1 Hello and welcome

Hello and welcome!

Welcome to the start of this course. This lesson will provide a basic introduction to the course as well as outlining some of the content we will be covering. The preliminary course structure is flexible and I am certainly open to suggestions. We will start with a broad overview of the areas that this course can include which will give you a chance to think about what you would like to focus on both in the course as well as your final project (see course structure for outline of this task). If there are any specific people, groups, exhibitions, et cetera, that you would like to include in the course please let me know and I will see what I can do.

The grading criteria and course goals are very broad which allows you a lot of choice in your final project, within the scope of Africa. It is also important that in your choice of topic you are able to adress the goals and criteria clearly.

We, as a group, are going to maintain a public blog which will chart the progress of the course and our preparations for East Africa Model United Nations – particularly for potential sponsors. I will organise a schedule where each student will be responsible for the blog for a week, I expect at least one entry per week.

Moving on to Africa – here is a slightly out of date map of Africa. You need to be able to place the countries on this map as it is vital that we have an understanding of the continent we are studying. You could use this map or this one to learn the countries. Vanity Fair magazine had an African special a while ago which you might find interesting.

Please add you ideas, requests, questions to the comments section of this entry. A specific question I would like to ask is what areas you are particularly interested in studying.

We will be having weekly skype chats, so if you haven’t already installed the program you will
need to (free). When you have signed up could you please add me as a contact, my skype name is ”first.name”. We will also try to move on to using Second Life for the chats as I think there is a benefit of being able to see avatars and move around. As well, we will try to use elluminate
(a virtual classroom) when it is necessary to have a ”blackboard” function for sharing of information.

Welcome once again,

Richard.