http://ignatiawebs.blogspot.com/2009/05/preparing-for-elearning-africa.html

This year's eLearning Africa Conference will be held in Dakar, Senegal. It promises to be a great event with a lot of creative, empowering demonstrations and presentations.

During the conference I will try to live blog (some live blogging tips from others)/tweet as I am watching the different presentations, keynotes and workshops. I will attend mostly mLearning topics.

While I have not gone through the complete program, I will be joining these sessions in which I have an active role:

Effective evaluation workshop
A pre-conference workshop on effective evaluation (workshop A1) organized by John Traxler and David Hollow (great and very knowledgeable people) who asked me to join them as a third expert (for which I am very grateful). The workshop will give the participants a (we hope) fun-filled and in-depth look at effective evaluation of TELearning materials and projects.

A small excerpt describing this workshop: "There is a small but growing literature of evaluation of eLearning within development contexts. However, there remains a lack of a fully coherent and theorised framework for evaluation, especially when emergent or mobile technologies are being deployed. This workshop will contribute to a more systematic understanding of evaluation and impact-assessment within the field.

The workshop will address three key themes:

• * Principles and Priorities
• * Methods, Tools and Techniques
• * Ethics and Quality

Each theme will be preceded by a brief talk that will define the scope of the theme and provide examples in order to create a shared understanding and to catalyse discussion. Each theme will then be explored by small groups, with each working on different evaluation scenarios and devising or deciding issues, concerns and appropriate interventions."

So join this session if you want to get active and learn effective evaluation... this is the workshop to join. We are also lovely people to meet :-)


Mobile project Tibotec
Then on Thursday I will join my wonderful colleague Carlos Kiyan when he will present the Institute of Tropical Medicine's mobile project funded by Tibotec and build in collaboration with the Tropical Institute Alexander von Humboldt in Peru. All of us have worked hard on this project, so we are looking forward to presenting it during the eLearning Africa conference.

Below you can find our (still a bit draft) version of the presentation we will deliver.
The project uses mobile devices (N95 and iPhone) to send mobile courses to medical workers in the field (in and around Lima). We use wifi, photosharing, skype, iclone ... just look at the options we choose. I did write a blogpost about the first endeavours for this Tibotec project here.

Not sure which hashtag to use for eLearning Africa, so I will use ela2009 and ela09... what do you think.