First Meetings at Bahir Dar University
3 March. Bahir Dar University is much smaller than AAU, with 16,000 students on campus and 16,000 in distance education programs. Although the second-biggest city in Ethiopia, this municipality feels much more rural. There are bicycles on the streets — something that would not be possible in Addis because of traffic — and a good deal of agriculture near the university. As at AAU, the setting is multilingual. Internet is in high demand but not easily accessible, and computer access is also limited. Steve Mwiti (ICT) suggested that it would be an overestimation to say that 3-5 percent of students have laptops.
Among the individuals in attendance at this meeting were Tesfeye Dagnew (Coodinator of External Relations), Getachew Setotaw (Bahir Dar University Librarian), and Steve Mwiti (ICT). We were also joined later in the meeting by the Director of Distance Education. The goal of the meeting was to brainstorm possible parallel research projects that might be carried out at BDU and UBC. We had earlier established that supporting learning in multilingual settings and supporting learning or research employing digital technologies might be possible areas of mutual interest and so we moved forward from that point.
By the end of the meeting we had explored four possible areas of research: 1) online distance education; 2) mixed-mode education; 3) supporting learning in multilingual settings; 4) online research dissemination / Digital Journal Archives. Because the infrastructure to support online distance education has yet to be implemented in the region that BDU serves (and anywhere in Ethiopia, for that matter), and considering our subject-area interests, we eventually concluded that mixed-mode education in an on-campus graduate course on English language learning might be a feasible starting point. We are gathering our thoughts on that matter and will discuss possibilities further tomorrow.
March 11th, 2010 at 9:16 am
Dear Teresa and colleagues,
I have been reading your entries with great interest, occasionally consulting google maps and wikipedia to better understand the context in which you are working. What strikes me in particular are the similarities between your experiences in Ethiopia, and the research that our UBC team is conducting in Uganda. One of our primary goals is to determine to what extent digital technology might be used to address local needs in the Ugandan context, notwithstanding resource limitations. We are also centrally concerned with the training of Ugandan scholars, who will be in a position to promote sustainable outcomes.
I hope you will bring to the attention of your Ethiopian colleagues the website we have developed on Applied Linguistics and Literacy in Africa and the Diaspora.(see http://www.renafrica.org). There are many resources on this site that may be of interest to Ethiopian educators and students, and some may wish to become members of the network.
I look forward to further updates, and possible future collaboration.
Bonny Norton.
March 12th, 2010 at 1:58 am
Thanks for your comment, Bonny. I will forward the site you mention and I look forward to speaking about common research interests on our return.
We flew to Amsterdam through Khartoum last night and now have several hours in the airport–a great opportunity with a fast Internet connection (not to mention power) to get some posts up on the blog from the last few days. Best, TMD
March 14th, 2010 at 9:51 pm
Dear Bonny,
I have looked at your website & it’s a commendable job you have done. I know quite a number of lecturers that will be keen on exploring the website.
Keep up the great work.
Rgds,
Steve.