didn’t get the time to catchup with everyone I wanted to, but hopefully I’ll be back again in May/June time for a slightly longer visit.