This week I attended the 5th Elearning Africa Conference in Lusaka, Zambia, seeing all the great progress that is being made across the continent in developing elearning. I had the opportunity to present the Digital Campus project in the eLearning in Higher Education strand. Although the time available was short, I had a great response to my presentation and made many new contacts, which will open up some new possibilities and directions in which we can take the project in the coming few months/year.

Many projects in the rest of the conference discussed the use of mobile technologies and these all seemed to demonstrate just how much further behind Ethiopia is in comparison to other African countries. Many projects were able to proceed due to almost 100% mobile phone ownership by students, not only basic models either, but students owning relatively high spec media and smart phones. In Mekelle, it appears to me that students have only recently been able to access these types of devices so ownership levels are stll very low. All this shows that even within Africa a big digital divide remains.

In the exhibition area, many companies presented shared computing solutions, but none of these seemed to me to be as cost effective and as scalable as the solution we are building at Mekelle Uni. The final conference debate revolved around the question as to whether a target of 1:1 computing (every student owning a laptop/computer) was necessary and achievable given the financial resources available. The debate was quite heated, with very strong opinions on each side.

There were several great sessions around the use of open source software and how quality research can be encourages within African universities. All of which fits in really well with the aims and ethos of the Digital Campus project.