Pain in the neck

I’m sure that skeletomuscular disorders brought on by overusing a computer aren’t very common in our part of Kenya. Today I’ve been working on a website for our Agriculture College students and I think I might have overdone it a bit.  It’s a bit of an obsessional thing when you start getting into it – (fortunately Pizza and Red Bull aren’t an option over here so I can’t really go for the full on web designer approach).

I’m sure I’ve blamed my Dad for a number of things in the past without any justification, but I am absolutely sure that he is largely responsible for my hoarding instincts. Fortunately my hoarding is almost entirely electronic these days, (unlike my Dad whose garage is home to a cornucopia of amazing tools, gadgets, fishing rods, home brew, fixatives, fixtures and fittings that are testimony to a lifetime of inspired ‘stashing things away’). Not to mention the loft full of books! To be fair to Dad his hoarding instinct has meant that he’s always been on the money when the proverbial ‘rainy day’ has come or anybody has needed that specialist tool for an otherwise impossible job.

I digress. Back to the web site. Having made a living as an ICT teacher for a number of years I’ve witnessed the phenomenal growth of the Internet and Information Technology as tools for learning. Despite the more grandiose claims that have been made about the educational value of computers they have certainly opened up a whole new world of learning for anybody who can get on to the world wide web. Unfortunately you really need a fast Internet connection if you want to make the most of the vast quantity of books, audio and video files that are freely available if you have the patience to drill down to the fiftieth page of a Google search. So far I’ve managed to collect about 1500 video files, 4,000 audio files and 7,500 text files, (PDF). Nearly all of them are directly related to our work in Kenya – a combination of resources for our church, school, agriculture college and staff training.

I have a dream, (honest), of rural schools in Kenya that have access to these fabulous resources. On laptop computers, running on solar power. Viewed through a website. At fast broadband speeds. At present not very many of these schools have computers or solar power. Or the skills to design websites for learning. Or a fast internet connection, (despite explosive growth in mobile network coverage in rural Kenya, the Internet is still accessed via a phone SIM, making it nearly impossible to download large audio, video or PDF files).

We’re working on a solution. The website I’m designing will run from the hard disk of our laptops and can be shared with other schools by simply transferring the entire website to their computer(s) via a portable USB hard drive or large capacity memory stick. With the help of our friends from Cisco we are hoping to run the website on a wireless network around our school site, (using the same, simple, router technology that most of you use to run wireless networks in your homes). These simple systems will make it possible for some of the poorest pupils in Kenya to access the same high quality learning resources that better off students in the West take for granted. We hope to have the prototype running by March. Once it’s up and running and the bugs have been ironed out we’ll be able to start offering training to other teachers in the area. After that it’s just a question of helping them to obtain the computers .........................