eLearning Africa: A Narrative of Community, Empowerment, and Geography

eLearning Africa:

A Narrative of Community, Empowerment, and Geography

Michael Gallagher

• #ededc
• #mscel
• 01.11.2010

Theme: Geography (What is Africa?)

"It is not sufficient merely to travel, but necesary

also to come back, and to bring an account." (Hines, 45)

So, we have two distinct entities emerging from the community focus and the community demographic:

• Africa as a physical entity
• Africa as a digital community

This notion of Africa as a physical entity speaks to ethnograhy as travel and translation and bestows great authority on the traveler (ethnographer).

eLearning Africa as a journey requiring participation (at the event) and translation (reporting to our "home" communities)

• Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
• Nairobi, Kenya
• Accra, Ghana
• Dakar, Senegal
• Lusaka Zambia

Bounded by "home" in the New York City area

Delving into the heart of the digital community

involved reconciling the physical entity.

The Makola Market in Accra, Ghana as a metaphor for the nerve center of the community, the vocal core, the social glue for eLearning Africa.

There is no way to fully understand the motivations of the community without appreciating the particulars of locality. eLearning Africa is bounded by experiences derived from space and our relation to the spatial environment, digital or otherwise.

What does eLearning mean to eLearning Africa?

• Markets as networks
• Energy of small business owners=start ups
• Need fuel to drive the machine

University of Ghana, Lagon

Higher education as traditional incubator for development; traditional mechanism for social improvement.

Technology (or lack thereof) has diminished its importance

eLearning Africa attempts to harness the tools (technoloy) to the engine (higher education, entrepreneurism

Leading to empowerment and progress, even liberation. This is a narrative of both the physical entity and digital community involved in eLearning Africa. That technology is not just beneficial, but necessary to development. There is a certain tone of spiritualism in the urgency and optimism in which this is presented.

Why we participate. Norman articulates the liberation/empowerment spirit of many of the community members. It is this spirit that is the social glue, a feeling that you are contributing to something good.

To review to this point, there are two parallel currents that congeal the eLearning Africa community. One, as we have discussed, is the notion of geography, of Africa as a physical place.

My preliminary investigation into this community had me circling the question without answering it. What does it mean to be Africa? What is Africa?

The second focus will be on the digital community of eLearning Africa, a community that appropriates tools and technology as necessary and borrows quite a bit of the empowerment energy of the physical community (revolving around the eLearning Africa event).

The #ela digital community uses as its timepiece the eLearning Africa event held yearly in May. The various calls for papers, special and subgroup activities, post-events, and regional committees leaves flickers of activity in each season.

These events from the #ela website all signal urgency and all serve as a marker for upcoming activity. This urgency reinforces cohesion and participation. The sense of energy is important to this community.

Theme: Boundaries

"The challenge of virtual ethnography is to explore the making of boundaries and the making of connections, especially between the "virtual" and the "real"" (Hines, 64)

The connections between the virtual and the real in eLearning Africa are significant as the virtual feeds the physical location and event and vice versa. They are intertwined considerably, lending their energies to each other.

While #ela is not bound in a physical sense, its appropriation of tools for communication does project boundaries to the discussions. To my knowledge this community has embraced the following:

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Flickr
• YouTube
• Blogs
• Podcasts

"Regardless of the medium or exact pathway to participation, the theory suggests that, over time and with increasingly frequent communications, the sharing of personal identity information and clarification of power relations and new social norms transpires in the online community-that social and cultural information permeates every exchange, effecting a type of gravitational pull that causes every exchange to become coloured with emotional, affiliative, and meaning-rich elements" (Kozinets, 28).

Through these tools and sense of space, we can see emotive elements begin to materialize.

We see interaction of a slightly more intimate nature bounded by the community themes of sharing and knowledge transfer.

Theme: Pragmatism and Dissemination

• Elearning for development
• Elearning for literacy
• Elearning for knowledge sharing
• Pragmatic narrative

#ela serves as a hub for these conversations, but applications

are often regional or local. The larger network spawns smaller ones

that capture the sense of experimentation and ingenuity.

Community has cultural antecedents in Africa; communal activity is the norm, the expected dynamic. This carried over to the eLearning Africa digital community.

Pragmatism in discussion; pragmatic in approach. Non-denominational in application.

Theme: Roles

• International
• African vs. non-African
• Open collaboration

Open question:

• Does moral authority sit with local practice? Does African trump non-African?

Physical Entity: the eLearning Africa Conference

"At eLearning Africa 2010, 1778 education and training practitioners, experts, researchers, newcomers and providers from 78 countries gathered during the three conference days at the Mulungushi International Conference Centre in Lusaka, Zambia.

86% of the participants came from African countries. The conference programme featured the work of 323 speakers and chairpersons from 51 countries, addressing all forms of technology-enhanced learning and including a rich mix of themes, topics and a variety of session formats."

eLearning Africa spawned from the success of Online Educa Berlin

This does not seem problematic to the eLearning Africa community, having what is essentially a foreign construct around a local solution/network.

Although majority of participants are from African countries, often the vocal minority, the social glue, are non-African.

What does this signal to the community? It reaffirms a definition of a digital Africa as being not bounded by geography per se.

Assumptions drawn from these redrawing of what Africa means, assumptions that need further reseearch include:

eLearning Africa will continue to localize on a physical level (eLearning applications being inherently local), which might pose a fracture point for the larger community

#Africa as a digital community, a digital presence, will continue to expand, but will be tested by boundary delineations. With such an active international presence, where does Africa end and the global community begin?

When #Africa transitions from pragmatic themes to innovative/knowledge production ones, what will eLearning Africa offer?

Assumptions (cont.)

At some point, will this be a collection of practitioners? Technologists? Administrators?

Roles will matter more when scope broadens and numbers increase?

However, this all point to Africa transitioning from

to a modern variant, one reflective of the scope and reach as Africa as a conceptual (digital) entity, a change that is being fostered by the eLearning Africa community (and its related communities)

eLearning Africa embodies this view of education and technology as liberation, empowerment, cohesive development for the continent.

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/12362798" width="400" height="300" frameborder="0"></iframe><p><a href="http://vimeo.com/12362798">Norman Sebonego on eLearning, Online Resources, and African development</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/jstorplants">JSTOR Plant Science</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

What is Africa?

eLearning Africa is a community that has sprung from an event, which is reinvigorated by that event. It is bounded by the yearly cycle of that event and energies ebb and flow based on that yearly cycle.

While the community is focused on solutions for Africa, it is an international group with as many non-African participants as African (apporximately).

eLearning Africa is a community of teachers, students, government officials, regional developers, vendors, and international non-profit organizations looking to learn about elearning for Africa, to share lessons learned, and develop a network for communication.

"The challenge of virtual ethnography is to explore the making of boundaries and the making of connections, especially between the "virtual" and the "real"" (Hines, 64)

Theme: Roles

Taken from

http://static02.mediaite.com/geekosystem/uploads/2010/10/true-size-of-africa.jpg