Human Rights, Childrens Rights, democracy and gender are in focus in the MKFC discussions with Catherine Isaksson, Secretary General of Centerpartiets Internationella Stiftelse. CIS, among others, runs ongoing projects in South Africa to improve shanty town pre school activities, and another one aiming to improve the quality of teacher educations at a college near by. MKFC could contribute with high quality educational content as well as the e-learning method End-to-End eLearning™.

In the discussions so far we have a similar opinion on the power of change for development in learning activities, and on the huge potential in good e-learning, including the use of different social media.

Olle Lundberg

The 5th International Conference on ICT for Development, Education and Training. This annual event for developing e-learning capacities in Africa took place in Lusaka, Zambia on May 26th to 28th 2010.

Four members from MKFC Stockholm and Helsinki College took part in this conference: Eva Kagiri with eCAP East Africa, Jonas Kwadwo Ansah Boateng with House of Grace Foundation / Ghana Institute of Jornalism, Tuomas Erkkila with MKFC SharingAwareness and Kwabena Obiri-Mainoo with eCAP Ghana Foundation.

Eva Kagiri held a pre-workshop on Wednesday, 26th May, on “Sharing Awareness – Lifelong Well-Beingfor Communities: Improving Health and Creating Change at the Community Level Using ICT”.

Participants who were interviewed after the sessions commented that the workshop was “very interactive and helpful for others to use in their projects.”

Kwabena Obiri-Mainoo also shared a presentation on Thursday, 27th May. His topic was “Sharing Health Education with Rural People in Ghana through ICT”.

The presentation focused on practical ways eCAP Ghana Foundation has been working to bridge the gap in providing health education in underdeveloped and rural communities.

Al-Baraka schools children parents teachers and Stafs have take part Eno planting day for 22-may-2010.

More photos click on the link

Topics: mLearning, mHealth or mBanking

Rules

Competition is open for everybody. You take part with a group or as an individual. You will choose one topic and produce a “solution” from cases described below. Only case solutions that are submitted in time and that fulfil the requirements will be evaluated. One group can take part with one case solution. MKFC Stockholm College and Kemi-Tornio University of Applied Sciences reserve all rights of the case solutions.

All participants are welcomed to take part in the MMMLife Workshop & Festival, where they will have the possibility to present their case in workshop.

Registration to case competition is open 24th of May – 30th of June at http://tinyurl.com/MMMLifeCASE

Competition Time: 24th of May – 23rd of July

mLearning. Come up with a plan how to provide education for app. 100 people living in remote location with mobile technology. There is one landline Internet connection at the location. Nearly everyone at the location has a simple mobile phone and there are good mobile connections at the location. You have 2000 euro at your disposal to provide a lasting solution to provide for people at the location. You can alternatively choose a real remote location and come up with similar plan (2000 euro limit) to provide education with the help of mobile devices.

mHealth. Come up with a plan how to provide health services for people living in remote locations with mobile devices or with the help of mobile devices. You should also consider ways how to raise awareness of health issues such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, diarrheal, warnings about dangerous areas, spreading of diseases etc. can be shared with mobile devices. Also consider, what sort of health services might be needed in remote locations and can these needs be met with mHealth. You can take a real life, existing example of mHealth from a location of your choice, analyze it and build your suggestion upon it.

mBanking. Choose a remote location/s where mBanking is used. Find out reasons why mBanking is used, what needs the people have for mBanking and are they met and what services are currently being provided. You can take a real life and existing example of mBanking some where from the world, analyze it and build your suggestion upon it or you can choose more locations and compare them. Come up with proposal where you benchmark solutions, analyze the current needs at location/s you’ve chosen, provide a solution how these needs could be better met and provide rationale why your solution is transferable to other locations.

Alternatively you can suggest as case of your own. Send your suggestion, to ville@mkfc.se. The suggestion must include a relevant problem within the use of mobile devices, and a hands-on case that the solutions produced will address. Your suggestion for case will be evaluated by the organizers, and if itʼs accepted as a case, it will be published at the event website, so that others can also provide solutions for the case.

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Alternatively you can suggest as case of your own. Send your suggestion, to ville(@)mkfc.se. The suggestion must include a relevant problem within the use of mobile devices, and a hands-on case that the solutions produced will address. Your suggestion for case will be evaluated by the organizers, and if itʼs accepted as a case, it will be published at the event website, so that others can also provide solutions for the case.

The case solution must include:

- Paper (max 10 pp.) and presentation or video or website
- Case must be presented also in NING, in the group with same topic
- The groups must also participate weekly in the NING-group of their topic, for example by posting some insights of their case solution, interesting developments within the case topic or some other contribution to
- “Hands on” approach with suggestions that are usable in real life
- Creative approach in all the materials produced

The case solutions can include:

- Analysis of existing practices
- Group’s own experiences form their local region
- Development / Combination of existing practice

In all cases the following aspects should be taken into consideration:

- What devices and technologies are most appropriate
- Applications that will be used
- Which Service providers will be used
- Transferability of the solutions to different locations
- Energy consumption
- Different age groups

Submission of case solutions.

By email to ville(at)mkfc.se (videos: preferably a link to Youtube or equivalent. )

Evaluation

After the competition has ended a case competition committee will evaluate the solutions, the materials used to present the solution and groups’ contribution in MMMLife-NING. The winning group will be contacted latest 5th of August and information about the winner and winning solution will be published at http://mymobilemylife.org/?page_id=125

Prize

- One 1000 EUR voucher/ gift card to mobile devices supplier of winners choice
- MMMLife Workshop – Festival & dinner party free of charge
- The winning group will get to present their solution in the summer event as one of the main speakers.

- If no one of the winning group is able to take part in the MMMLife Event, it’s alternatively possible to make a video that will be presented at the event. Take this into consideration while preparing the case solution materials

Read more on the My Mobile My Life blog

My Mobile My Life Community

My Mobile My Life Facebook

Foster and Africa Works try to find business opportunities and build links between countries in the areas of travel, studying, business, education, civil society. You will also find information about learning cultures in African countries.

Watch the movies for more information and inspiration!

Panos London promotes the participation of poor and marginalised people in national and international development debates through media and communication projects.

Communication at the heart of change explains the essential role that information and communication plays in development.

Sustainable development demands that people participate in the debates and decisions that affect their lives. They need to be able to receive information, but also to make their voices heard. But the poor are often excluded from these processes by geography and lack of resources or skills. The video explores what can happen when poor and marginalised people are listened to, and given access to the information they need.

Source

Kay Obiri-Mainoo, successful MKFC cooperator in Ghana, initiated village people to make a great change for a better life. Here interviewed by Emma Hedlund, MKFC tutor in Stockholm outside our office.

Yesterday Mr Kalaimani Supramaniam, Asias ENO coordinator and Mr Balu Perumal, Coordinator – Forest and Biodiversity Programme for the Global Environment Centre visited MKFC Stockholm College.

Kalaimani and Balu are in Sweden for a conference in Uppsala, and we are very glad that they found the time to visit us and tell about their incredible mangrove plantings in Malaysia and other work that they are doing.

We also discussed on how we can work more closely together and start with different eLearning programmes in Malaysia.

Tree planting activities Malaysia from ENO picassa photo album.

The brain is like one house with rooms that affect how we learn, biological and psychological factors affects as well. If there are barriers it can create problems in learning and development. Awareness about these questions is the first way of development, the next step is to work on solutions to not punish children.

How punishment affects the child:

• It’s interactions between environment, behaviours and personal areas
• Attention
• Blocks and/or disturb learning
• Create anti social behaviours
• Can generate lies, bullying, cheating
• Create fear
• Generates hinder for the development of the rooms in the brain
• Create insecure adults

This is how to positively stimulate the whole brain in early ages:

• Loving care, experiences, talking, singing, playing, reading and senses stimulated the brain development.
• To smell, hear, see, gently caressing (touch), taste like drinking stimulate children’s whole brain!
• Let the children discover different sources (media, ICT tools, subjects from different perspectives etc)
• Study and observe behaviours
• Strategies for parents, schools and community
• Playing and games release ideas, thoughts, knowledge’s and more!
• Social learning theory (SLT) can be used to see positive and negative behaviours

Source: Wikipedia on Social Learning Theory

Literature tips:

• Non violent communication (Marshall Rosenberg) In English
• The Centre Of Non Violent Communication. In English
• Non Violent Communication In Sweden (Swedish text)

The course Social media / Journalism started in February 2009 and was completed in March 2010. Besides the concept of social media issues were taught concerning gender equality, proper journalistic ethics, and the meaning of freedom of speech, all within digital media. More practical topics were lessons about the actual devices and applications of social media, such as wikis, blogs, twitter, mobile reporting, and Facebook.

The objective of the course was for the students to gain knowledge about how social media can be utilized in one’s work as a journalist, as well as professional communication and networking. Practical assignments successfully completed by the students included starting their personal blogs and using the blogs for news reporting with images. Many students started using twitter and some of them also implemented the use of a wiki into their work as a teacher.

eLearning is based on the concept of learning taking place online, digitally. Such a learning concept, where the teacher and students do not interrelate face to face, is significantly different to the classroom learning traditionally practiced in Ghana. Yet the adult students of this course showed outstanding open-minded attitude towards eLearning, as well as clear enthusiasm towards social media. Plans have been initiated for further implementation of social media into the curriculum of GIJ in Accra.