The 4-day Cross Country Learning Event, which was organised by IICD and co-facilitated with GeSci, allowed participants - secondary school teachers, university lecturers, ministry officials, and ICT4E (ICT for education) project coordinators from Zambia, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Bolivia, Jamaica, Uganda, and Tanzania - to discuss their day-to-day experiences in this area, share their triumphs, and identify ‘good practices’. It also helped participants to find solutions to persistent challenges.

In order to gather learning experiences from the programmes supported by IICD in the various countries in which it works, local organisations that work on ICT-for-Education programmes are brought together. The Cross-Country Learning Events encourage and enable the organisations to share knowledge and skills, expertise and experiences gained in the field in which they work. The knowledge acquired is then shared across countries, and reinvested in existing or new ICT-enabled education sector activities. At the international level, IICD disseminates best practice information gathered during the event.

In many respects, the event was pioneering. Methodologies that encourage knowledge sharing and peer learning were employed, underpinned by an approach that appreciates practical and proven experiences contributed by participants. Traditional types of presentations were actively discouraged. On top of that, the event was facilitated in three languages simultaneously to allow for active participation by all – English, French, and Spanish!

The CCLE was timed to coincide with the largest annual eLearning event in Africa - eLearning Africa 2008 – which was hosted by Ghana this year. This enabled IICD to sponsor a large group of CCLE participants to attend eLearning Africa after the CCLE where they made presentations, attended workshops, and took part in an interactive Panel Discussion, chaired by IICD, on ‘Developing Local Content for Secondary Schools in Africa: Voices from the Front Line’. The good practices and experience-based advice gathered during the CCLE were brought into the conversations taking place at the large regional conference.

Learning through Exchanging

The CCLE agenda included diverse activities designed for unearthing participants' experiences in developing educational content using ICTs. The session started with a Storytelling exercise which allowed participants to better get to understand more about what motivates and inspires them. Benjamin Sia shared his story:

“I was in a small village in Burkina Faso. The headmaster was supposed to make a presentation to the teachers. I put the presentation into Power Point. The head was really happy. Now the headmaster is the one who does the computer maintenance at the school. The school’s computer lab is open to everyone. Before this, the headmaster was very anti-ICT. Now he is really engaged.”

Participants broke into groups to prepare the knowledge supermarket exercise; two groups of individuals who are actively implementing ICT projects in schools or teacher training colleges, and one group of individuals who are working at lobbying, advocacy and the networking level, aiming to bring practitioners' experiences together with policy makers and other sector actors.

A problem shared is a problem halved: the power of Peer Assists

The morning of the second day allowed three participants to use the opportunity to obtain their peers' advice to challenges they have been facing. From a list of challenges offered by participants, three were chosen that would be interesting to tackle collectively using the Peer Assist methodology:    

Edmund Segujja (Uganda): I have spent months trying to find the right, user-friendly software to digitise, manage and update teaching materials developed by our trainee teachers.

Patrice Kaboré (Burkina Faso): Our challenge is how to build capacity so that content and tools can be used by a larger group of teachers – how do we upscale the capacity beyond the teachers involved in the pilot phase?

Lucia Muñoz (Bolivia): We want to use the educational telecentres to create content on the history of a municipality and distribute it – I would like to receive strategies and methodologies to do this.

The participants being assisted all received more than three flip charts full of suggestions and advice from their peers and were happy that they had openly shared their challenge with the group.
 
The World Café methodology was used to delve deeper into the participants' experiences and practices related to three themes that kept recurring. Discussions on the three tables focused on identifying answers to questions such as What worked?, What contributed to making it work? In the following areas:

• Creating locally relevant content
• Motivating teachers to use ICTs to develop content
• Software tools and applications to develop content and capacities required

Much of the third day was spent allowing participants to share their content, software, experiences and ideas in the form of an Open Space session. This allowed all of the issues that were most important to the participants to be raised and their work to be shared. Participants demonstrated their use of animation software for educational content, use of mind-mapping tools, projects that use ICT to support literacy for Jamaican at-risk youth, Web 2.0 tools for educators, and much more. The buzz in the room was infectious!

On the morning of the last day, an on-site visit to Morning Star Secondary School enabled  participants to ask the school administrators, ICT teachers and pupils first-hand about their experiences of using ICTs and make comparisons with the situation in their own schools.  A list of burning questions which had not yet been sufficiently answered by the knowledge exercises that had taken place, and the visit gave them the opportunity to ask the dynamic school head, experienced ICT teachers, and enthusiastic students for their thoughts and experiences directly. 

Good Practices – a methodology?

When wrapping up and identifying the Good Practices that had been heard throughout the workshop, it was interesting to note that many of the responses from participants included the knowledge sharing methodologies as Good Practices. For many of the participants, activities such as Peer Assists, Open Space, and facilitated Storytelling were new and were highly appreciated. Action plans were formulated that included sharing the acquired knowledge with colleagues and teachers back home, investigating web2.0 resources for educators (like www.teachertube.com,  www.edublogs.org or ww.curriki.org), but also employing Peer Assist methodologies in their next meetings with teachers and lecturers! 

These examples, and others, will be collected by IICD and published later in 2008.   

Summing up the pioneering spirit of the CCLE on the last day, Oumarou Sawadogo (Burkina Faso) stated

“I discovered here that many other countries have the same problem. In Zambia and Bolivia there are a lot of things that we can instantly draw upon and make use of. Therefore, when I go back to Burkina Faso I will make sure that the process of bringing everyone together gets off the ground.”