So, here’s another blog on Moodle, making your list of feeds even longer then it already is. How will this space be different from the other, good ones, on the topic? For one, I am not writing from the gently pampered position inside an educational building of the West. I have come to know and use the learning platform on the other side of the digital divide.
(What reminds me of the Berlin Wall when still standing, with its observation towers in the East and the West barely ten meters apart. It was not difficult to imagine the view from the other angle. In fact, the view wasn’t that different at all. Still, it made a difference, being here or there.)
In 2008 Renaat and me set up a Moodle platform in landlocked Uganda, one of the lowest bandwidth environments of the world. Originally, all traffic went through satellites and was direly expensive. Then the cable arrived from Kenya, but the poor line has proved vulnerable to attacks from pirate ships and other mishaps ever since.
At the moment eWallah is working with organisations in various locations around the globe. Our server is located somewhere in the Cloud. I myself have moved to Brazil, a country whose name looms big in the list of Moodle sites but where I barely speak the language. All good reasons why, in some ways, I prefer to maintain the outlook of an outsider. I will voice issues considering the point of view of the student who benignly lies his way through the admission test but who barely knows how to move a mouse on introduction day. I’ll walk with the enthusiastic mentor whose students visit the platform only because they feel obliged to. I will be the overzealous apprentice administrator who questions and learns.
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