ILC Participates in Building IK Management Chapters in Africa
« View All Articles(February 16, 2008)
The Indigenous Learning Company has just wrapped up two days of intensive meetings in Midrand, South Africa, at an event hosted by the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA). Represented by ILC CEO Randy Morse, the workshop focused on establishing Indigenous Knowledge Management centers in Africa, as well as how these centers could be linked to -- and with -- international colleagues.
The workshop was set up in collaboration with the Department of Science and Technology and the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Centre of Excellence at South Africa's North West University.
The lone non-African participant, Morse shared ILC's experiences working with First Nations in North America, and gave a presentation on the use of appropriate new digital technologies in developing and delivering educational programs to indigenous learners and their teachers.
"The response to our Washington and Alberta webstories was amazing," Morse said. "Everyone was knocked out by them, and the notion that indigenous communities can help shape their own educational content -- and that this content both can and should lead the technological charge in their respective countries," he added.
Discussions at the workshop focused on issues such as research, intellectual property rights, national and international cooperation and coordination, advocacy, human capital development, and policy guidelines.
The Midrand workshop grew out of the of the deliberations of the First Biennial Conference of KMA (2005) held in Johannesburg (South Africa), and the Second Biennial Conference of Knowledge Management Africa (KMA) 2007, held in Nairobi, Kenya under the general theme of ‘Knowledge to Remobilize Africa’.
Participants at the Midrand workshop agreed to pursue several pilot projects, with an aim to showcasing these at the upcoming Knowledge Management Africa conference slated for Dakar, Senegal, in 2009.
"I'm really excited about the likelihood that something extraordinary is going to emerge from the Midrand meetings," Morse commented in an email from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. "We're committed to working with some very special people to quickly set up pilots in selected primary schools in South Africa, Tanzania, Namibia, and hopefully Kenya well before Dakar '09. ILC intends to link these African pilot schools with schools we're currently working with in North and Central America -- creating a de facto global indigenous learning network. I'm pretty pumped," he concluded.
After the Midrand workshop, Morse met with officials from South Africa's Department of Science & Technology. ILC and the DST have agreed to move forward with a joint initiative designed to support the DST's innovative "Digital Doorway" project, providing indigenous South African content co-developed with ILC to selected South African schools via an innovative new digital infrastructure.