So far, the ten participating countries around Africa have benefited from 3 workshops being the

• Kick Off Workshop in Merak Institute, South Africa, June 08
• Outcome Mapping Workshop, Winneba Open Digital Village, Ghana, August 08
• Technical and Business Workshop, Colonial Guest House, Irene, Centuriom, South Africa, November 08

The project facilitated by the Meraka Institute, IT46 (http://www.it46.se/) , KwantuMedia and Wire.less.dk (http://wire.less.dk/) is expected to be completed in 2010.

Its exciting to see participation from these ten (10) Africa countries (http://www.wireless-africa.org/partners/projects) and the knowledge that has begun to be shared. We foresee the formation of an African Wireless Alliance called the “Wireless Africa Alliance” which has already been accepted by the participating teams at the Tech. and Biz. workshop in November. As a member of the steering committee with Houda (Morocco), Muroro (Zimbabwe) and Ochuko (Nigeria), I foreseee the realisation of this vision as a process leading to the attainment of the MDGs and especially the Universal Access Declaration.

In today’s Information Age, individuals around the world require Information Literacy Skills – which is the ability to analyse, synthesize, evaluate, assimilate and use information. Kafui therefore designed a course for individuals who wish to enrich their knowledge and acquire the skills to function effectively online whilst acquiring the needed materials/knowledge for professional or academic use. In particular, it is to equip the participants with online research and computer skills to undertake online self study and or information search to:

• meet the ever increasing academic/professional needs and standards with much ease;
• make you globally competitive whilst functioning locally;
• build a foundation for future research work, information and knowledge building; and
• strategically develop skills to take and or teach online courses.

This course is part of an onging series of capacity building sessions dubbed the “Simpa Open Summits” (SOS) being held at the Winneba Open Digital Village (the Village) at Winneba Low Cost, just behind Uncle Rich JSS (Tel: 0432-20270). The name SOS evolved from the combination of “Simpa” which is the indigenous name of Winneba and the “Open” nature of the sessions to all as a means to improve lives of participants through knowledge acquisition and save people from information overload. As well, SOS could mean “Save Our Souls” from the inability to handle the information overload.

Course Content: The topics addressed in the four-day course included:

1. The World Wide Web and Universal Resource Locators (URLs)
2. Search Engines and Content Repositories
3. Evaluating Websites for information validity
4. Gathering educational materials online; Text Editing and Materials Development from Online Sources

Instructional Goals/Course Objectives: This course was broken into sessions. Haven gone through each course session, its was expected that, participants will be able to:

1. Session 1: identify correctly stated Universal Resource Locators (URL) from a list of URLs; explain the concept of the World-Wide-Web; differentiate between the main activities of institutions from a list of URLs provided for you; and surf within a website to gain an understanding of the function and behaviour of hyperlinks
2. Session 2: differentiate between websites and search engines and their functionalities; identify websites or content repositories which provide access to free educational content like: www.itrainonline.org , www.merlot.com
3. Session 3: conduct an evaluation of websites to determine the validity of the source of using information provided here: http://lib.nmsu.edu/instruction/eval.htm; and list an evaluation criteria to ensure the authenticity for citation in your work
4. Session 4: select appropriate text and analyze information relevant to a given topic from online sources; bookmark the sites you visit using browser tools that enable you to return to the sites without having to type out the URLs again.

Instructors: Instruction for SOS is provided always by experienced local and international trainers. This course was taught by:

1. Mr. Kafui A. Prebbie (Cell: 0244 429 448, kafui@kafui.com ), an ICT Instructor with years of teaching experience at the ICT Center of the University of Education, Winneba; and
2. Mr. Michael Dorh Tetteh (Cell: 0243 604 696, mdtetteh@onevillagefoundation.org ), a professional instructor in Mathematics and ICT with appreciable years of practice; and assisted by
3. Mr. Dennis Doe (Cell: 0246 124 151, doedennis@onevillagefoundation.org ), a Multimedia and Network Technologist.

Together, the team provided the needed framework to kick start the professional/academic life online for study growth and development.

Course Evaluation: A combination of classroom activities including observations, group activity and short practice questions was employed. At the end, you were required to use the skills acquired to author an opinionated paper on a given topic – for instance “Dividends of Computer use in the Classroom”. Composed opinionated paper was graded using the “Three Blind Grading Principles” practice and review provided to participants.

Extracts/Summaries: There are two basic means of searching for information online:

1. navigating through topic lists eg. www.merlot.com
2. entering a keyword or phrase into a search text box of a search engine eg. www.google.com

A topic search method is conducted by selecting a category link and subsequently selecting subcategories until your search is trimmed to a list of your relevant or desired documents.

A keyword search method is used n search of specific concepts, ideas or phrase. The keyword is a set of words or word that describes the concept. When entered into the search text box, the search program compares the keyword with some part of the text in its database – titles, URLs, text, abstract, description, reviews, etc. after which it displays a list of all pages relevant in its database.

Search Operators are symbols, words, and punctuations that enable search online to be more specific. They include quotation marks (“ ”); the Addition (+) and Subtraction (-) Signs; and Boolean Operators “AND” and “OR”.

Cost: The four-day training programme was priced initially at a heavily discounted and promotional price of Twenty Ghana Cedis (GHC20) or Twenty US Dollars (USD20) for the locals. The price attracted two batches of participants for two consecutive weeks totalling approx. fifty (50). Some more are still interested thus the third session is being planned.

Resources: Copies of text from appropriate text books were provided including text from the O’Leary Series, Microsoft Office Volume 1, Timothy J. O’Leary.

The essence of e-STAS as a Symposium about Technologies for the Social Action, is to provide an international and multi-stakeholder dialogue, where all the agents implicated in the development and implementation of the ICT’s exchange their experiences, ideas and knowledge with the aim to bridge the digital divide. e-STAS is also to promote, foster and adapt appropriate technologies for social action. It was divided into two parts:

Magisterial lectures by themes and Geographical locations. By themes the following was discussed:

• Infrastructures and low-cost tools
• Services and contents
• The ICT and the Objectives of the Millennium
• Corporate Social Responsibility NGO’s, Volunteers and ICT
• Programmes of access and use of the ICT in groups / areas with the lesser chances for access

By geographical location, the group was divided as such:

• Europe
• South America
• North America
• Asia
• Africa

Kafui discussed the UEW Content Development Initiative Project - www.wikieducator.org/UEW and the Winneba Open Digital Village - www.opendigitalvillage.org as a socio-educational projects in Africa. He discussed during the workshop session, the concept of low-cost technologies research he is involved in through an EU FP7 funded project, the Digital World Forum - www.digitalworldforum.eu.

Interesting tracks and details of the ongoing conference can be found here http://www.idlelo.org/.

Kafui (Ghana), Nicholas (Kenya) and Jibril (Cameroon) are attending the event to address issues related to and present the WikiEducator (www.wikieducator.org) Initiative; and the Free/Libre Open Source Software for Education (FLOSS4Edu), www.wikieducator.org/FLOSS4Edu - an Africa wide eContent development initiative.

There will be a stand, a presentation and a hands-on workshop at the Conference venue, Université Cheick Anta Diop (UCAD) of Dakar, Senegal
Campus Numérique Français, Dakar, Senegal.

Coordinating the project involves some unique challenges including collecting content from the academics in a format that is not “web-ready”.  Materials uploaded here http://www.wikieducator.org/Content_Contributors have clearly depicted the willingness of African academics to begin and continue to share knowledge. Most of these materials

In the coming weeks, plans are far advanced for follow up workshops and to introduce the University of Cape Coast and University of Ghana to the use of the technology. Details of this will be posted at www.simpasummits.net - a website dedicated to the capacity building sessions to be held in Winneba, Ghana often at the Winneba Open Digital Village (0432-20270).

You may also call me 0244-429-448 if you wish to be registered in advance. Its all expense paid workshop except accommodation for  participants outside Winneba.

The Commonwealth of learning (www.col.org) will provide support for the training and conversion of Community Health Nursing Materials into ODL and Online formats by the Community Health Nurses Training School (CHNTS) in Winneba. This is in preparation for a West African Regional roll-out of a Community Nursing programme, hopefully, by Distance Education. Currently, the tutors are working feverishly converting the materials.

The Partnership for Higher Education in Africa (www.partnership-foundation.org) is supporting the Initiative for Digital Content Production in the University of Education, Winneba hosted at www.wikieducator.org/UEW. I am lucky to be Project Coordinator - though I worked hard for it! great opportunity to serve as always - and this time my Alma-Mater. The workshop to be held at the Winneba Open Digital Village (email: admin-ghana@onevillagefoundation.org) will take place from March 3 - 5, 2008 for about forty (40) academic staff of UEW.

UEW and the CHNTS are on the path to lead the expertise needed by African educators to develop and upload their own content. I will be happy to share the outcomes of the trainiing sessions with you all later.

Many thanks,

Kafui A. Prebbie, kafui@kafui.com

The Kick Off Meeting of the Digital World Forum on Accessible and Inclusive ICT (’Digital World’), a FP7 European Union project ended yesterday, Jan 16 - 17, 08 in Orange Labs (France Telecom R & D), Paris, France. The meeting provided the opportunity for the representatives of the 8-member consortium to meet for the first time. I was there for oneVillage Foundation Ghana. The first meeting of the 18month (Jan 08 - June 09) project, offered the opportunity for members to discus details of the 5 work packages (WP0 - WP4) , timeliness and reporting mechanisms within the project. An opportunity was also provided for each consortium member to make a presentation in the first day. Portions of the detailed Document of Work (DoW), WPs as well as issues that needed clarification were made with the Project Officer (PO) from EU in the second half day and final session of the meeting.

The meeting re-united me with Roland Burger, an old friend I met in Sao Palo, Brazil in 2005; I made friends with two new Africans from Meraka Institute of South Africa and Kosumatu & Kosumatu of Nigeria - the other African partners.

Digital World Project brief

Digital World Forum on Accessible and Inclusive ICT (’Digital World’) is a FP7 European project focuses on the use of ICT to leverage economic development in Africa and Latin America.

Providing minimal services (health, education, business, government, etc.) to rural communities and under-privileged populations is of major importance to improve people lives, and to sustain development. Using ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) would be the easiest and possibly only way to develop and deploy those services.

Digital World will explore how to take advantage of the new paradigm of low-cost technologies in broadband infrastructure and devices, as well as the explosion of mobile telephony to bridge the digital divide and connect the unconnected. The aim of Digital World is to make a state-of-the-art in these domains, identify the challenges, and propose a roadmap to tackle them. A particular focus will be on involving local actors from industry, research and academic communities and non-governmental organizations who have field expertise and who will provide feedback on the key factors of adoption.

Upcoming project website: http://digitalworld.ercim.org/

Some follow up activities are planned including members of the network organising a workshop at the eLearning Africa, Ghana in May 2008. Preceding this, members of the network plan to organise some pre-conference activities.

These activities include:

1. A one-day Seminar on the 27th May, 2008 at the University of Education, Winneba (www.uew.edu.gh) . This will present reports of a group research to be carried out in Kenya, Ghana, Mozambique and the UK on the Public-Private Partnerships in ICT4D. It will attempt to take a look at the extent of involvement of the private sector institutions in ICT4D in these countries.

2. Another one-day parallel workshop (same 27th May, 2008) on the development and uploading of online educational resources will be held at the Winneba Open Digital Village (www.opendigitalvillage.org) in Winneba.. With this in mind, we intend to have discussions with the FLOSS4EDU Inintiative (www.wikieducator.org/FLOSS4Edu) and WikiEducator (www.wikieducator.org) Project team both supported by the Commonwealth of Learning, Canada (www.col.org); and oneVillage Foundation-Ghana Management to provide some form of support for the training session.

When more of this is formalised, we will make them available on the partnership website - http://www.gg.rhul.ac.uk/ict4d/delphe.html - and on the events page of the Simap Open Summits site here - http://www.simpasummits.net/eventsmain.php.

Thanks.

The partnership has a collabotative research agenda - and in the past year was in Kenya to organise a workshop during the eLearning Africa Workshop under the title “ICT4D in African HEIs”. Details here: http://www.elearning-africa.com/review_2007_workshops.php

From Dec 1 - 9, 2007, members of the partnership (of which I am a part) are at the Royal Holloway University of London, UK further organise some workshops, fine tune the reasearch agenda for the coming year (2008) and plan workshops for the eLearning Africa 2008 in Accra,Ghana. So far, there will a full day workshop and a public lecture in the Univ. of Educatio, Winneba and two workshops at the main conference. Results from our research is likely to be made available. Though these sessions are yet to be confirmed as a team and with the eLA 2008 organisors, our deliberation here in the UK shows commitment to the effort.

I am learning, meeting new faces and making new friends. The sessions here are enlightening!

Background
Juergen Neumann posting on the wsfii discussion group list reports on his current effort working with Vic Hayes, Xavier Carcelle, Marek Linder and Florian Fainelli to develop a OpenHardware Platform. They are currently organizing an OpenHardware get-together in Paris. Several of the people on this team recently met with Joy Tang (Director of OVF) and other FOSS leaders in Taiwan in October.

Relevance to OVF
The business model and application area is still in development but the basic concept is to develop an EcoLiving Zone (ELZ) (more about the ELZ: “Ghana C2C nation? a Plan for Setting up Ecoliving Zone in Ghana“) in Ghana to promote more sustainable and open source approaches to development, seeing that the two communities and/or schools of thought are converging. The ELZ surrounding Winneba Ghana would be a test bed to evaluate the “Freedom Project” from a technology, community development and the business standpoint - as a multisector approach to sustainable development.

This would include using the Freedom Project Routers to establish long distance wireless networks to deploy sustainable best practices and technologies within the geographical borders of the ELZ. Key to the development of this program would be the set-up of Open and Distance Learning Program to connect the rural village hubs with the Winneba Open Digital Village (WODiV). The WODiV will operate as a clearinghouse for organizing and disseminating relevant knowledge in our networks as it pertains to the particular EcoLiving approach needed in the village.

Open Hardware Initiative Goals:

1. Achieve cheap FOSS compatible open embedded wireless hardware, which come off the factory with e.g. OpenWRT or similar OS.
2. Modular more comprehensive wireless router (super node) for backhaul infrastructure

oneVillage Foundation-Ghana’s Goals:

Within the Winneba Open Digital Village project, oneVillage Foundation Ghana will expose these ideas stretching from its immediate environs to the global landscape through the “Simpa Open Summits” - www.simpasummits.net