Category: EBB

The Wonky Road Ahead

The network here is a bit wonky.

According to Charles, one of our liaisons on the ground here, the Ministry of Education (MOE) would have preferred another venue.

That venue did not complete the required rating that would have established it as a Historically Disadvantaged Institution. Evidently, in order to bid for the contract, a business should qualify as a HDI.

We’re working with approximately 40 Senior Education Specialist e-Personnel this week. They work with the 6,000+ schools in the Eastern Cape province. The majority are responsible for tech training for around 300 schools.

At evening tea last night, one e-Personnel boasted that she was able to travel to a record 40 schools in one month thanks to her new government-subsidized car.

Eastern Cape has the third highest population in South Africa and is ranked the most impoverished.

And those are just the socio-economic problems.

Based on multiple reports here, the provincial and national management see ICT as a new problem for them to manage.

They are working under the myth that, “ICT can never ever, ever assist teachers in the classroom.”

Charles would like to erase that myth as his legacy.

I’d like to help.

Still, the network here is a bit wonky.

The e-Personnel haven’t all physically met in the same place for years. They’ve received quarterly training in cohorts.

They don’t know what one another is doing.

As I learned at lunch, “We are not terribly interested in what you are doing in your district as we are responsible for our own.”

Similarly, the e-Personnel have never been in the same virtual space at the same time. The e-Learning unit attempted to get everyone together through a site called SocialGo. It didn’t take.

Seems they didn’t inherently value something because it was new.

Yesterday’s session had the e-Personnel logging in to a moodle course we’ve designed for the week. It holds the readings, it holds the homeworks, it holds the forums for discussion. It means something to their progress.

Everyone had to download their homework files and fill out their moodle profiles before leaving the meeting room at night.

We haven’t any wireless access. They needed to be plugged in.

The network here is a bit wonky.

Today I learned something about different

I went to the SuperSpar today.

It was no cheetah, but it was interesting.

While the rest of the team was tidying the odds and ends of their workshop sessions, I took on the task of lunch and dinner preparation.

SuperSpar, btw, is a brand of grocery store chain here. I didn’t go to Spar or KwikSpar. I went to SuperSpar. South Africa is rife with Spars.

If you’ve never been to a grocery store in a country other than your own, it’s a bit trippy.

It’s clearly a grocery store. You can tell that as you walk in. There are groceries.

Little things, though, are different.

Eggs are left out stacked on pallets on the floor rather than in a refrigerated case.

Milk comes in a foil-lined carton with the label “long life milk” and sits on an aisle’s endcap (also unrefrigerated).

Little things.

Also, you can slice your own bread.

I’m not saying a bread knife sits next to the display and you individually slice each piece. I’m saying you get to operate the little machine with the handle that pushes the loaf through while dozens of little jigsaws do their elfish work.

No adult supervision was required.

I’ll admit a small amount of giddiness.

Here’s the thing – we ate the eggs, I made soup with the milk, no one died. Not even a stomachache.

It seems doing things in a way that’s different and thereby initially seems wrong may not, in fact, be wrong. It may, stay with me here, be different.

Not only that, different didn’t mean better. Different didn’t mean worse. Different meant different and same.

Mind = Blown

Thanks, SuperSpar.

This is going to be tough & I petted a cheetah

I petted a cheetah today. It came and laid itself down in front of us and our guide said we could come over and pet it.

I did.

It was strange.

Two of our hosts on the ground here in Eastern Cape took us to Inkwenkwezi Game Reserve today. It was amazing. Given the possibility of jetlag, movement was impressive.

While the nature was impressive, it was part of the conversation at lunch that began, again, to put the situation in Eastern Cape in perspective.

Talking to Charles and Nobubele who head the e-Personnel for all of Eastern Cape Province, we learned:

– Eastern Cape has 6,000 schools.

– The province is broken into 23 districts.

– That’s about 300 schools/district.

– Ten percent of all schools have a computer lab (PC).

– If the other schools have information communication technologies (ICT) it consists of a laptop and a digital projector.

– Many times schools’ principals will lock up the laptops (sometimes in their offices) because they don’t trust their teachers with the ICT.

– In order to get a lab, schools must put the infrastructure in place for the labs. That means everything from the tables to the power supply.

– One school received 30 computers but had power for 15.

A person begins to have perspective on what it means to work with educators here on building capacity for the integration of ICT in education.

You can take your cute workshop on digital storytelling and shove it or throw it or delete it or whatever-verb-you-choose it.

The new old ways of thinking don’t apply here.

New new ways of thinking are what are needed.

Working on that.

What if they don’t like me, again?

I’m imagining this to be easier to write given the lack of Internet connectivity. After three days of travel, we’ve arrived a Gonubie, Eastern Cape, South Africa.

While the others showered or settled in, I put on my running gear and ran down to the water.

Three and a half miles along the Indian Ocean at sunset with a full moon over the horizon turned out to be exactly what I needed.

I’m unsure what to expect from this first week of workshops. Though the e-Personnel here in Eastern Cape will have their own laptops, what I’ve read about the education system here has been bleak. I am, as always, waiting to be proven wrong.

One of the sessions I’m charged with leading this week is backward design. If your memory’s some sort of steel trap, you’ll recall I was Mr. Backward Design for last year’s projects in both South Africa and Kenya.

In Cape Town, we were met with resistance. Not resistance to the ideas or to me in particular, but resistance to what it resembled.

In preparation for this year, I did my research and found this report on the advent and predicted failure of Objectives-Based Education (OBE) in South Africa.

OBE is close to Backward Design (not the same, but close enough).

Handed down in the wake of Apartheid as a way to rejuvenate the South African education system as well as create an influx of creative, innovative thinking, OBE went along with attempts to reform the blatantly racist curriculum of Apartheid.

The study lists 10 reasons OBE will fail in South Africa. The study’s author is no dunce.

After the fact, this helps to put last year’s teachers in context and helps me to gear up for this year.

The piece that hung in my head – if you squint you can still see it hanging there – was the idea that OBE would also mean the advent of a slew of new jargon and terminology accompanying the new way of thinking. Add that to the existing structure of the South African classrooms and the paper argues teachers will overload and either reject OBE or implement it incorrectly, shaping what they’re already doing to fit what they understand OBE to be.

This last part stands at the crux of some of my concerns when working with teachers in a workshop setting.

I’m learning each year to push my students to think more deeply vs. trying to get shallow understandings of everything.

Professional development, though, is so scarce, it’s nearly impossible to resist the urge to throw everything into one week.

Looking at our schedule, I think we’ve a good start.

Tomorrow’s first face-to-face full-team meeting will help to flesh some of this out in my mind.

Sunday’s meeting with Charles (our liaison with the Eastern Cape Ministry of Education) and his colleagues will also bring a better understanding of what the participants here need and want.

So long as we’re working to those needs and wants, we’re on the right path.

Back to Africa (Almost)

I just finished drinking a Coke.

For those who know me, you’ll understand this is somewhat surprising. Then again, I’m sitting in London’s Heathrow Airport, so the Coke here is free of high fructose corn syrup, so I can drink without guilt – mostly.

It’s Day 2 of travel to South Africa.

After an hour’s delay at O’Hare, we boarded our flight.

Then, we sat.

We waited for some piece of cargo or another that was running late on account of multiple deluges that have been battering the Midwest this week.

Once loaded, we pulled away onto the runway.

Then, we sat.

One thing I’ve got to hand to our captain, the dude was forthright with the information.

“Folks, it’s Capt. You’llForgetMyNameLater here on the flight deck. No one seems to be taking our calls at the tower, but we’ll let you know as soon as we know something.”

It went on like this for a couple hours.

The Northern Corridor was shut down, and you know how that goes.

On the plus side, no one was seated near me, so I was able to “stretch out” while watching Leap Year. (If you haven’t, let me save you some time. Everyone ends up happy. Even the bar.)

My body and mind aren’t quite on the same page as to whether I’m tired or hungry or know what day it is. I’m hoping the 11-hour flight to Cape Town will sort that out.

I’m still sorting through my thoughts on the trip as far as expectations go. Most important – I never expected this. In my flurry of e-mails home to let folks know I’d made it through the first leg of the journey safely, I wrote this to a friend:

In other news, I’m going back to Africa – back. That’s crazy, right?

There are these moments when I stop and think about the little and big choices that led to this. I mean, think of all the decisions in my life that have afforded me these opportunities. Three generations ago, my mom’s mom’s mom was born on the banks of a river in the Oklahoma Territory. How’s that for perspective? Whoa.

So, that’s where my brain lives. A taste of this particular moment in my life before I sign off and head to Terminal 5 (I’ve been in the wrong terminal for a few hours now):

I’m sitting in Heathrow watching the World Cup on my way to Cape Town while chatting on Facebook with a friend in Nairobi. Oh, and yesterday morning, I woke up in Springfield, IL.