Dadamac
= enabling networked learning, mostly in Africa
URL = http://www.dadamac.net/
Description
Pamela McLean:
"Dadamac's work is about enabling collaboration (mostly, but not only, between between UK and Nigeria) and is usually about networked learning of one kind and another. We could never have come together and collaborated before the existence of the Internet. http://www.dadamac.net/about-us. Minciu Sodas (Lithuanian for Orchard of Thoughts) is a large online community, which Andrius Kulikauskas started eleven years ago and which has enabled an immeasurable amount of learning.
In Dadamac (and in a different way through Minciu Sodas) people are exploring various ways of using the Internet to create collaborative communities, to network, and to learn from each other.
For instance Dadamac's Cameras for Communication course was jointly developed by Riccardo (in UK) and by the people who subsequently presenting the course in Nigeria. To greatly oversimplify the division of labour: Ricardo in the UK provided the course content words and the Nigerians provided local photos. http://www.dadamac.net/projects/cameras4communication
The initial development of People's Uni was another cross cultural collaboration made possible by the Internet (Prof Dick Heller in UK and John Dada in Nigeria) http://www.dadamac.net/projects/peoplesuni Dadamac is now doing a new collaboration with People's Uni to produce a distance learning course on Sickle Cell Disease for health professionals. This blog post explains the need http://www.dadamac.net/blog/20100204/sickle-cell and this one explains the response and move towards course development http://www.dadamac.net/blog/20100319/starting-new-dadamac-ok-project-scd-peoples-uni
Since that blog post five health professionals have joined the course development team. As I remember from the introductions, I think they all Doctors (I know that three of them are) and they are all in different locations, (scattered across three different countries in Africa). At present we are introducing ourselves, discovering how "bandwidth rich or bandwidth challenged" our team members are, and discussing what should be included on the course. It will be a challenge. The work has no funding, but there is a need, People's Ini provides the online venue and the structure for developing and presenting the course, and people are willing to put in time to do it, so we will give it a go." (email April 2010)