Dadamac

Collaboration, Education, Livelihoods and Development in a Changing World

teacherstalking

What Should First Thursday Aim to Do?

Submitted by vijay on 18 March 2010 - 6:06am

Hi Pam,

It feels good to be back on Dadamac after a long time. The other day, you asked me about my views on the latest First Thursday, in which I tried to participate but could not do much. And I wrote the reason for that in a recent blog comment. Here goes:

"For one, I was having a problem with the Net connection on the First Thursday. And also, to be frank, I just could not connect with the agenda. I felt like a total stranger, groping in the dark.

This is not to belittle the thought and efforts behind First Thursday, but I would ideally like to participate in a lively interaction and exchange of ideas, where I get enriched by the knowledge flow and (try to) enlighten somebody else with whatever little I know.

This time, I felt things were getting quite listless. And I hope I am wrong. For the next chat, can we talk on a couple of topics or more, so that there are enough talking points.

A lot of time gets wasted on pleasantries--and before one gets to focus on the topic, the discussion veers off in some other direction. So as an anchor, you might have to take the tough line, and make participants tow the line.

Teachers Talking

Project is Active: 
Archive

Teachers TalkingTeachers Talking (TT) is an introduction to ICT (Information and Communication Technology) for teachers in rural Africa. It is an inservice training course which ran for the first time in 2004 at Fantsuam Foundation. It has taken various forms over the years, and has also been presented in Kenya thanks to support from CoL (Commonwealth of Learning).

Pamela McLean designed and presented the course at John Dada's request when local teachers started asking to become computer literate.

People and Organisations: 
David Mutua
Florence Bukola Bale
Folabi Sunday Folarin
John Dada
Kazanka Comfort
Pamela McLean
Pastor David
Sabo Bako Kantiyok

Post BarCampAfrica

Submitted by nikki on 12 November 2009 - 9:44am

Participants at this week's UK/Nigeria online meeting were eager to share feedback following Dadamac's successful 5th anniversary celebrations of Teachers Teachers from BarCampAfrica.
It was agreed by both teams that the day had proved both enjoyable and productive.

Our friends in Nigeria expressed their delight at the quality of the contacts that they made and already plans are being discussed to move forward the debates about open software and equipment for the new Community Communication Centre. In fact it was online at BarCampAfrica that John Dada was able to tell us the exciting news that their CCC had just been evaluated and Fantsuam were told it is the best they've seen in Nigeria. No surprise to us here in the UK Dadamac team!

No-computer computer course

Dadamac Day

Project is Active: 
Archive

Dadamac Day is an annual celebration which is held online and at Fantsuam Foundation.

The start

Dadamac Day grew from TT-online, which is part of the Teachers Talking (TT) course. TT-online was a bit of serendipity that came about because Pam habitually runs to the Internet for help. When she sought help for planning TT various bandwith-rich people got involved, and so TT-Online and Dadamac Day were born. Dadamac Day is something that has gradually  evolved as part of a wider picture.

The yahoo group

When John and Pam started planning TT they were simply using emails, and copying in a few key people. Then Pam decided she wanted some more up to date information to feed into the course, so she set up her first online group - a yahoo group. She invited some of her online contacts to join the group, John brought in key contacts from Fantsuam Foundation, the group took off, planning began, and the seeds of Dadamac Day had been sown..

Planning Dadamac Day

Submitted by dadamac on 19 September 2009 - 8:20pm

This week we had the first planning and practice meeting for Dadamac Day (DD).  The DD team, Chollom and Alheri (in Nigeria) and Nikki and Pam (in UK), e-met through one of Dadamac's usual typed Skype conferences.

Date, time and place.

The date and time are agreed -Saturday November 7th 10:00 GMT, 11:00 Nigerian time, 13:00 East Africa Time.