My dream for the Dadamacadamy  is that it will become a centre for research and learning. This is already starting to happen in a small way.

The Dadamacadamy will not provide taught courses. It will do three interrelated things:

1. Provide an environment for practice-based learning and reflection.
2. Create a repository of knowledge.
3. Make available its knowledge and networks through collaborative research and consultancy.

Provide an environment for practice based learning and reflection.

People who have shared concerns will cluster together in the Dadamacadamy to consider what they're doing, and to share what they are learning. The Dadamacadamy will enable peer-based learning of the highest order - driven, not by a desire for accreditation, but by passionate concerns and the need to know.

Create a repository of knowledge.

The knowledge that people bring, and the new knowledge that they create together,  will be collected together at Dadamacadamy and made freely available.

Dear Ismael

Thank you for your rapid response to my initial comment on your blog.  I am glad that you know first hand the differences in the two cultures (ie of academics and of practitioners). I agree completely that “bridging these two realities (which they are) is usually not an easy thing to do”. If there are to be any bridges it seems we have to be active bridge builders.

I feel that, like you, I am sometimes in one culture and sometimes in the other, and at present my journeys between the two realities have to be made without a bridge. My connection is more like a ferry-boat between the two worlds. Maybe together we can find ways to make a bridge that is so visible and robust and well signposted that others (who cannot be tempted into the ferry-boats) will cross back and forth easily and often.

For now it seems it is a matter of travelling from one culture to the other and trying to raise mutual awareness through “making friends”. I feel that for now I am simply trying to bring gifts, and the gifts that I bring to academia are gifts of information. Sometimes I feel like a new ambassador who is bringing precious gifts to a superpower and is trying to find the right gift (and the right way to present it).

I was delighted today to read Mike Gurstein's blog Thoughts on Research as an Element in Telecentre Community Informatics Practice and so I commented on it. I was encouraged because I am always looking for opportunites to close the gaps between academics and practitioners - and he is keen to do that too.

Genuine collaboration

In his blog Mike Gurstein writes about Community Informatics research and makes a plea for researchers to link more closely with practitioners in a genuinely collaborative way. He points out that they should recognising the value of local knowledge and networks in academic research - just as for commercial market research. This is something dear to my heart, not just for Community Informatics, but for all kinds of research related to community development.

Early collaboration

I believe that, from an early stage of research planning, local people should be involved with researchers in a genuine collaborative way. Now that we have better communications technologies to hand this is getting easier and easier - even if it does mean new and more imaginative approaches, rather than business and usual.

On Tuesday, Pam alerted the Dadamac UK and Nigeria Teams (plus a few of her contacts in Higher Education) that:
"The UK Government's Department for International Development (DfID) is investing up to £3 million a year in a new Development Partnerships in Higher Education programme (DelPHE), which will run for a seven year period, from June 2006 to March 2013. The programme will provide funding to support partnerships between Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) working on collaborative activity linked to the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)."

Several emails followed; and the next day, at the weekly UK-Nigeria Dadamac meeting, this initiative was top on the agenda.

Hi Andy

This email is a progress report about organising our online academic-practitioners forum. I am publishing this email on my personal space at dadamac.net, as well as sending you a personal email, so I will briefly go over old ground before moving on.