My blog this week has focused on the idea of community, having been part of some very different communities recently this is very real to me. I have felt very much part of the ededc community and I been part of the edcMooc community – which felt quite soulless at times, to the #edcmooc on twitter which inspired feelings of community through shared activity and response. I have left my own community with friends and family and visited a new community with an entirely different set of rules and cultural references. Then I began to dip my toe into an online community of cyclists obsessed with the weight of bike parts – it has been a strange old week!!!!!

It makes me question what is a community and what makes one belong,
I felt I belonged in my home community, in the ededc community and in the #edcmooc community, I was beginning to become part of the community in Kenya and part of the edcMooc community, I didn’t belong in the Weght Weenies community. When I dissected my feelings of community it appears to be based on not only my engagement but the responses. In my own community with family and friends I give and receive feedback. As part of ededc I commented on others blogs and they on mine and we had chatted in real time through Skype. In twitter I was commenting and gaining responses. The edmooc course and Kenya – I still felt very new and the interactions I had were less engaging, which is quite surprising for Kenya as I was very engaged in many things I took part in but I always felt like a visitor. However I did feel a sense of community with the people I travelled with which was a new group of people to me. I have no sense of community with the Weight Weenies group because as yet, I have not contributed just observed.

So what is actually a community? It has to be more than a collection of people who are doing the same thing?

When I arrived I assumed that in places where there was electricity I would be able to access the Internet using the Dongle I bought in Nairobi as I had read that Africa had the biggest uptake of online learners. I had assumed that the Internet would be the same as we have here – I was wrong. Accessing the Internet was a very different experience, and involved one tab browsing of websites which had limited graphics and no video or it would be seriously overloaded and not open. As for accessing the Mooc – Meh!!!!

The education system in Kenya that I saw was like ours in the 1980′s in teaching style, curriculum content and use of technology. It was quite amazing to see how far behind in technology terms the students at the local Secondary school were in comparison to the group of tech savvy 6th former’s we brought from the UK.

We provided 11 laptops for the school (of 300 children!) and ran workshops on how to use basic packages, teaching clicking and dragging was a challenge, yet toddlers can pick this up so easily here without teaching just through early exposure to adults interacting with technology.

This school (and village) is going from having one laptop to 12 in a short space of time, we have also funded more to arrive in the near future along with Internet access. The availability of information is going to increase exponentially and the links to the rest of the world through communication and observation of other people will have an enormous impact on this society.There will be a transition from analogue to digital – Hand (2008) suggests that “digitization enables and intensifies processes of circulation, flattening, de-territorialization, and de-differentiation, and for new kinds of objects, subjects and practices to become emergent and convergent in a transition from analogue to digital cultures”

It would be interesting to see the ‘emergent practices’ and the impact it will make to their lives and their system of education. Will the introduction of technology create a need for a change in the education style, which is currently very didactic and information based? The children will then have the access to the information they require and the teaching may need to change to support the students application of the information rather than just providing facts.

Culture is very different at the moment in this village in Kenya and digital culture is limited, perhaps the culture will become ‘flattened and de-territorialized’ with the introduction of technology. I’m not sure if this is a bad or good thing for the community but it is different and the future.