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Collaboration, Education, Livelihoods and Development in a Changing World

Looking back at May and forward to June 2012

The turn of the month was extremely busy with a great burst of attention focussed on FastTractor, with deadlines in June. Like most Dadamac things Fast Tractor emerged from something else. It started with a few conversations, a shared concern, conversations developing into a commitment and then action. Fast Tractor is our first serious attempt at crowd funding and will be an axperiment in impact investment. More details are given in Pam's notes, where the development of Fast Tractor is traced through the last couple of weeks of the month.

Pam's Notes: 

Events 

Events this month illustrate my various interconnected interests.

My main interest is education.

At present I'm looking at how the Intenet influences our opportunites to create our own unique learning journeys and investigations., much of it in collboration with others. I like the opportunities the Internet offers for greater inclusivenss as well, which is partly how I first got involved in rural Nigeria (in connectiosn with someone else's dream to proide better educaitonal opporunites locally).

Through being involved in rural Africa I needed to know more about "Development" (so I learned how to learn about that in online ways and through face-to-face opporunites in London). I soon found myself invovled in ICT (Information and Commnicaton Technologies)  for Education and ICT for Development.

Involvement in those areas leads very naturally to wider concers such as sharing and co-creating knowledge, sharing good practice, the development and use of apporpriate technology, sustainable development, agriculture, industry, lievlihoods, and so on.

I got fascinated by the communication aspects of ICT - the cross-cultural collaboration that we could do, and the challenges we had to overcome to make this communicatiion work effectively. (Hint - the technology, in its physical sense, is the least of the problems).

I found that some of the lessons relating to communicatoion, collaboration,integrated development, livelihoods, wider patterns of change and more, were applicable in other contexts, including closer to home.

Events this month illustrate elements of my inter-connected interests.  

  • May 1st: ‘Knowledge Policy and Power in International Development: A Practical Guide’ – European Book Launch - Overseas Development Institute - (I try to be aware of "development work" in case any of it is directly relevant to our work at the grass roots).  http://www.odi.org.uk/events/details.asp?utm_source=event-update&utm_med...
  • Miscellaneous May dates at the Westminster Hub including May 4th and May 8th
  • May 4th; At Westminster Hub with Indy - he'd invited me to talk with him about education - we used Eco^2 protocol. Education and emergent 21st century systems are my main interests (education and development are interlinked - at all levels - from the perosnal to the communal at a local community level, national level, every level).
  • May 8th: Mobile Innovation in the Majority World: An African Case Study - Praekelt Consulting and its sister company Praekelt Foundation at Hub Westminster - http://www.eventbrite.com/event/3460677981 - I'm a Hub Westminster member now, and glad there is a new International development group starting there. This presentation - by another Hub Westminster member - was was the first related event - and,with its emphasis on mobile phones (inlcuding Kenya adn Nigeria) it was close to me interests..
  • May 12th: The second Collage Network workshop - http://collageworkshop2-eorg.eventbrite.co.uk/?ebtv=C - Collage emerged from the "knowledge and networks" of  Dadamac, applied in the UK 
  • May 16th: One of our usual weekly UK-Nigeria Dadamac team online meetings - what made it particularly noteworhty was the update that John gave us about the government subsidised tractor scheme - that was the start of what becaem known ss "Fast Tractor" - I wrote about it a couple of days later on posterous - http://dadamac.posterous.com/fast-tractor-you-saw-it-here-first-join-us.
  • May 17th: The monthly Dadamac meetup  that I organise on the Third Thursday of the month in Central London (to be renamed Collage Network meetup). It's an opportunity for continuing conversations about personal projects and how we can help each other http://www.meetup.com/Dadamac/events/60680632/
  • May 18th:  Commoning Seminar - last of a series on Rebuilding our Beloved Commons, but the only one I could get to. Various aspects of School of Commoning interest me, (some related to the content - "Commonoing" some related to the "school" aspect i.e. issues about learning and teaching and sructures to enable that to happen.) http://www.schoolofcommoning.com/content/introduction-quilligan-seminars...
  • May 19th: GobalNet21 - PICS Festival 2012: Photographic Images Changing Society - http://www.meetup.com/21stCenturyNetwork/events/51252922/
  • May 19th: Steve Podmore arranged a meeting with Iain Harrison and me to follow on from the PICS Festival. (Steve and I originally met through GlobalNet21 - it was the first time Iain and I had met). By the time the evening was over we were starting to make decisions together and the FastTractor team was coming into being.
  • May 24th - Changing pedagogies, changing technology and changing organizational systems for ODL (Open adn Distance Lerning)  - Centre for Distance Learning lunch time seminar. - http://cdelondon.wordpress.com/2012/05/07/changing-pedagogies-changing-t... - A particularly relevant one (some of the explanations and classifications described things I recognised but did not have such good language to describe them) . I look forward to the slide share as I might cite it in something I'm due to write about e-learning and my on experiences..
  • May 26th - Saturday. It was the first chance that Steve, Iain and I had to get together and work on making FastTractor visible to people. We had some highy ambitious ideas to implement if we could get other people to join us on the day. In the event, Iain couldn't join us until early evening, and no-one else was around at all, I brought useful background knowledge, but not much in the way of the practical skills Steve was hoping to call on,  so It was a steep learning curve kind of a day.
  • May 29th - Fast Tractor set off, with a website, twitter account, face book presence and online giving facility. We started to tell people and try to raise the money John needed.
  • May 30th - included sharing FastTractor with eco^2 contacts at the Hub, and doing some work on it there together.
  • May 31st - David Pinto, Andy Brromfiedl and Nikki Fishman were all at my place and helped to push FastTractor forward.

Posts to Dadamac's posterous during May 2012

These show interests related to Dadamac - but wider than we presently include at Dadamac.net

First Thursdays: 

Blog posts this month

Storm at Ago-Are
This week the UK-Nigeria meeting concentrated on the Dadamac outpost in Ago-Are which is run by Fola Sunday. Earlier in  the week we...
Talking Rubbish....again!
  "The safe disposal of plastic waste is a perennial problem that gets worse by the day, so we have to be committed to efforts to...
Tractor Trouble -Urgent help needed please
Good news and bad news at last week’s meeting regarding John Dada’s long-running quest to secure a crucial tractor for Fantsuam Foundation...
Fantsuam Update
The Weekly UK-Nigeria meetings are always varied but this time the focus was more on the format than the content. In fact the meeting was...