students meet our 'secret weapon'

Siphethile arranged for the students to meet with Adele so they can ask her about the cool stuff she is working on. Knowing just how 'traumatic' that can be we tagged along for emotional support (and to learn more ourselves). The thing is each time we talk to Adele we learn something new, there was no ways we were going to miss out. Today's panel consisted of two more people who were also as interesting and knowledgeable as Adele. We got to meet the woman behind Dr Math.
Needless to say the students were really disappointed and excited at the same time. One thing that really impressed me more about them is, as heartbroken as they were not even a single one said "I quit or wh
at now" they knew what they had to do. With week smiles they were ready to go back to the drawing board and fix their project.

With that kind of determination I can safely say, they are going far.

The project so far

The winning team is hard at work developing a .mobi site for CSIRIS. The excitement is back on so is the pressure, I know it is too early to brag but we are giving this our all and we are not stopping until we have it up and running. If you know of any open source software we can use please le us know. One click to the names of our latest additions (Frank, Herman and Kriya) will take you to their personal journey as they invade the world of mobile services in libraries.

Yes we win

UP students

A warm welcome to Kriya Gangiah, Frank Mokgoloboto and Herman Redelinghuis from UP, who will be with us for the next two weeks to help us fast track our learning. These guys are making me feel so old school with what they have in mind already. We win

The way forward and CoP

Botswana conference came and went, now the greatest challenge is to take the project further and applying all that learning at work. We are starting a community of practice for those interested in exploring the mobile environment with us. Our first meeting is scheduled for 29 June 2010 at the CSIR.
So far we have Wits, UP and CSIR (Information services and Meraka) in our group. The next "big thing" is the workshop we will be facilitating at the 10th Southern African Online Information Meeting in August 2010.

The Workshop

The day we've been working hard for finally arrived, they day was warm and beautiful - a good sign. We explored University of Botswana (yes we love exploring) looking for the venue, until we settled for the one arranged by the organisers. We didn't get the simcards on time for the workshop the plan was to borrow a cellphone from the attendees and use it for live demonstration. Unfortunately we didn't get one with a registered simcard (you need to register your simcard if you want to use your phone to access the internet) we used screen dumps to demonstrate what a mobile phone can do.
Over all the workshop was a great learning experience for everyone, including ourselves.