[UgaBYTES] Summary of the e-conference

[Polly Gaster]

Hello all

Thanks for the summary. It reminds me that I have a few points nobody else
seems to have raised, so better make them now!

1. I was really hoping that someone else wd raise this one, as it always seems
to be me going on and on about it - what are people's view on language issues?
We seem to be talking about continent-wide, or regional, or national academies
and forgetting that continent-wide and regional both raise problems. I wonder
if it is significant that this list gets such very small participation from
French-speaking countries? Not to mention Portuguese-speaking of course. When
we speak about standardising courses, let us not forget that that involves
translating everything into at least 4 languages if we leave out Spanish,
Swahili, etc - French, Arabic, Portuguese and English - and this has quite
serious cost and training implications.

2. About course materials - I hope people will look at the UNESCO CMC manual
How to Get Started and Keep Going, which I think is more practical and less
country-based than the previous Telecentre Cookbook. It's not a course
training manual but a general introduction. And also the Multimedia Training
Kit, the materials available at ITO, and the UNESCO Open Training Platform (I
think that's the name) which has training resources on all sorts of things,
not just ICT. Also, I personally think that the microsoft Digital Literacy
course is better than the Unlimited Potential curriculum, partly because it's
not so big.

3. However, having said that I do agree that in the area of management, for
example, while there is a lot of material about general principles it is
usually necessary to adapt to local conditions and ways of doing things. This
brings me to my other concern - I think that for an Academy to be an Academy
with recognised certification it is essential for the courses to be identical
and to an identical standard wherever they are given. This means that
providing materials centrally that can then be adapted locally doesn't work
because you can never be sure that the certificate means the same thing from
one region to the next or one trainer to the next. This is fairly easy to do
in purely technical courses such as CISCO or Computer Driving Licence, but
less easy in what we are calling the "soft subjects". And when Micrisoft told
us that the UP curriculum was so big because trainers would then pick and mix
the bits they wanted we ran up against exactly this problem - how could we
then give a Microsoft certificate?

Many of you may disagree with this last opinion, in particular, but I thought
I should put it on the table for debate.

Polly
 





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Polly Gaster
TICs para Desenvolvimento/ICT4D
Centro de Informatica da Universidade Eduardo Mondlane (CIUEM)
Campus Universitario, Maputo, Mozambique
e-mail: polly.gaster at uem.mz
cel: +258-82-3264540
tel/fax: +258-21-485779
Skype: polly_gaster