Google Faculty Development Workshop -- Day 1

Obum from Google introducing the Google African University Program 

Google is at it again! This time, interacting exclusively with Computer Science Lecturers, Professors, and Administrators in Sub-Saharan Africa. The beginning of this week saw the team in Nigeria where they met Faculty from about 20 universities for three days. Today they met Faculty from 15 universities in Ghana, at the Alisa Hotel. The workshop will end on Saturday.
With the changing trend in the Industry, it is expedient Curricula is adjusted to better suit the needs of users/consumers. Thus a collaborative community of academics who are introduced to the use of Google's tools and developer platforms for instruction and research is highly beneficial.
Participants were introduced to Web 2.0 technologies, The Google App Engine, and the Google Web Toolkit. Do check out the Google Developers University Consortium that was launched about a couple of days ago.
Personally, it is an insightful event that I pray continues, and yield the fruits it is expected to bear. The classroom setting made a great impact. However, I felt a bit intimidated because the programming language used is one I hardly am conversant with -- Java!
I however enjoyed the first day and look forward to the next couple of days that promise to be full of brainstorming sessions, hand-on experience and fun.
Related articles:

• Google Faculty Development Workshop -- Day 2
• Google Faculty Development Workshop -- Day 3

Letter to my unborn child

Credit: Kalongi

Tomorrow marks the day most men would be celebrated in their various homes -- Fathers' Day!
As I sat through the day thinking about my dad and his sacrifices for me and my siblings, I thought of  writing a letter (of a sort) to my unborn child. Here goes:

Dear Son/Daughter,


It's with ambivalent feelings that I write this letter to you.
I trust all is well with you up there? Well, your folks down here are doing okay. Thanks for asking.

My thoughts are filled with how you are going to look. Will you be having your mum's eyes or my ears -- or both?
The joy you would bring into our home is always a refreshing thought. 


I pledge and look forward to being you partner-in-crime, protector, and above all, your best friend. *wink* 
I can't wait to see you happily drain your mum's milk factories, while throwing your legs about happily.
Looking forward to your first sound, steps, crush, heartbreak, love -- and squabbles with our neighbours' kids. Ha-ha-ha
In all these, know that my shoulders will always be available to give you support and comfort.


Really, there's a lot I wish I could say but I'm overwhelmed by the thought of holding you in my arms, and watching you grow into a humble, passionate and responsible individual.


Until the day my orgasm gives you the impetus to drill into your mum's egg.


Sincerely,
Your Papa.

Welcome to iWitness -- in Ghana

A couple of months ago, I struck an acquaintance with Daixy, the Social Media coordinator of GhanaDecides -- a BloggingGhana project that seeks to cover issues pertaining to the forthcoming elections in Ghana. I was fascinated after she introduced me to the project as it presented an opportunity for individuals to broadcast the news of Ghana's forthcoming elections to the world.
I thought to myself, "If we are tired of having our country and continent given a negative image in the media by both foreign and local media, who better to set the record straight, than ourselves?"
GhanaDecides became a fixture in my lectures (during breaks) where I educated and advised students to make their voices heard in the campaign known as iRegistered. The iRegistered campaign covered Ghana's first ever biometric voter registration.
Personally, I believe all has gone according to the expectations of the project team based on the responses got. Or maybe not?
That being said, I stumbled upon a project being undertaken by Adaptive Path (a User Experience design company in the USA) that seeks to take social media to another dimension -- iWitness. The free tool iWitness went live a couple od days ago!
iWitness is a pretty cool tool I think would further enhance the GhanaDecides project. It reads tweets (and even Flickr and instagram updates) in real time, based on location and time. It works solely in a browser. All you do is enter a location and a time, and voila, news becomes readily available to you.

Screenshot of the iWitness app. Location: Accra

The downsides of the tool I think has to do mainly with the fact that it's mostly for desktop browsers that are Webkit-based, such as Chrome and Safari. But hey, it's an evolving open source project. It shouldn't be long before we have it being supported on mobile browsers and all other browser as well. Developers can hack at the source code on Github.
iWitness is also advantageous to the GhanaDecides cause as it doesn't require a hashtag (which the campaign so far has depended mainly on) for any particular news.
Just go ahead and try the tool.
I will like to have your thoughts on it via your comments on this post. ;-)
You can read more on iWitness on this blog post by the creators.