Time for another weekly installment from your Norteño in Asia!

Well this week was very eventful. Our main objective this week was to make sure our training happened tomorrow. The big wig at the MoE contacted the provincial IT managers on Monday and told them our criteria for participants. My team lead and I were a bit skeptical given the complexity of the bureaucracy here in Sri Lanka. We were pleasantly surprised to meet with our big wig and have him hand us a participant list on Wednesday. Talk about clout! That was good because it was getting rather tricky for the office manager to book all of the accommodations for the people coming to the workshop. Having things set really took the pressure off.

The next piece that needed to fall into place was the support staff from the NIE. We wanted people we had just finished training to help train the new cohorts of people. We told the head of the NIE on Monday and thankfully he was able to confirm their participation on Friday. However, it kind of blindsided many people so we had to have an emergency meeting to calm everyone down. Things went well and everyone was very excited to help out. I even got some training in for the support staff that have been assigned to our session tomorrow.

Tomorrow starts a gauntlet of 15 trainings that we will deliver over the next 2 or so months. Sad to say that the local consultants will only be available for one of our 3 sessions in each of the 5 cohorts. Bummer but I have a feeling it will all work itself out. I planned the content accordingly so I will basically have the primary role on the first two days and they will cover the last of the 3 sessions.

The participants themselves are a question as far as their technical literacy goes. I have a feeling that they will be infants in their IT skills. This is not really such a bad thing because I will be able to go very slow and dedicate most of our time to clicking around on the Net and helping folks one to one. No presenting to these folks; they need all the experience and hands on that they can get! I like to present just fine but I prefer working one-on-one.

My biggest task this week was putting together the course/instructional support materials for our workshops. I just finished polishing things up a little while ago. Now all I have to do is backup all of the information to my computer and I will be totally good to go.

Another going on this week was awarding the participants at NIE for their great group work. All of the groups produced very good reports using Moodle. I could not pick a winner so I gave them all some chocolate. All of them have big smiles on their faces when they come by the office to collect their prizes. I sent their report to the MoE and they are going to present there at the end of the month. The nice thing is that the group leaders came to me and took ownership of their presentations changing it from simply the moderator and mentor to more of their group members in order to show the MoE what they have been doing and what kinds of things they have been learning. Very cool.

I freaked out when I went to the store this week. I found an avocado unlike any I had ever seen before. Our avocados are about the size of your palm and have dark bumpy skins on them. The avocados here are the size of your whole hand and have smooth lime green skins. I was so intrigued I had to get one. I have not eaten it yet but I am excited to see what is inside. Now if I could only find some cilantro…

This weekend I am going to be traveling down south to a mask festival and dance in Ambalangoda. One of the guys at NIE invited me and there will be a small contingent of folks from NIE going. I think I will stay overnight to go and do the beaches, which are very nice in that part of the country, and go see one of the old colonial forts in the area. It is also the area that was hard hit by the tsunami and also where the data I worked with was collected. I want to see all of the places that I read about for so long as a Masters student. I am excited for the trip but I am focusing on the training tomorrow for now.

My biggest milestone this week was thinking consciously "I love this job." The thought of liking what I was doing has always been there but I actually got a little grin on my face when the thought/feeling came into my head. It was not anything in particular that sparked it. I was just working on the content and thinking about how I would pair up subject matter experts and IT people to create their own online learning and it just hit me.

That’s all folks!