Holistic ICT for EcoLiving

The staff at the Winneba Open Digital Village have recently completed the set up of the first Open Digital Village in Winneba Ghana. To celebrate this historic moment they have organized their first major capacity building event for the community called: SOS: Conducting Effective Online Research.

In today’s Information Age, individuals around the world require Information Literacy Skills – which is the ability to analyse, synthesize, evaluate, assimilate and use information. This course is therefore designed for individuals who wish to enrich their knowledge and acquire the skills to function effectively online whilst acquiring the needed materials/knowledge for professional or academic use. In particular, it is to equip the participants with online research and computer skills to undertake online self study and or information search to:

• meet the ever increasing academic/professional needs and standards with much ease;
• make you globally competitive whilst functioning locally;
• build a foundation for future research work, information and knowledge building; and
• strategically develop skills to take and or teach online courses.

This course is part of an onging series of capacity building sessions dubbed the “Simpa Open Summits” (SOS) being held at the Winneba Open Digital Village (the Village) at Winneba Low Cost, just behind Uncle Rich JSS (Tel: 0432-20270). The name SOS evolved from the combination of “Simpa” which is the indigenous name of Winneba and the “Open” nature of the sessions to all as a means to improve lives of participants through knowledge acquisition and save people from information overload. As well, SOS could mean “Save Our Souls” from the inability to handle the information overload.

Course Content: The topics to be addressed in the four-day course include:

1. The World Wide Web and Universal Resource Locators (URLs)
2. Search Engines and Content Repositories
3. Evaluating Websites for information validity
4. Gathering educational materials online; Text Editing and Materials Development from Online Sources

Instructional Goals/Course Objectives: This course is broken into sessions. Haven gone through each course session, its is expected that, you will be able to:

1. Session 1: identify correctly stated Universal Resource Locators (URL) from a list of URLs; explain the concept of the World-Wide-Web; differentiate between the main activities of institutions from a list of URLs provided for you; and surf within a website to gain an understanding of the function and behaviour of hyperlinks
2. Session 2: differentiate between websites and search engines and their functionalities; identify websites or content repositories which provide access to free educational content like: www.itrainonline.org , www.merlot.com
3. Session 3: conduct an evaluation of websites to determine the validity of the source of using information provided here: http://lib.nmsu.edu/instruction/eval.htm; and list an evaluation criteria to ensure the authenticity for citation in your work
4. Session 4: select appropriate text and analyze information relevant to a given topic from online sources; bookmark the sites you visit using browser tools that enable you to return to the sites without having to type out the URLs again.

Given a topic, for instance, “Dividends of Computer use in the Classroom”, you will be required to gather materials online and bookmark websites to compose an opinion on the topic for submission by email for review and comments.

Instructors: Instruction for SOS is provided always by experienced local and international trainers. This course will be taught by:

1. Mr. Kafui A. Prebbie (Cell: 0244 429 448, kafui@kafui.com ), an ICT Instructor with years of teaching experience at the ICT Center of the University of Education, Winneba; and
2. Mr. Michael Dorh Tetteh (Cell: 0243 604 696, mdtetteh@onevillagefoundation.org ), a professional instructor in Mathematics and ICT with appreciable years of practice; and assisted by
3. Mr. Dennis Doe (Cell: 0246 124 151, doedennis@onevillagefoundation.org ), a Multimedia and Network Technologist.

Together, the team will provide the needed framework to kick start your professional/academic life online for study growth and development.

Course Evaluation: A combination of classroom activities including observations, group activity and short practice questions will be employed. At the end, you will be required to use the skills acquired to author an opinionated paper on a given topic – for instance “Dividends of Computer use in the Classroom”. Composed opinionated paper is graded using the “Three Blind Grading Principles” practice and review provided to participants.

Extracts/Summaries: There are two basic means of searching for information online:

1. navigating through topic lists eg. www.merlot.com
2. entering a keyword or phrase into a search text box of a search engine eg. www.google.com

A topic search method is conducted by selecting a category link and subsequently selecting subcategories until your search is trimmed to a list of your relevant or desired documents.

A keyword search method is used n search of specific concepts, ideas or phrase. The keyword is a set of words or word that describes the concept. When entered into the search text box, the search program compares the keyword with some part of the text in its database – titles, URLs, text, abstract, description, reviews, etc. after which it displays a list of all pages relevant in its database.

Search Operators are symbols, words, and punctuations that enable search online to be more specific. They include quotation marks (“ ”); the Addition (+) and Subtraction (-) Signs; and Boolean Operators “AND” and “OR”.

Cost: The initial four-day training programme at Twenty Ghana Cedis (GHC20). However we are open to negotiations including discount on group registrations.

Resources: Copies of text from appropriate text books will be provided including text from the O’Leary Series, Microsoft Office Volume 1, Timothy J. O’Leary.