eLearning

In class we heard quite something about the possibilities of eLearning. But it wasn't the first time this term crossed my path. Sure, i may have heard it somewhere, sometime before already, but there was this one time it started to become something real.

That time was around early 2010.
It was the beginning of our second semester at university. Me and a couple of fellow students, or friends, how i like to call them, were working at the Usability Engineering Center (UEC) of the university as studen research assistant, and we had quite a cool project going on.
We were doing a collaborative project with a team of russian design students from St. Petersburg. That were also living in russia, of course. So we had to think of new ways to communicate progress, ideas and discussions concerning the project.

eLeraning? Maybe. But it's still not the point.

In order not to bore you to death i'll cut right to the chase:

Due to our boss at the UEC socialising with professionals on her last job-related visit in Ethiopia early 2010, we got invited to present our project at barcamp.
Barcamp Ethiopia is a sort of open conference, welcoming everyone who'd like to participate and share some of his ideas, knowlege or whatever one has to offer, all hovering over the one big topic:
eLearning.

Thats when it really hit me.

So we went on to finish the project, to finally travel to Africa, germans and russians all together, to present our work and the ways we learned how to communicate over geographical as well as language barriers.
After three days of inspiring conference in Addis Abeba we set up two two-day workshops to teach the local eLearning professionals something about our ways of designing and displaying educational content in multimedia based form. It was a great vibe, and we could all learn from one another.

Over all this trip was one of the greatest experiences so far, and it tought me a lot about new ways to learn and percieve things. Be it medial, or cultural...