COE professor to take ed tech to African nation

When you think of developing nations that are ripe for a boom in educational technology, Rwanda is probably one of the last places that come to mind.

But COE Associate Professor Rick Ferdig says the central African nation, best known for the ruinous conflicts it endured in the 1990s, is now eager to move into the 21st Century.

Thanks to a $5,000 grant from UF’s Center for African Studies, Ferdig will travel to Rwanda in May to find ways information technology can be used to bring more educational opportunity to Rwandans.

“This is my first visit to Rwanda, and I’m going to be surveying the ed tech landscape,” said Ferdig, whose teaching and research focuses on educational technology. “I’m going to be looking for the most effective ways to make an impact with information technology and distance learning.”

Why Rwanda? Ferdig’s project grew out of his involvement with a three-year project called International Leadership in Educational Technology (http://www.public.iastate.edu/~ilet/), which forged partnerships between the U.S. and several countries across Europe. The success of the project led ILET participants to look for ways they could bring inexpensive, versatile computing technologies to schools in Africa. Participants who knew the region well suggested Rwanda as the best place to start.

“They seem to have a certain desire for this, a willingness to grow and participate in a global society,” Ferdig said.

Ferdig expects to develop course content for the Kigali Institute of Education, one of a number of Rwandan institutions that have been striving to provide state-of-the-art information technology to teachers and students. He will also tour rural schools in search of ways information technology can improve student learning – even in an environment with little of the infrastructure usually associated with computing.

“This may be a good environment for handhelds or similar options,” Ferdig said.

Ferdig said he hopes to develop partnerships that will give UF students the chance to study, teach and do research in Rwanda. His goal is to partner with ILET and the UF Center for African Studies to take a group of students and faculty to Rwanda and Tanzania in Summer, 2008.

Those students will also learn to tread with a light foot. Modern media have helped accelerate the disintegration of many traditional cultures in Africa, Ferdig said, but he hopes to explore ways information technology can be used to preserve and honor Rwanda’s heritage – perhaps by creating digital archives of historical records or artifacts.

Ferdig is also using the grant to Africanize the content of educational technology courses.

“If you look at the content of many American ed tech courses, you see that its founded very much on European and American resources,” he said. “I’d like to find ways to bring in more content that reflects the global society more generally, and Africa specifically.”