Plant Sciences, eLearning, and African development (via JSTOR Plant Science )

A colleague of mine, Rahim Rajan, captured this conference attendee from Botswana at the eLearning Africa 2010 Conference in Lusaka, Zambia. He is just so passionate about the transformative powers of eLearning for developing nations. It becomes infectious. He speaks for about 12 minutes, but I have started breaking it down into 1-2 minute clips for the average attention span (ie, mine).This is another one of him talking about culture as being a divine gift, one that we have squandered and so we must preserve it. Impassioned stuff from an e-Learning type.

[vimeo 12395469]

If you want to see more of these videos, check out http://vimeo.com/jstorplants. On a side note, I have fallen in love with Vimeo. I will always love YouTube for nights searching with my wife from old commercials, music videos, and general nonsense from our youth, but Vimeo has such a clean design. Very intuitive. Great statistics. I can track how many people have embedded these videos and how often those embedded videos have been played.

It is often hard to imagine the plant sciences as being beacons of culture, as instruments of development, but in the developing world they remain vehicles for preserving the local past and shaping the national future. Plant sciences play a large role in the developing world in preserving the biodiversity of the region as well as the indigenous knowledge associated with that biodiversity. This indigenous (traditional) knowledge is an expression o … Read More

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