Web 2.0 Tools for Research Support and Networking in Africa

The Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation, in collaboration with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, held a course on "Web 2.0 Tools for Research Support and Networking in Africa" from 7th to 11th April 2009. Participants at the workshop came from Cameroon, Gambia, Ghana and Nigeria.

The general objective of the course is to equip scientists in universities and agricultural research institutions with the requisite tools to conduct collaborative content development in a variety of scenarios. The aim is to improve educational content creation, research efficiency and the effective flow of agricultural information and among researchers within and between academic and research institutions.

The five day course covered the following:

• Introduction to Web 2.0
• Web 2.0 for Social Networking - Facebook
• Web 2.0 for Sharing Multimedia (Photos)- Picasa
• Web 2.0 for Sharing & Collaboration on Documents– Google Docs
• Web 2.0 for Content Generation & Sharing – Blogs
• Principles, Practices of Open Access Education/Research Resources
• Web 2.0 for Content Generation and Collaboration – WikiEducator
• Web 2.0 and Copyright

At the end of the course, participants acquired hands-on experience on how to use Picasa, Facebook, Google Docs, Blogger, and WikiEducator.