Tectonic shift think tank/Nicholas Kimolo

The African Wishlist – FLOSS4Edu by Nicholas Kimolo (Kenya), (nkimolo@gmail.com)

FLOSS4Edu – The Vision

“By 2009 make available appropriate educational content and a set of easy to use FLOSS tools to 100 educational institutions while building the largest community of educational practitioners collaborating on the development of Free and Open Educational Resources in Africa” We believe in “Education for all and by all” because everyone has a story to tell. We not only want to put in on paper but on Wiki.

FLOSS4Edu – The Need

• Absence of Educational Content for African Schools
• The lack of valuable skills and knowledge to use modern technologies
• Lack of access to existing educational resources caused by high bandwidth costs
• We lack educational resources that help us to participate and not only to consume

Why Africa needs Open Content

• Simply put, “ We cannot afford any other option”
• We are losing our culture, traditional knowledge and identity- “Lion King is an African story”. We cannot film our own wildlife and put it on satellite television.
• Knowledge has been commercialised – something new to us.
• Access will soon not be a problem – so what next? There is nothing coming out of Africa now
• We want to participate in the knowledge economy

FLOSS4Edu – The Strategy

• Build a strong community around creating Open Educational Content.
• Carry out promotional activities to improve awareness on Wiki for Education solutions
• Support capacity building initiatives and develop relevant OER’s for installation and pedagogical support
• Collaboratively work together towards the development of wiki based open educational content
• Involve EVERYONE in the development of content

FLOSS4Edu – The Results so far

• Workshops for Educational Practioners in various regions of the African Continent
• FLOSS4Edu has grown with now over 5 chapters in various regions of the continent
• Over 100 lessons developed by Educational practitioners with minimal IT skills hosted within the Wikieducator
• Influenced change in Educational Networks to adopt the development of OER under wikieducator

FLOSS4Edu – Our wishlist

• We need technology that can work with adhoc internet access – e.g an Offline wiki editor with the ability to synchronise via email whenever one has access to internet
• We need wiki to work on mobile phones. We need also the ability to be able to translate and localise.
• We need open access incorporated with the Learn4Content project.
• We need money to set up open digital villages where people pay for access through content production
• We want to participate and not consume
• We want to build capacity and create awareness. A good example would be “The one day for Open Content campaign”

FLOSS4Edu – A case study

• In Kenya we have 150,000 University students, if we engage them to produce a single lesson on anything of their interest we have 150k articles in Wikieducator per month (1.8m per year)
• We seek sponsorship from google and microsoft etc we establish open digital villages where people pay for access through producing content
• Let this be replicated in other African countries and let this go on and on
• “Is it possible?”