Alex Little

Student being interviewed for ETV

This morning we had another visit from the Ministry of Education, coming to find out about our Digital Campus elearning project. They’ve had quite a punishing schedule over the past few days – not helped by a mix up which left them with 1 day to complete a 2 day car journey. Nonetheless, they seemed very enthusiastic and keen to learn about our project, looking at how similar programmes and technologies could be introduced at other Ethiopian Universities.

Unexpectedly (for me), our visitors were accompanied by a reporter and journalist from ETV, so I had to provide an impromptu presentation to camera about our project, which I’m expecting to be broadcast nationwide sometime over the next few days. I hope I gave a better performance than England did last night against Algeria! I think the appearance of the TV team surprised the students working in the lab, but a couple of them were happy to be interviewed, so really pleased they’ve been able to get feedback and opinions from the students too.

In the past, I’ve worked on quite a number of research projects developing prototype software and web applications, where, due to the nature of the project (pilot/prototype/research) you never quite get the time to invest in making these systems as robust, well structured or documented as you’d like. Yet at the same time, a tension starts when there is a push to get these systems used in the real world, and they become to be treated as production level systems. No, it’s not quite that black and white, research projects need some real world testing to prove their worth and production systems will never be perfect.

With our new thin client labs and OpenSolaris server I feel we have a similar tension. On one side, these labs were a facility for us to try out new ICT policy and infrastructure for the university, for example, disabling flash devices, using university mail accounts, amongst many others. Yet at the same time, our lab is the only functioning lab available in the Engineering College. A review yesterday by the ECBP team, found that there was only one other lab (approx 30 PCs) which was functional and had relatively modern PCs (less than 5 years old) – but this lab isn’t yet networked (it’s in the computer science building – which, almost a year after being occupied by the department, still hasn’t been networked except recently for some of the staff offices). So there are 40 networked terminals available for a student population of over 2000. That’s a ratio of 1 terminal to 50 students in a college teaching engineering, technology and computing.

So we have a question of priorities, do we stick with the research goals and risk the labs not being usable due to the decision we’ve made (but then have something interesting to write up), or do we focus on providing students with a lab they are able to use effortlessly?

For me, it’s an easy decision to make. We must focus on providing a robust and reliable lab (contrary to the other labs) for the students to benefit from and not worry about the fact that they’re sharing passwords, using webmail rather than university mail accounts and the like. This doesn’t contradict some of the bigger research aspects we wanted to look into (e.g. demonstrating we can create a more robust and scalable architecture than the usual PC labs), but does mean that we very quickly needed to make compromises (such as allowing the use of flash drives) we didn’t want to have to make so soon.

Havana Club, Mekelle

Have now been back in Mekelle for a few days – I arrived on Monday evening, and got back into life here amazingly quickly when I think how strange it all seemed when I first arrived in Sept 2008.

I’m staying back at my old house, even have my old room back for the next month. Meeting up with everyone again has been great, it feels as if I’ve been away for such a long time, even though it’s only been around 2 months and I had expected more changes, but then I guess things don’t change here that quickly. The road that had been dug up near the house is still unfinished, in fact in an even worse state than before. Almost everyone has mentioned how fat I’ve become being back in the UK, but with the amount of eating out I’ve been doing the past few days seems unlikely I’ll lose any weight whilst here

I got straight back into work at the Uni on Tuesday morning, Jaime had been here for the week before I’d arrived and we’re ran the third of our face to face training weeks with our tutors. On Friday evening we had another meal out at the Axum hotel and had a short presentation of the tutors certificates (Basic Certificate in Online Education, accredited by Alcala University).

My to-do list for this visit seems to be getting longer by the minute, there are still a large number of technical and management issues that we need to get resolved. There is still confusion over who is responsible for the opening of one of the labs and there needs to be better coordination and management from the university. At the moment it seems that no-one at the university has overall responsibility.

On the plus side, the Engineering College (now an independent Institute of Technology), has employed 3 new staff as elearning specialists, so I will spend some time training them over the coming weeks. As they’re part of the IoT rather than the university generally, we can’t get them to support the Health Sciences college. So I can see a big divide opening between the IoT and the rest of the university in elearning infrastructure, capacity and capability.

I can see my time here flying past, I’ve already been here a week and only have 3 left, so will be back in the UK before I know it!

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

Over the last week, Mekelle has undergone a bit of a facelift, repainting, rubbish collected and flags put up, all in preparation for the celebration of 35 years of the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF). The road near our house was never quite tarmaced in time, but no-one seems too bothered. Town has been full of federal police, with small celebrations and events happening each day this week.

But today is the big day, the fields behind the Hawelti monument are full of people, most of the town and thousands of people from Tigray and further afield have arrived for a day of speeches. People began arriving last night and stayed up overnight – a huge firework display at midnight then today there is due to be a speech from the Prime Minister.

I’ve been up there this morning already to see what was happening, there doesn’t seem to be any schedule and I’m not too keen on spending all day in the sun listening to political propaganda speeches in a language I don’t understand. Fortunately our house is close enough that I’ll hear if anything significant starts to happen and can then take walk up. I’ll update this posting if there much else to report during the rest of the day.

I feel I’ve been a little quiet on here recently, but that’s not because been being lazy. Quite the opposite in fact. The closer I get to my leaving date, the longer my to do list seems to grow. It’s highly unlikely that I’ll get chance to finish everything I’d like.

It’s only in the last week that I realised I’ve not left Mekelle now since the middle of December, when I had a very brief trip down to Addis for the VSO leavers workshop. But, I do now have a trip down to Adama University lined up for next week, a couple of hours drive south of Addis, so will be good to get away for a few days for a change of scenery, even though it’s still work related. The new intake of volunteers arrive this weekend, so whilst I’m in Addis, I’ll get chance to meet them all.

Progress with the Digital Campus project had been a little slow over the last few weeks, but things are now getting back on track. The next full week of training has been arranged for the second week of March, so just before I return to the UK. We’re also now getting many of the technical issues resolved with the servers, such as implementing an LDAP server to ease the user creation process. Later this week I’m running a Moodle admin training course for people in Computer Science and ICT, so at least staff will have an idea of how to maintain the server properly.

This week, I’ve started the Moodle Course Creator Certificate (MCCC), so I’ll be working on that over the next couple of months. Despite having used Moodle a lot in this job and whilst at the OU, most of this has been from a developer point of view, rather than a teacher. So will be good to learn more about how the various activity modules, which I’ve rarely used, really work. Just need to make sure that I can set aside enough time to devote to this.

The last week or so has seen lots of ups and downs, though overall the balance is more up than down! On both of the last Saturday mornings I ran training sessions for tutors. I was expecting these to be a bit of a nightmare, I’d already had trouble getting all the user accounts working correctly, plus I wasn’t really sure how many people would turn up. In the end around 10 tutors attended each week so was very pleased with this outcome – it could very easily have been that no-one or only one or two attend. Not knowing who was coming beforehand or what level they’d got to made things a little tricky for planning the sessions, but went well in the tutorial-style we used. Some are already creating quizzes and other activities for their students, whereas with some other tutors, they hadn’t attended the training week in November, so we were starting at the beginning.

Last Sunday morning (just over a week ago) we had some visitors from the Ministry of Education, so I explained our elearning projects and showed them the labs – unfortunately (as always seems to be the case) a power outage, in one of the buildings holding the switches connecting the terminals to the data centre, prevented me from showing the terminals in use.

The downsides this week have been the fact that it was uncertain for a while as to whether we’d be able to run the second full week of training for the tutors, as the visitors from Alcala may not have had time to prepare. If they weren’t coming this would have made extra work for me, as I still would have needed to run some extra training to ensure the tutors were set up and ready for delivering courses int the second semester. With all the other tasks I have to do (in the now 8 weeks remaining – not that I’m counting) this would have been too much and I’d have been very disappointed if they had canceled, or delayed until June.

Also a laptop went missing from our office over the previous weekend. A student had left it with one of my office colleagues to fix, but without going into all the detail here (and I’m not totally sure about exactly what happened), he ended up being locked up at the police station for 2 days and has to pay 12,000 birr (over 1000 USD) until the laptop is found. Previously our office was used a lot by other staff to get internet access and to get their laptops fixed, but now all this will stop and the locks are being replaced.

This week we finally made progress on fixing up many of the user accounts that weren’t working, plus getting the server at Ayder campus working again. There were lots of different odd problems with the users accounts, but most re fixed now (just a few odd problems to resolve still). But getting the server fixed was great news (especially at the end of a Friday afternoon). this means we can now get the lab open again and into use. Though now the students are having exams, then they’ll have a 2 week break, so they may not be around much for anther 3-4 weeks. The lab at Ayder now has curtains up, and new carpet is ready to be put in. The curtains seem to match the rest of the room, but I suspect this is more by accident than design.

Anyway it was a good end to a very fraught week, so hoping I don’t have any more weeks like this one.

On campus there is a small family of baboons, I’m not really sure where they came from. Although they’re native to Ethiopia, there aren’t any wild ones in this region, so I suspect they’re escaped/released ex-pets, perhaps from one of the amusement parks in town (one used to have a hyaena pit, now turned into a arcade games room).

The campus baboons spend quite a lot of time in the area near my office, out on the first floor balcony, but they often have to be chased off to stop them pulling apart the noticeboards. The other day we heard a lot of crashing noise from outside – it was the young baboon playing with broken glass, then throwing it onto the tin roof below. Very fortunately, and despite licking the edge of the broken glass, the baboons managed to avoid cutting themselves, or anyone else.

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.