Guest Post: From the eLearning Africa 2010 Conference in Zambia

[Note: This week’s blog post is from Bernard Appiah, AuthorAID graduate assistant. Bernard recently attended an international conference at which he gave a demonstration titled “AuthorAID at INASP: An ICT-enabled mentoring project helping developing-country researchers to publish their work”.  Below, Bernard reports on the conference. Thank you, Bernard! –Barbara]

In the past weeks, the world witnessed a major global event in southern Africa: Africa’s first soccer World Cup, which was staged in South Africa.

But just before the World Cup began, another global event occurred in a southern African country: Zambia. This event, known as eLearning Africa 2010, was attended by 1,778 delegates—including researchers—from 78 countries. Some delegates came from Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

Main themes of the conference included

• using information communication and technology (ICT) to develop sectors such as education, health, agriculture, and the corporate world, and
• understanding the theoretical models that guide use of technologies to promote learning.

I attended this conference to give a demonstration on how AuthorAID uses ICT to help developing-country researchers to publish their work.  

Several keynote speeches and plenary sessions underscored the need to use technology to empower Africa’s educational system and to drive social change.

Some experts discussed how to adapt openly accessible tools and content to promote quality research at African universities. These tools included those for accessing literature and research findings.

Finally, delegates had an open debate on whether African educational institutions should invest more in ICTs—particularly the one computer per child concept—despite the global financial crisis. Delegates generally agreed that priority should be given to quality teacher training before investing more in ICTs.

A brief report on the conference is available at http://www.elearning-africa.com/past_conferences.php.

The next conference will take place in Tanzania in May 2011.