Social media in Africa - What I learned today

Post by Peter Casier, originally posted on Blog Tips



We are never too old to learn.

This morning, I was participating in a session at the AgKnowledge Africa share fair in Addis, on "How to report on agriculture issues".

One presenter introduced his experiences as a radio reporter, where he travels around interviewing farmers on the diverse aspects of their daily life, their problems and solutions. Rob from Shujaaz explained how they use a combination of comic strips, Facebook, a website and a radio show to reach out to Kenya's youth. Gladston from Story Workshop is using drama and a radio show to get farmers together.

Are you using your phone at the Share Fair?

Day One at the Share Fair Addis, and its just exciting to see all the various ways that we are using to learn and share knowledge across Africa. I just filmed two colleagues sharing and learning their just acquired skills on using Twitter to share information.

Use of mobile technology will be a major and interesting Focused Group Discussion to follow here at the Share Fair. Focusing on how rural communities can make use of mobile technology to enhance their agricultural and rural development initiatives, it will also showcase some best practices of mobile technology use in rural Uganda and Tanzania.

Government ministries are rarely using social networks to communicate; But i believe, that after this session, Philomena Chege, from Njaa Marufuku Programme at the Ministry of Agriculture, will be able to tweet from her Nokia C3 phone about her experiences here in Addis. She has been very keen on learning how to make videos work in her programme but now she is even more enthused to learn that she can share her information from her phone! With the help of Solomon Mwangi, a Communications Officer at ICRAF, she now has created a twitter account and we expect to see her live tweets contributing to the ShareFair Social media visibility.

These are just some of the side events happening at the #sfaddis

Originally posted on:http://tinyurl.com/2g37tww

How to report on social media in 60 minutes?

Originally posted on BlogTips



Remember the shout-out post I wrote a couple of months ago, asking for social media volunteers at the AgKnowledge Africa Share Fair in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia?

Well, over forty volunteers raised their hand, and invested a fair share of their time and expertise in putting the social media strategy together to cover the four days of the Share Fair.

Social media enthusiasts from all over the world defined what tools we were going to use, refined the process of gathering content for social reporting and tested some technical solutions to the various challenges we faced.

This week, it is all happening. Twenty social media volunteers are here on site in Addis Ababa. They are attending all sessions, workshops and trainings as participants or trainers, but also as social reporters. They are gathering the core messages of each event in the form of:

• blogs
• pictures
• video
• podcasts
• tweets
• and for specific sessions, there is even a live video stream

During "Day 0", the preparation day, over 180 participants were trained on knowledge sharing and social media tools they would use in the following three days. I was "appointed as the volunteer" to wrap up the training day, giving an overview of the social media tools available on the market today.

So how does one give an overview of such an extensive topic in 60 minutes?

As I like content better than fancy Powerpoint presentation forms, I used a primitive method of a blank white board, cards and different stories to engage the audience (yes it had been a busy and long day for them)...

1. I told the story how I got started in social media, pretty much like most of them have or will start one day: "I had content".
   In my case, four years ago, I wanted to publish a book on the web. I had never published anything on the Internet before, and thought the web was still reigned by the almighty webmasters, with almighty HTML knowledge and the like.
2. As the story went, I googled "easy web publishing" and hit on "Blogging", which brought me to "Blogger" and a day later, I had my first blog online. With the first chapter of my book.
   Voila.. I had discovered social media. Which brought me to the definition of social media:
   
   • A series of web-based applications
   • ...Enabling anyone to publish almost any type of content (asked the audience who has ever published anything on the web) with little of no technical expertise
   • ... enabling a dialogue about that content with an audience
3. And then came the main part of the session: I had prepared cards for each 'type' or 'family' of social media tools, divided up by the type of content they generated. I asked the audience to name one type, or one brand, or one tool they knew, and worked with them to typify the "family" name of that social media "category".
4. As each card came up on the white board, I asked examples of that 'social media family', and what they used this tool for
5. As time went by, the white board showed 9 cards:
   
   

I was pleasantly surprised how many people came up with tools which were new to many. When we "discovered" an "unknown" tool, I showed the site on an overhead projector.

In all, it became a fun and engaging to-and-fro discussion about tools, the pro and cons of them, and specific uses.

And that is how I explained social media in 60 minutes.

Pictures courtesy Roxy Samii and Jan Gerits

"Day 0" at the AgKnowledge Africa Share Fair: The Learning and Training Day.

By Nadia Manning-Thomas

Have you ever been to a big event and seen lots of exciting methods and tools for sharing knowledge, facilitation and collaboration being used?

Have you ever wanted to learn how to use some of those tools and methods being used so you could apply them in your own work?

Did you realize that watching them being used is not always enough to learn them properly?

Well the Share Fairs that have been organized over the past two years have recognized this need and have included in their programs opportunities for learning and being trained in some of the key tools and methods used both in the preparation of the events but also in the running of the various sessions at the event. And the AgKnowledge Africa Share Fair is no different!

Dubbed as “Day 0”, a whole day before the start of the main Fair activities, is dedicated to learning and training activities on key knowledge sharing tools and methods that are and can be used in Africa.

To kick off the day, an opening session will introduce the concepts of knowledge sharing, knowledge management, ICTs, facilitation, social media, online collaboration and networking and more.
This opening session will also be a time where participants are given guidance around identification, choosing and implementing the right tool for their particular stage of work and to help achieve a particular purpose or goal they may have. Very often we hear people shying away from the use of innovative tools and methods due to the “overwhelmingly long and constantly increasing list of tools and methods” from which to choose.

Different tools and methods can and should be used for different kinds of activities and for achieving certain aims. This session aims to help people link the tools and methods they will explore and learn with real needs, activities and goals they may have.

The main training sessions will take place in two blocks of two hours each-one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The main categories of tools and methods being introduced are:

• Social and Collaborative Media
• Popular Media
• Google Tools
• Face to Face Knowledge Sharing Methods

Within each of these categories a number of sessions were designed, for which participants can sign-up before the event:

• For those interested in Social and Collaborative media hands-on sessions on Blogging, Collaborative Writing, and Academic Social Network (Mendeley) tools will take place
• As always there is a high demand for learning how to make use of forms of popular media so sessions on radio/audio recording and sharing, film/video recording and sharing or journalistic reporting are on offer too.
• A group from Google will be running two interesting sessions. One will focus on Google geo products, including Google Earth, Google Map Maker, Fusion Tables and more, while the second session will showcase more communication and collaboration tools, such as Google Apps, Books, Gmail and Voice.
• For some brushing up on face to face knowledge sharing methods an interesting, combined session has been designed. Starting with an ‘open space’, participants will not only learn that method, but be able to suggest and schedule the various other KS methods to be learned in the session.

But since many of these tools and methods can and should work together to help make our knowledge travel-it is key to learn how they can be used to support, complement and enhance each other in moving your content around. The final session of the day will be an open session on ‘How to make your content travel’.

To end the day (and start the night!) an open session on ‘creative communication’ will be convened and this promises to be lively. This session at the end of the day allows people the opportunity to share, observe and participate in creative forms of communication such as drumming, singing, dancing, storytelling or whatever else people bring forward.

Important! For all Share Fair participants, please sign up for the different sessions using this form.

Picture courtesy luc.iana