Reusable cooking objects

Recently a lot of emphasis has been placed on sustainability. Sustainable this, sustainable that. Here at the University of Plymouth we had a CETL - a Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning - dedicated to Sustainable Futures. We have also seen a movement toward 'reusable learning objects' (For many teachers, sustainable education might simply be about actually keeping students interested for a full hour). I guess it's not simply about being 'green' or environmentally conscious. It's also about minimising effort of the creation of learning resources, and adapting existing content into new contexts or for new groups of learners. It's about sharing. It's about common sense. I just don't know why we had to invent a name for it.

I was fascinated last year, while walking around the huge sprawling open market of Serekunda in the Gambia, to see a huge 'cottage industry' dedicated to recycling old aluminium, tin and other metals into really useful objects. The picture above shows some of the products of this labour - salvaged aluminium from old cars, refrigerators, cola cans and other household goods that have lost their inherent value. We walked into one of the market stalls, and out through the back into a yard which resembled Dante's inferno. Everywhere we looked there were smelting furnaces, and all around in the smoke, people were melting down metal and remoulding it into useful cooking utensils. The picture below shows a guy fabricating a cooking pot. Got me thinking about education.

How much content do we actually waste, and how often do we 'reinvent the wheel'? I remember a few years ago having 14 cohorts of students, all studying the same content. I simply set up a wiki and populated it with a set of learning activities. I then replicated the wiki 13 times more and let it loose. The result was that the students were each contained in their own little groups, studying the same materials but enjoying small group conversations that were unique and relevant to their own cohort. It didn't take long to do once the first wiki had been established, and in a sense, I re-used the same content over a dozen times. It should only be a small step from there to reusing other people's content. But it's actually a huge step, because many teachers want to protect their own intellectual property and are not willing to share their ideas or content with others. The Creative Commons movement is going some way to challenging this mindset, and we are also seeing the rise of open scholarship, where teachers and academics are willing not only share their content, but also to open themselves up to constructive criticism from their peers on the web. I share all my slideshows and papers on Slideshare for free, and only ask for acknowledgement. (Go on, click on the link and help yourself. You know you want to).

After witnessing the collective actions and sharing culture that exist among the poor people of the Gambia and realising that they are compelled to take this approach simply to survive, I am even more determined to share my own content and encourage others to do the same. Seeing how the people of Gambia use everything and throw nothing away makes me very conscious about our own wasteful consumer society and how selfish I can be with my own 'property'. Reusable learning objects....It makes a lot of sense to me now.


Click here for more pictures of Gambia.


Reusable cooking objects by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Gambia Maybe Time

I learnt this week that GMT stands for 'Gambia Maybe Time' - and that about sums up life in the Gambia. Everything is done at an amble, and no-one really concerns themselves too much about time keeping. Perhaps we in the West could learn something from that. We landed at Banjul International Airport in the late afternoon in 36 degrees of heat, and were set upon by hordes of locals outside the airport, all wanting to take our bags and earn a little money in tips. Gambia is one of the smallest and poorest nations in Africa, and everyone has an angle. You can't blame them for trying. And my angle? I was in Gambia with 5 colleagues and 30 student teachers from the University of Plymouth, on a comparative study tour.

On day 2 we took a bush taxi into the centre of Serekunda, one of the largest cities in the Gambia. Bush taxis (tanka tanka) are haphazard, arriving when they arrive, and are usually battered, poorly maintained old mini-buses. They stop for people on demand anywhere, anytime, and squeeze as many inside as they can, including their baskets, chickens, goats etc, into the space that is available before driving off in a cloud of black fumes. We travelled for 20 minutes, and payed the princely sum of 5 dulasi for the priveledge - about 15 pence.

Nothing prepares you for what you see, hear (and smell) on the streets. The dangers don't come from the people, who are usually very friendly and welcoming. Rather, it's the maze of open sewerage channels and lack of hygiene that challenge most visitors (don't have ice in your drink and avoid salad). I will never forget the colour and richness of the market places, where traders can set up anywhere, usually shoulder to shoulder, to do business. At night-time, there are no street lights. The only light comes from open fires, car headlights and the occasional trader who happens to have a lamp connected to a car battery. The pungent, mingled smells of livestock, kerosene and meat cooking on open fires continually assail the nostrils, and the dust and heat are ever present.

It's easy to open up conversations with local people. They will do it for you. Anyone who looks like they are visiting is approached, and they then try to find out as much about you as they can so they can attempt to obtain your e-mail address, an unwanted mobile phone, or a handout of some kind. On my first day in Serekunda, one guy glued himself to me and tenaciously followed us around for half hour, until we decided to invite him to sit down and have a drink with us. During the conversation, we talked about religion (Moslems and Christians live side by side in harmony and intermarry freely), politics, local customs and culture, and of course education. My new friend, Al Fusainey Janh (pictured above), told me that many of the schools in Gambia don't have electricity, let alone computers. The Gambian government provide the school building, the teachers and the chalk. Any thing else has to be funded by parents, and most are too poor to do so. Most people who wish to use the Internet go to a telecenter or Internet cafe. Many people have mobile phones, but they are mainly used for talking and text, because few have the capability to browse the Internet.

In tomorrow's post on this blog I will give an account of our visit to a rural primary school, what we saw, and my conversations with the teachers and children.

For more pictures see my Flickr Photoset