elearning Africa Conference

The eLearning Africa conference www.elearning-africa.com was a mixed bag of stimulating discussion, meeting old friends, making new contacts, African ‘organisation’ and rushing around trying to get to hear all the presentations I’d marked on the programme.

My colleague (from Botswana) George & I, co-presented at the ICT in TVET Summit, held jointly by COL and UNESCO-UNEVOC. We presented the new Flexible Skills Development Initiative that we are working on together with colleagues from TVET institutions in Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. George shared some interesting ideas on quality in TVET and his PPT is in great demand.

We sponsored some ladies who work in TVET from Botswana, Kenya, Zambia and Namibia – and they all made the most of the experience. Luckily, one of them won a new mobile phone in a Microsoft business card draw – that was great! There were more than 1000 people there from all over the continent discussing a huge range of emerging issues in elearning. As always, I missed more than I saw/heard, but I especially enjoyed sessions on mobile learning and open education resources. Shuttleworth Foundation are doing interesting things in literacy with mobiles – i f0rt it was gr8, cuz itz new 2 me! I heard a keynote presentation from Gilly Salmon, whose work I have admired for some years. She told us about the Media Zoo at Leicester University – where lecturers can go to learn and experiment with new teaching and learning technologies. That reminded me that we have a Second Life account and it's about time that I went there to see if we can use it for skills development courses. There was also a rockin’ Bishop from the Gambia who uses Twitter, Facebook, blogs and all the social media to communicate with young people in his diocese.

I met loads of people that I used to work with in Zambia, but also colleagues from Rwanda & UK and new friends from Nigeria that I only met a few weeks ago. It’s gr8 (sorry!) to hear that the groundwork in distance education which we did in Zambia about 6 years ago is standing them in good stead now. I met someone from the Open University of Catalunya - which is a virtual university based in Barcelona - lots of good stuff going on there with the Campus for Peace and we may be able to collaborate with them.

All in all a worthwhile trip – next year we go to Tanzania. Sorry, no pics – I didn’t even get my camera out of my bag. Josiane from UNEVOC promised to share hers with me.