My Blog

Communication channel meets information bottleneck - skype call prep February 21, 2011

Hi Ben (and readers of my open letters at http://dadamac.posterous.com )

It it was good to meet you today. In anticipation of our follow-up Skype call I plan to collect up some references which may be useful to us.  I'm not expecting we will need them all ( we may even use completely different ones) but it will be a useful exercise for me to discover what I have to hand and what is missing. By collecting these up in advance I'll be freeing up our conversation time. I'll start by working through the list that we looked at briefly today towards the end of our conversation.

Open letter

By the way - I'm sending this is an open letter as part of my experiments with posterous - to see it if will help me to be less of an information bottleneck - See Eight Weeks on Posterous -16 May 2010  http://www.dadamac.net/blog/20100516/eight-weeks-posterous 

Making a quick list for Ben.

The context for this list was that you contacted me about Think Africa Press, a recently launched website focussing on pan-African news and commentary and a new project - Think Africa Schools. In our discussion we widened this out to cover "a platform.. different voices.. different opinions.. not one dimensional... many different ideas.. academic and grass roots.. via auniversities and grass roots groups". You had already tried to contact schools “through the usual channels” but had run into some difficulties, which it seems that Dadamac may be able to help you to overcome.

Before our meeting I had jotted down first thoughts for a list of people and projects that could be useful to you which I'm copying below. If I have relevant background information I will drop it in as I go along. If not then I'll will make a note to myself to try to write it up at some time (and if I haven't written it up I'll just tell you about it). I won't try to write full explanations about why things are included - because I'll know that, and I can tell you when we are talking - but I'll just write a hint.. The links don't explain why I think these people are relevant to your interests - I would need to explain that.

The list

Omo - and his connections with Open Source, Universities, and the school he used to attend -

Fola - and the rural primary school where he teaches - near Ago-Are

ESPIN - a DFID initiative for rural schools and the connections that John Dada and his team have with that project
People and Place - a project we did with the children's computer club at Fantsuam and Teeside university
Ken and Kibera - Naafsi acrobats teach children in schools - they wanted to join in People and Place
Tom and the deaf school -

Kayiwa Fred - and his young people in the football teams

Adults leading youth programmes - something to think around

Olalekan - wants to help with diaspora-Nigeria connections - good local source of info on Yoruba culture.
Victoria Adetona - computer literate geography teacher near Okeho

Pastor David - has been doing "computer orientation " work with rural schools for years
Caroline Ifeka - computer literacy work with schools for pastoralists

Minciu Sodas - great online network - many active contributors from "grassroots Africa"
Teachers Talking - all kinds of knowledge and networking, various contacts from that programme - Nigeria and Kenya. Also interesting experiments linking up with two schools in Ireland through Peter Heany and Don McBurney.
David Mutua - arranged TT in Kenya - great networker.

So - that's something for us to get started with. Be aware that I jotted the list  down before we met, before we agreed that it was probably better to widen out, rather than just having a schools focus.  

It may be better to look at what concerns are actually coming up from the grass roots - such as John's current concerns with health, and Sam's with drought.

We also need to look seriously at the win-wins behind this project - for anyone we invite to get involved. You and I may be somewhat obsessive teacher-learner-communicator types of people - but other people are busy doing other things . Before we bother them we need to consider practicalities like -

  • Why would they want to take time out of their busy lives to get involved in cross- cultural communication?
  • How much trouble would it be to them?
  • What costs would they incur?
  • Who would they be communicating with and why?
As it is your project you are better placed than me to answer these questions - so something else for us to consider in our skype chat.

By the way - might you be free to join in a skype chat on March 3rd between 9.00 and 10.00am UK time? It is our next First Thursday meeting - a chance for you to connect up with some of the UK-Nigeria team for a typed skype chat.

If you can join us, and could let me know tomorrow, then I could tell people during the UK-Nigeria team meeting on Wednesday.

It was a great to meet you - as you are probably getting to realise I am an information bottleneck - struggling to become an information channel - so I am delighted to link up with someone who is a multi-faceted communication channel. I am hoping we will find the right areas of overlap so that you get the information you want to share, and I will see at least some of "my"  information flowing more freely, and enabling greater understanding, and better decision making amongst the people you aim to inform.      

When shall we fix our skype chat?

Pamela
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