Success! A picture of our up and running ELearning platform!

A bit simple at the moment but it’s got everything we need to kick things off. We have high hopes. It’s taken this long to get things going due to a host of delays and things not working out. All of them every day events around here. You simply have to adjust and then work out ways of getting around them. Things like no staff or disappearing staff (as in gone for good to the mainland or some other posting with no more than a day’s notice) or limited staff without the requisite skills. No hardware, old hardware, cobbled together hardware on its last legs. As an example, below is where I’m used to working.

Above and below is the server room at one of our offices in Berlin.

The above set up would be seen in your average run of the mill organisation, medium sized office or college of about , let’s say 1000+ students.

The equivalent in Zanzibar.

OK, I’m exaggerating. It’s nowhere near that bad. Below is where we actually do all the techy stuff.

The College of Health Sciences server room (where we’re based).

 It also serves  about a 1000+ students but with the kind of kit you would use for a home network setup. Desktops instead of servers, simple ISP communication links instead of dedicated routing and networking equipment. It works. If you accept the limitations and are prepared to go with the ‘Zanzibar flow’, it’s fine. Don’t know about the curtains and table cloth. They’ll have to go as an interior design faux pas (they’re also a fire risk). The ants are a bit tricky too. You can’t get rid of them. They’re all over the place and continuously crawl in and out of PCs. When you type you’ve got ants popping out between the keys and up your fingers. Inside PCs they can cause short circuits and spark internal fires.  Dust is another one. Clogs up the internal fans. You can hear them wheezing away like old men.

We need to say at this point that our job isn’t solely about building an ELearning platform. To be honest we’ve only done that to more clearly demonstrate a method of learning that is very new to Zanzibar. The main aim is to capacity build so when we’re gone the skill sets and knowledge are in place for the Ministry of Health to make their own decisions and implement their own solutions, whether it be ours or something else. We’d much rather leave them with something small scale but with a sense of ownership and confidence to take it forward without us. That would be a success. Failure would be some fancy ‘bells and whistles’ solution that nobody understands or feels a part of. It would die within months of our departure. The whole donor/aid world is littered with them. It’s depressing as hell. Unused medical equipment gathering dust in hospitals because nobody knows how to use them or repair them or they came with the wrong plug. It’s nuts.

 And so to our ‘capacity buildees’. We’re still in the process of selecting potential project management, administration and online facilitator candidates. Below are some of my technical ‘capacity buildees’, my à la David Carradine Kung Fu ‘grasshoppers’ who will receive the benefit of my ’Confucian’ ( Confucing?) wisdom.

Kung Fu grasshopper number 1 is Vuai (on the right of me) and Kung Fu grasshopper number 2 is Hafidh (on the left of me).

 Lucky, lucky people, I hear you say. Yes, some of you have already been fortunate enough to experience first hand my prodigious font of knowledge, a knowledge that grows and matures with units of alcohol consumed. Unfortunately, alcohol assisted sagacity is not an option for most of my trainees (Islam doesn’t see the funny side of booze). A shame.  Still, we’ll see what we can do. Progress reports later.

 And now, as brief introduction to my own personal teaching philosophy, a classic example of Master Po Kung Fu wisdom:

Master Po: [after easily defeating the boy in combat] Ha, ha, never assume because a man has no eyes he cannot see. Close your eyes. What do you hear?

Young Caine: I hear the water, I hear the birds.

Master Po: Do you hear your own heartbeat?

Young Caine: No.

Master Po: Do you hear the grasshopper that is at your feet?

Young Caine: [looking down and seeing the insect] Old man, how is it that you hear these things?

Master Po: Young man, how is it that you do not?

You can’t knock it. You can build servers and area wide networks with this stuff.

Vuai with the tell-tale Kung Fu ‘grasshopper’ look of enlightenment after my recital of a Master Po Kung Fu quote just before take off. Very strange, he tried to jump once we were airborne.

And, since I’m in the mood, I shall now give you a line of poetry:

“<IfModule mod_fcgid.c>FcgidMaxRequestLen 26214400”

All right, all right, it’s a line of otherwise gibberish computing code. This little snippet though just saved our newly born ELearning platform. Without it, its first fledging steps would have been doomed to an online early death. Took me ages to work it out. Forced Nadine out with me to the bar afterwards and put her through an hour or so of explaining the incredible mind exploding intricate details of ‘FastCGI implementations on Apache web architecture’. She didn’t speak to me for 3 days. Master Po sagacity aftershock. I’ve seen it before.