Alex Little

Habtom giving his presentation

Another good day at the conference, today things seemed a little more organised, it seems that people had got used to the idea of how the event should be running – the sessions ran a little more smoothly (timings and room bookings etc)

Again there was a really wide variety of topics being presented – but I stuck to going to the more techie ones. First session I attended was about OpenStreetMap (OSM) in Ethiopia. Addis is now quite well mapped out, a company (AddisMap) has been putting a lot of effort into getting the city well mapped on OSM and I think they are hoping to make some money from advertising on their site. They’ve been lending GPS units to taxi drivers to help collect all the data. They also wanted to be able to produce (and sell) printed maps, but are being limited as they can’t yet get a license from the Ethiopian Mapping Agency to print maps any larger than A4.

Early in the afternoon I ran a session on Open Educational Resources – I did a demo of how to download some resources from the internet and get them uploaded onto a local Moodle server – fortunately the internet was working well enough for this as I didn’t have much of a backup plan.

Habtom from Mekelle Uni ICT gave a presentation about localisation and globalisation, discussing how localisation was more than just about having software translated into another language. I found the other day that Moodle has been translated into Amharic and Tigrinya, it’s only for Moodle 2 and there are several sections not yet fully translated – but hopefully more progress will be made soon.

The final session I attended was a live video presentation from Michele Suhlmann, a phd student at University of Groningen – so fairly ambitious to run a presentation in this way I thought, but it worked well. She was talking about the research she has been doing on the social and psychological effects of personal laptop schemes. Interestingly her data was based on interviews with the children at the school in Mekelle where they are running the One Laptop per Child project.

In the evening there was a final party and a local band providing the entertainment. The team from ECBP must be really pleased how well the whole event worked out, the variety of sessions and the enthusiasm of everyone who attended. Hope there’ll be another one next year – or even sooner

My previous comments about the computing ability of some of the Computer Science students may not have been too generous, however, if they’d all been given a laptop on arrival at Uni, something like an Asus EEE PC or OLPC XO, I’m sure many would not be having the problems I mentioned.

The OLPC project is certainly having some problems and I previously criticised how the OLPC laptops were being used in schools. Looking back now I realise that maybe the project isn’t meeting it’s intended aims, but even if it’s just getting students used to being able to use a keyboard and a computer generally, then surely that’s not a bad thing? I’m dealing with first year computer science students who have little idea about even login names, passwords or keyboards.

In the last week I conducted a mini-survey amongst our Computer Science Uni students about their access to computers and attitudes towards having access to course materials online, almost all (around 90%) said that access to a computer was one of their main problems. Given that this survey was online (OK, maybe not my brightest of ideas for this type of survey!), the total figure is likely to be more than 90%. For info, there are about 10-15 working PC’s per 80-90 computer science students and less than 10% have access to a PC outside the those provided by the university.

I’m sure that giving the uni students a laptop, even just a cheap one, would be immensely beneficial to the next generation of computer science students/graduates. So if anyone is looking to improve the computing capabilities of those in the developing world, you could no worse than providing laptops to university level students. In my opinion, the more access and practise students have with PCs, be that Window or Unix, the better.

As an aside, I’ve been quite surprised by the number of university computer science students who don’t yet have an email address. I hadn’t even thought to ask this in my survey, but it’s come up in training sessions, when students fill in their profile, many have asked what to enter in the email field if they don’t have an email address!

I attended my first English lesson in about 20 years this morning when I visited the Maiwayni School in Mekelle to see their trial of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. OLPC trials are being run at a few other schools in Ethiopia, but this is the first in the Tigray region. It’s a model school for the area and has very good facilities for it’s 600+ students and staff.

Around 100 students of grades 6 and 7 were given the XO laptops just over 2 weeks ago. Teachers were given a one day workshop in how to use the laptops and how they can use them in their teaching. Technical support for the laptops is provided by MIT (probably not the one you’re thinking of, but the more local Mekelle Institute of Technology), though so far they’ve had few technical problems. Students can charge the laptops up at home if they have electricity (and the electricy is on), or there are charging facilities at school – unfortunately not solar power (Matt, if you’re after a project, then come over and fix up a solar panel for them!).

I didn’t get chance to talk to the students/teachers/parents to find out what they felt about having the laptops, although the head and deputy head seemed very keen and happy they were chosen to be the trial school.

Before going into the class, the headmaster (Tsegay) gave us chance to have a little play around. At first I found the interface was a little tricky to navigate, but once I’d got the hang of it, it was fine. As well as the games and cut down Wikipedia, all the grade 6 and 7 text books (mainly in Amharic and Tigrinya) have been scanned in and pre-loaded as ebooks. During the English lesson, all the students (around 55 in total) had grade 7 English ebook opened at the right point – I was half expecting most of the children at the back to be playing with the games!

Most of the students seemed to be taking an active part in the lesson, even if it meant having their hand up for a while before the teacher had chance to get to them. The use of the XO laptop in the lesson we observed was restricted to using it as an alternative to a paper textbook – I didn’t get the feeling the lesson would have been much different if all the students had had a paper textbook in front of them. However, it is still very early days for this school and the students have only had the laptops for a couple of weeks to get to grips with them, at least the students here each had a copy of the ebook – unlike many schools where there aren’t enough paper textbooks to go around. Also, it will probably take some time (and more workshops) for the teachers to gain experience in how to make best use of their new IT facilities.

It will be interesting to see how things have changed if I can get to visit the school again in a few months time.