Paolo Brunello writes: Understanding group dynamics, identifying leaders

My 30 Burundian trainees are technical high school teachers whom I’ve carefully selected to install and administer a dozen computer labs in their schools. As I strongly believe that such a task can be accomplished only if the people involved share a common vision of the project as a whole, I decided to try out [...]

Jennifer Hauck: Teaching and learning, learning and teaching

I think I like teaching, because I like doing several things at a time. While I tried my best to introduce the Net-Map tool to the students I had the chance to learn from the students as well, when they shared their experience with me. I started with a very brief overview of how one [...]

General or specific questions?

Yesterday I sat with a group of colleagues at IFPRI to discuss our plans for supporting the Nigeria Strategy Support Program to better understand how research influences (or doesn’t) agricultural policy making in the country. We want to know this for two reasons: IFPRI is pretty active in Nigeria and aims at “supporting evidence based [...]

Jennifer Hauck writes: First Net-Map course at ZEF

Tomorrow I will teach my first Net-Map course. Students from the Bonn International Graduate School for Development Research (BIGS -DR) at the Center for Development Research (ZEF) will learn how to use the Net-map tool. And I will learn whether I qualify as a teacher. The students will come from all over the world and [...]

Scale Free Thinking

Most of what I write (here and elsewhere) is rather concrete, drawing from real world examples, own experience, pushing some hands-on ideas. That’s because most of my learning is people-to-people learning, through hearing stories, making experiences and linking unusual things to each other. However, every once in a while  I read something that is more [...]

ITCs in the Educational System of Burundi…

A few months ago I received an email from Paolo Brunello, who had read this blog and was planning to use Net-Map in his PhD thesis. He is working on the Burundian educational system and while training teachers to become system administrators of newly installed PCs, he wants to evaluate the relevance of ITCs in [...]