Alex Little

One of the photos I took in Axum last year received a ‘highly commended’ award (top 10 from nearly 300) in the VSO Going Places photo competition.

Andy, one of the VSOs here last year submitted the photo for me – hence why his name appears as the credit – and was taken when both of us were on a trip to Axum.

On another note, work has got a little less hectic the last few days, although still plenty to do, we’ve had a few issues with both of the new computer labs to get fixed. At one lab a power surge broke one of the switches in the daisy chain of switches that connects the lab to the data centre. At the other repeated power failures and subsequent unexpected & abrupt server shutdowns have caused files to become corrupted. The server is protected by UPS, but this doesn’t always last long enough for the power and the monitoring or auto (clean) shutdown isn’t yet set up. Will get a longer work related blog posting up int he next week or so.

A recent article in the Guardian this week discusses the problems of (computer) viruses and the chaos they can cause in Africa. Alan Mercer, one of my fellow VSO IT volunteers was interviewed for the article. It’s interesting reading, and has generated plenty of comments worth reading (even though I may not agree with all of them!).

It’s easy to spot the comments written by people who obviously haven’t worked in developing countries, yes, we all know that there are (theoretically) technical solutions to many of the problems, use linux, run XYZ piece of software from your USB stick etc. But in my experience here, as one of the comments states, it certainly is ‘much more complicated than that’.

I now feel like I’m beginning to make some progress – though there are still a few things which may throw a spanner in the works. I’ll start with the progress…

I have arranged for our site to be launched to students in the week of 12th Jan. Rather than waiting until everything was in place, course materials uploaded etc, I decided that a better option was just to pick a date and work towards that. Even if no computer science courses are loaded and running, I’ve uploaded some OpenLearn materials to the site for students. If students find the site useful hopefully they’ll apply a bit of pressure to the course teachers to upload their courses.

As well as having Yonas helping to check all the course materials are up to date and uploaded for CS courses, Wondwossen (my counterpart) is going to run a Moodle training course on Monday afternoon for Computer Science staff, so they have the skills to update/maintain the courses themselves.

I’m arranging a series of 1-hour ‘Introduction to Moodle’ workshops for the students, to give them their usernames/passwords and to introduce them to the site and how to post to forums etc (as well as appropriate use of the site!). There are around 300 students in total, so I’ll need 15 workshops in total (only 20 PCs in the lab), hence why I’m keeping them to 1 hour! After this time we’ll have the lab open a few times a week for drop-in sessions when Wondwossen or I will be available to help answer queries.

I’ve also been talking to the (now-ex – see below for explanation!) coordinator of the Distance Education program about how we can begin to move responsibility for the elearning site to them – as it’s a service given to the whole Unviersity, it’s not something the Computer Science Dept can (or should) support indefinitely. This will also involve looking at how to get the server supported by the main uni ICT dept, and training people in the distance ed office who can support and run the teacher and student training courses.

There are several potential hiccups which could scupper some of these plans…

Firstly, next semester our dept is due to be moving to the main uni campus on the other side of town. This could be fairly chaotic as the rooms we’re due to move into currently have no networking. As it’s taken me nearly 3 months just to get the server up and available on the uni network, I’d rather not have to repeat this. With the huge potential disruption in computer access for students, especially while some will be doing their project work, I’m unsure why we may be moving mid-semester. It would seem to me to be preferable to move during the inter-semester break in Feb or during the summer break.

Secondly, the current Distance Education dept has been dissolved and we’re waiting for a new Distance Education dept to be set up, which may not consist of the same people. Until this new dept exists, I won’t really have anyone outside the Computer Science dept to hand over to.

Finally, I heard about a new university-wide e-learning project which is due to be starting soon, who apparently had no idea about the project I’m working on. I think it’s funded by a Spanish Uni (or at least a Spanish organisation) and I’m hoping to meet with them in February so we don’t end up replicating each others work, or rather, so that we do end up working together!

Anyway, I’m off now to go and celebrate New Years Eve, generally it’s a bit of a non-event here as the Ethiopian new year falls in September, so we’ve hired a bar for the evening to have our own party. Hope everyone else out there has a Happy New Year and please keep in touch with emails and comments

(Hoping that the internet speed will improve soon so my blog postings can be a little less text-heavy!)

It’s now been nearly 2 weeks since I had an evening staying in at home, so tonight I’ll attempt to do so, though the chances of someone ringing to go out for drinks and dinner remain high!

I taught English for the first time on Saturday. It was never my best subject and the only grammar I know comes form learning foreign languages. This wasn’t strictly English teaching, more conversation practice for the students at the agricultural college in Wukro, so I didn’t feel too unqualified. The practices sessions have been running for the last couple of weeks by other VSO volunteers, but this is the first time I’ve been able to go. I had a group of 13 17-20 year olds, and it was their first time coming to the practice sessions too.

At first I had no idea about their current level of English, and they were very shy to speak at all. So I started to ask about their families, saying that I had one brother and he was 32. I’d messed up slightly here, as most Ethiopian families are quite large, the conversations were along the lines of “I have 4 brothers and 5 sisters, one brother is 15, one brother is 31…” and so on. Half the lesson was gone before I knew it!

Their vocabulary was really good, but they hadn’t had much practice in constructing sentences, so in the second half of the lesson I did past/present/future. Their responses to their plans for the future were most interesting. One girl was going to be killing cows in the afternoon, several of the other girls wanted to be mechanics or pilots. I didn’t quite get why so many wanted to be pilots, although it may be because almost all wanted to live in Europe or US.

So after a bit of a shaky start it all seemed to go well. Towards the end they were noticably more confident in speaking out loud, although I didn’t manage to get them to understand when I asked them to work in pairs, practicing their sentences to each other. I think this comes from the fact that it’s not the way they’ve ever been asked to work before.

I have now seen my first Christmas tree of the year – one of the supermarkets in town had a 2′ plastic tree with flashing lights and decorations, though still not quite enough to get me ‘into the spirit’! At the main outdoor market, I eventually managed to find all the ingredients for making gluhwein. Cloves were a little tricky to track down, only 2 stalls seemed to have any at all, and thn only about and eggcup full each.

Slightly disappointingly, there will be no turkey for us this year – well, there were 2 left at Wukro, but obviously if we take one or both of these, the chances of any turkeys in the future will be greatly reduced! So we’ll have to make do with a sheep or two for Christmas dinner. Numbers for dinner now stand at around 25, so not sure there’s any room for gatecrashers but we could probably squeeze them in if they bring their own plates and cutlery!

The eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed that I’ve added a ‘VSO feeds’ section to the side bar. I wanted to be able to aggregate feeds from other VSO volunteers to show on my site, unfortunately the RSS widget built into WordPress won’t aggregate feeds for you – you’d need to create a new wdiget for each feed – not really what I wanted.

However, I did find the SimplePie Plugin for WordPress which has done exactly what I needed and was very straightforward to get up and running. The display is all done via templates and is very configurable. The only (very small) niggle that I have is that you need to specify the feed urls in the code, rather than in the WordPress admin pages, e.g.

<?php
echo @SimplePieWP(array(
     'http://markvso.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default',
     'http://siddypen.wordpress.com/feed',

http://nonoincambodia.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default'

      ), array(
     'items' => 10,
     'date_format' => 'j M Y',
     'truncate_item_description' => 100
  ));
?>

At the moment I’m only showing feeds from 3 blogs, but if you have a feed that you’d like me to add then please send it on.

Rather unfortunately the blogging system that VSO uses (http://www.vso-stories.net/) doesn’t provide RSS feeds of the postings (!) – though it does provide an email subscription service. So there are several other blogs I’d like to include in my aggregator which would be very relevant, e.g. Julian Bass’s blog, but I can’t until vso-stories provides an RSS feed factility