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Special Interest Groups
We are pleased to inform you that we have formed two special interest working groups in Educational Technology and Engineering Education and Research. This is line with KENET’s mandate of promoting collaboration in education and research and being a catalyst in the transformation of education and research. The KENET strategic plan 2011-2017 identified five focus areas for collaboration in educational technology, engineering, health sciences, agriculture and ICT (i.e., computer science and information systems) and we have only picked two of the areas for focus starting this Fiscal Year 2014-2015.
The convenor of the Educational Technology working group will be Dr. Alice Njuguna, Associate DVC for E-learning and Information Technology at KCA University. She has a PhD in ICT in Education and was recently appointed a member of Management Board of KENET by the Board of Trustees. She will be assisted by Mwirigi Kiula from JKUAT and John Otieno of Kisii University (a former high school computer studies teacher) as well as some technical staff at KENET. The group will discover a few more faculty champions in the area of educational technology. One of the first projects they are working on is the KENET Schools Connectivity Initiative (see http://www.kenet.or.ke) that aims to connect up to 200 schools in Kenya to the Internet (we are starting with 69 Nairobi schools by October 30, 2014) in partnership with Wananchi Group who have provided the last mile connectivity and the school WiFi access points.
The convenor of the Engineering Education and Research working group will be Dr. Edwin Ataro, formerly the head of electrical engineering department at Moi University and recently appointed a Director of ICT at Moi University. He has served as a member of the KENET management board for the past three years. He has a PhD in Electrical Engineering. The initial members of the group includes Prof Heywood Ouma, Chairman of Electrical Engineering Department at University of Nairobi, Dr. Ciira Maina, Head of Department of Electrical Engineering DeKUT, and Dr. Wilfred Gikaru (Computer Engineer), Chairman of Computer Science, Egerton University among others. The group held its first meeting on Tuesday October 14, 2014 and they will first need to discover other engineering faculty champions. They are involved in a project on the innovative use of the Raspberry PI computer as a home-based laboratory teaching tool (see call for Mini-Grant proposals).
Do you have one or two people from your university who should be a member of one of the above special interest working groups? Send the e-mail and mobile number of such a person to office_admin@kenet.or.ke (they need to be your champions in the two areas)