Hey guys,
It has been quite some time since we communicated as a community. Oliver and
I had a very successful meeting with Dr.Njoroge –The Director of the
Confucius Institute of Kenyatta University and a member of The Multilingual
Education Network of East Africa on 9th Sept. 2010.Dennis from Google was
set to attend but some official matter cropped up at the last minute and He
could not make it. We also were involved in the preparations of the Google
Health Speaks and took the participants through the Wikipedia tutorial. The
details of each of the above events are below:
*KU Meeting*
- Oliver had mentioned of our possible collaboration with the Confucius
Institute of Kenyatta University. In pursuance to that, we had a meeting
with Dr.Njoroge.We discussed various areas in which we could collaborate as
a Local Chapter with KU (as an institution) and with The Multilingual
Education Network of East Africa. Among the key issues are:
- A possible increase of local content online both in local languages
and other languages
- A possible collaboration with the Multilingual Education Network of EA
to enhance mother tongue curricular and content in schools
- Dr.Njoroge also brought us in the loop of some grand African
Development Bank project that seeks to train translators to make as much
African content on culture and local languages online.(financed by the ADB)
- We also thought of identifying some pilot project of Local relevance
say like try to bring Agricultural information online in local languages as
possible. This idea however was left to the Local Chapter Members to
deliberate on it and then get back to Dr.Njoroge with our thought over the
same as soon as possible.
- Dr,Njoroge also assured us of the support of KU in terms of physical
address when we need legal registration.
- We however agreed to try out the one off projects in collaboration with
The Multilingual Education Network of EA as we work out the registration
details.(upon the Local Chapter Members to determine a pilot)
- Lastly we agreed to have another meeting as soon as possible to
deliberate over the above issues after we(The Local Chapters have discussed
the same)
- We also thought to involve Salome(The Kiswahili Expert from Google
during the next meeting)
*Health Speaks*
Health Speaks is an initiative of Google to try to make Health related
content available online as much as possible. Currently they are running a
pilot to make English Wikipedia articles available in Swahili, Hindi and
Arabic .It is on voluntary basis but they are offering upto $50,000(US) in
donation to a local NGO. (more at
www.google.org/healthspeaks).
Oliver, Abbas and I were involved in the training of the participants on
Wikipedia related issues. Oliver delivered a fantastic Wikipedia start up
tutorial during the Nairobi training. I was also involved in the
distribution of the posters for the same in my campus (JKUAT) other than
being a participant in the same. If anyone would like to participate, log
onto the website above.
--
Limoke Oscar
Undergraduate Student -JKUAT
Bsc.Geomatic Eng. and GIS
+254 717 845 316