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I have been reading the impressive The Elearning Africa Report 2012, a publication which sets out to address “the absence of comprehensive, consistent and coherent documentation on eLearning practice in Africa”, as the editors Shafika Isaacs and David Hollow put it.

They are proud that it is an African-led report, with an unusual diversity of contributions including investors, donors, academics, tribal chiefs, cartoonists, activists and civil servants.

At the centre of the report are the key findings of The eLearning Africa 2012 Survey, completed by 447 respondents from 41 African countries. The overarching question addressed is the role of ICT-enhanced learning and training community
in contributing towards Africa’sgrowth and development. Questions include:

• How do people define ICT-enhanced learningand training?
• What technologies are being used within the sector?
• In what contexts are they being used?
• What motivates people to use ICTand how do they make use of it?

There is also a good mix in the 15 opinion pieces. My selection:

• Africa’s choice: digitise traditional knowledge or lose culture and development (Bappa)
• How the education sector produces eWaste in Kenya (Mware)
• Early reading acquisition using mobile learning in Africa (Adhiambo Otieno)
• Why invest in using ICT in education in Africa? (Trucano)
• African youth, identity formation and social media (Bosch)
• Why radio still matters (Kamlongera and Yasin)

I was pleased to contribute a piece too. Being asked to consider the question of 21st century skills (and please don’t say the same old same old, they stressed!), focused my mind on what it means that content online is becoming more social, fluid, mobile, visual, dynamic and distributed, while being less scaffolded, and with authority and expertise likely to be less explicit (to quote from the final paragraph).

Well done to the editors and all the contributors. Worth a read!