Today, I am reporting to you from a GIZ topical conference, where we discussed „the future of economies and business“. We had here lot’s of experts and numerous programmes on sustainable private sector development and economic policy of GIZ from over 30 countries. Here’s my personal summary of the event for you in four […]
The GC21 E-Academy of GIZ has just started to take in applications for a new round of an online course on “Tutoring for eLearning Communities”. This might be of interest to anyone who works for institutions involved in e-learning or who is closely related to a network of institutions that aim to enhance their capacity […]
Last Friday, I had the chance to take part in some interesting discussions at the „Summer-Academy” of GIZ’s “Academy for International Cooperation“. The issue was “self-empowered and self-guided learning processes”. we learned at the event, that this paradigm transforms trainers into coaches for self-guided learning, requires different pedagogical methods and is fuelled by the open […]
So I am listening to the speakers of the panel “Learning is a two-way street: Participation in Communication and Education” of this years’ “Global Media Forum” of Deutsche Welle. And I keep thinking that the speakers on the panel seem to describe another case of a “stolen concept” here: Kanchan Malik from India’s University of […]
Recently, I had the pleasure to host a group of international experts who wanted to learn more about our alumni networks as part of a “sensing journey”. So I tried to have them “sense” the 50.000 plus members of the communities on the “Alumniportal Germany”, which in real life live in in more than 180 […]
So I learned a new word this morning containing the component “peer”: “peeragogy” comes from Howard Rheingold. He defines it “as the powerful idea of making our class into a community of co-learners”. Also called “Paragogy”, it’s a nascent theory of tech-powered peer to peer pedagogy. What I find particularly interesting in connection with my […]
[Please note: This blog post is a preview of the interview to be published soon on the Alumniportal Deutschland (APD) – subject to further editing]. Last week saw ‘re:publica 2012’ in Berlin, Germany’s largerst conference on blogging, social online networking and internet community. This years edition went global and put Africa on the map of […]
Bas van Abel, head of the design lab at waag society, Netherlands had a great session where he spoke about empowering people and fixing our economy by moving to open peer-to-peer production communities. He gave examples of concrete work with miners in Congo, and prosthesis-makers in Indonesia. Bas starts with a quote from Oscar […]
So re:publica 2012 has started today. Not only with a call for freedom by Harvards Eben Moglen, but also with an interesting talk on ‘open innovation and the contribution of non-experts’ by Beth Kolko. Here’s my summary of it: For Beth, non-experts have the skills to innovate, but lack the recognition and credentials by institutions. […]
It is rare these days to see high-level government thinkers talk about the commons. Here is one: Arun Maira of Indias Planning Commission makes the point that commons-based models are important tools to plan for the future of democracy worldwide. Here is the summary: “The world is full of complex problems, but humanity’s main organizational […]
In the coming days, everyone will talk about the new president of the world bank. I think that the recently announced move of the world bank to an “Open Access Policy for Research and Knowledge” and its launch of an “Open Knowledge Repository” will be more significant over time. According to a press release, the […]
I just read a quite comprehensive “update on the use of e-readers in Africa” by world bank blogger Michael Trucano. It looks like there is quite some movement on the “hardware” side. However, his description of the old “missing-African-content” problem sounds all too familiar. I wonder, when there will be the long-awaited wave of African […]
Just found an interesting TV show on “African Innovation” aired by Al Jazeera three days ago. They make several points e.g: ” Across Africa, developers and programmers are coming up with new technologies from mobile banking to mapping software and medical tablets to cloud storage. Now the continent is increasingly relying on its own homegrown […]
Last week, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) announced a new LPI certification and training project throughout the 22 countries in the League of Arab States. This is certainly good news for ICT capacity building in general and even more interesting for the community of ict@innovation, which has been building training capacities around Linux Administration in Africa […]
What the call is about: The German Government via its Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) released a call to fund research partnerships between German Research institutions and partners in Subsaharan Africa. One of the main goals is to build African ICT study courses and to fund exploratory measures / pilot measures in “Applied […]