African Democracy Project Mozambique

adpm-wordmark-small.jpg In October my university will be sending a number of remarkable students and faculty members to Mozambique to watch elections in one of Africa’s vibrant democracies, and I have the great good fortune (especially great in light the distinct absence of references to Mozambique in my professional work) to help coordinate the trip.

Aside from the excitement of travel and learning something very new, I am also geeked about some new software tools, mashups, fixes and workarounds for active, project-based learning as pioneered by the remarkable Michael Wesch of Kansas State. His digital ethnography course is a model for what upper level undergraduate education can do, and so I can do no better than follow his lead. As a result, our course will be us a netvibes page to link all of the various streams of effort which I hope will include multiple blogs, social bookmarking, video uploads and whatever else we can imagine. Remarkable tools are available and it has taken only one afternoon to get them in shape for our course and cobble them together (all the same tools are probably hidden somewhere in Blackboard along with a corkscrew, a nail file and a jar of mayonaise, but Blackboard is the equivalent of Terry Gilliam’s “27B-6” though “Brazil” is not the former Portugese colony I have in mind).

For those who are interested, the key elements of the project will come together at http://www.netvibes.com/adpm and we will be using the tags “adpm” and “adpm09” to label what we find across the web.