Thursday morning, I got to start my day by taking a private tour of the Kofi Annan Centre for Excellence in ICT, a state-of-the-art technology training centre initiated by the governments of India and Ghana. The centre, in a neighborhood reminiscent of New Delhi's Lodi Road, was surrounded by greenery in every direction, with numerous embassies and NGO headquarters nearby.
Inside, I met with several staff, who were kind enough to lead me around the facility for about an hour. Opened two years ago, the Kofi Annan Centre is home to a variety of high-tech training facilities, including a Cisco Networking Academy. By sheer coincidence, the Cisco Academy was full of young Liberians from the Buduburam refugee camp, which I visited the previous day. We walked from classroom to classroom, most of which were engaged with groups of students working in small groups, huddling around laptops and workstations. I managed to hover in the background in a couple of classes, snapping pictures and getting completely over my head in the technical discussions on networks, routers and switches. Upstairs, we entered a room that needed to be unlocked with a smart card. Inside we found a Padma supercomputer from India. The most powerful computer in Ghana, it runs on an open source operating system; access to it is made available to any Ghanaian researcher starving for hard-core processing power. I'd wanted to check out the centre's main conference room, but it was busy with some official event; someone told me that several government ministers were participating. Only later in the day did I discover that it was a high-level meeting on Ghana's new national ICT policy. Boy, I'd wish I'd been able to get through the door for a few minutes.... Leaving the Annan Centre, David and I drove across town past the sprawling campus of the University of Ghana until we reached the site of my workshop on blogs, podcasts and video blogs. When we arrived, I discovered the cards were stacked against me; the facility had no projector (nor an empty wall on which to project, even if we had found one), and its Internet access was having problems. What those problems were, no one could really explain, but the end result was that my connection was no more than 10k per second. Frustrating as this was, it was actually useful in a way, given the fact I'd be talking about publishing tools that usually require fast bandwidth. Would it be possible for me to demonstrate video blogging or podcasting on a connection slower than what I had at home in the 1980s? We'd have to find out. Eventually, a group of two dozen Ghanaians settled into the room. Most of them were professional journalists, some quite well known in Ghana, while the others were technologists or academics. Since we didn't have a projector, I ditched my plan to show lots of websites and instead led a 90-minute discussion on the digital divide, blogging tools and their potential impact in education, politics and community life. Amos Anyimadu, DDN member and organizer of the event, then suggested we break up for refreshments on the verandah, then return to the conference room in small groups so people could huddle around me and watch me demonstrate various blogging techniques. We enjoyed the outside breeze while chatting over Star beer and Fanta, then worked our way back inside the facility. Just for kicks, I offered to demonstrate podcasting and video blogging using fairly small files, neither of which was larger than 750k. I recorded a quick mp3 file while uploading a compressed two-minute video clip of a taxi ride through Accra. In both cases, it took just over 15 minutes to publish each file, plus another five minutes to way for the Web pages of my blog to download while I updated them. The slowness of the process gave us time to talk about what I was doing in great detail - again, an unexpected bonus caused by limited bandwidth. The participants were very eager to learn more, but some wanted to step back and learn the basics of setting up a blog from scratch. For that, we simply visited Blogger.com and created a blog in about 10 minutes, again slowed down mostly because of bandwidth. They all took copious notes, asking lots of good questions; by the time we were done it was nearly 6pm. Before heading out, though, one of the journalists pulled out his minidisc recorder and a large microphone; he wanted to do an interview for Radio Ghana. We chatted for about 10 minutes, recapping the topics we discussed over the course of the afternoon. Now if I could only get him to publish the recording as a podcast rather than just a national radio broadcast, then he'd do me real proud. :-) -andy -- ----------------------------------- Andy Carvin Program Director EDC Center for Media & Community acarvin @ edc . org http://www.digitaldivide.net http://www.tsunami-info.org Blog: http://www.andycarvin.com ----------------------------------- _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
