Ken Owino of Nafsi Acrobats said: ".... learning from your experiences we employed the use of Etherpad as a virtual space through which participants of our "CUlture Of ARts " project drawn from Denmark and Kenya, could meet and have cross- cultural discuassions... We had a facebook page where we archived the meetings notes and kept all participants updated..... ICT has really been instrumental in my advancement. i must admit that i have l earnt much virtually. Most the lessons learnt i did not get them from the physical classroom."
Ken told us this at the February First Thursday meeting (held on an etherpad).
Dadamac Learning
I'm sharing this story because Ken and I have been learning-together and learning-from-each-other for many years now.
Our shared learning has been enabled by our ability to connect online in various ways. Separately, we are each learning-by-doing and learning-by-thinking. Sometimes we meet online as part of Internet groups (such as in Minciu Sodas' inter-related yahoo groups, and through First Thursday meetings). Sometimes our online meetings are one-to-one in emails, or skype (voice or text). We have only met a few times face-to-face - in 2007 we met in Kenya, subsequently we met in Lithuania (thanks to Andrius Kulikauskas) and most recently we met in the UK. Most of our meetings are at a distance, and very often they are asynchronous, and yet we have been supporting each other in our individual learning journeys.
I'm still struggling to find the right words to describe this kind of Internet enabled learning. In discussions about my experiences of learning-thanks-to-the-Internet I find that people's minds tends to leap to formal courses - and we are soon talking at cross purposes. To save such confusion I simply call what I am doing (and what Ken is also doing) "Dadamac learning".
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