35 Years of the TPLF

Alex February 18th, 2010

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.

Getting away

Alex February 2nd, 2010

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.

Rollercoaster week

Alex January 24th, 2010

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.

Monkey business

Alex January 17th, 2010

Campus baboonsOn 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.

Road Building and Re-routing

Alex January 11th, 2010

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.

Once in a blue moon

Alex January 4th, 2010


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.

Setting off fireworks
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.

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.

Elearning site available off campus

Alex November 11th, 2009

On Friday, I finally rebuilt our Moodle server, following the power supply failure of the old server. The site is now running on the same server as the main Mekelle University website and so can be accessed off campus (another big achievement) at:

http://www.mu.edu.et/elearning

Initially, we’ll use this Moodle installation as the place where the Engineering and Health Sciences tutors can upload their courses for the Digital Campus pilot project, but any other college or department is welcome to use this server for hosting their courses.

The building of the labs for the Digital Campus project is all coming together at once, the servers and terminals are on their way up from Addis as I write, the tables are almost completed and will be delivered by the end of the week, plus the other networking and electrical work is almost finished. All of this is on top of organising the training week (16th to 20th November) for tutors, followed by week of training for th ICT staff. This training is being run by the Digital Campus project team, with the others arriving from around the world during this week.

Given how busy I’ll be over the coming 2-3 weeks, I’m unlikely to be checking email much or updating my blog, so be prepared for a long catch up post in a month :-)

Mums for Mums

Alex November 10th, 2009

Last week, I was asked to go and visit the Mums for Mums centre to help them to help them out with the redevelopment of their website. Mums for Mums is a local NGO which helps women into work by giving them training and childcare, plus much more. They’ve recently won a grant of 100,000 USD from the Stars foundation to expand their activities. This is a huge amount of money for a relatively small NGO in Ethiopia.

They’d like to revamp their existing website so they can better advertise the work and projects they’re able to undertake with the new funds. The current site was built by a VSO volunteer when she was working in Mekelle a few years ago – she worked at the Computer Science department at the University and started the elearning project that I worked on last year. As she has now left Ethiopia, I feel it would be more appropriate if the office staff could keep the site up to date themselves, rather than depending on someone abroad to do this for them.

My first task in this work is to write a proposal they can send to Stars, so at least they can show they’ve started thinking and planning how their website will be renovated.

Updating the site to use a content management system (not sure which one we’ll use yet) and training the staff will be straightforward enough. The more complex facility that they’d like is the ability for people to donate money online, as they receive many offers of donations, often from people in the UK. Currently there are two ways in which money can be donated. Either by transferring money directly into the Mums for Mums bank account in Mekelle, or by donating through a partner charity (Friends of Ethiopian Children in Need – FECIN) in the UK.

Neither of these methods are ideal, transferring money directly by international transfer is expensive (approx 40 GBP per transfer) and so is only appropriate for very large donations. Using a partner charity in the UK means they are dependent on this other charity.

We had a discussion about how we can find a solution for this, but is difficult as Mums for Mums is not a registered charity in the UK and so can’t use (for example) the JustGiving website. Registering as a UK charity may be a solution, but they’ll need representation in the UK, plus all the associated paperwork.

If anyone has any suggestions as to how we could find a good solution to this problem would be gratefully received. There must be many other NGOs around the world who receive donations from the UK without being registered as a UK charity, so we’d be interested to hear any possible solutions. Please either leave a comment below or email me directly (alex@alexlittle.net)

Birthday Cake

Alex November 9th, 2009

IMG_1081On Thursday, rather than celebrating bonfire night – the meaning of which would have been a little lost on most people here, we celebrated Martin’s birthday. Over the week we’d had several other VSO volunteers coming to Mekelle, so the promise of a good meal out and some birthday cake was enough to convince them the stay on an extra day or so. Mike, an IT volunteer from Maychew technical college came up on Tuesday to look at the IT infrastructure at the University and also for me to show him the main computer suppliers in Mekelle. Cathy and Peter came over from Axum, I’d visited them the previous week, to see the English Language Improvement Centre (ELIC) and the Academic Development Resource Centre (ADRC). Marcel also returned to Mekelle after an extended back in Australia.

For Martin’s birthday meal we went to the Boston cafe, one of the main ferenji restaurants in town. We had a great turn out, with about 25 people coming along, so was lucky that accidentally 2 cakes had been ordered.

IMG_1079

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