We are a team of three students from Ashesi University in Ghana, implementing AshCon at Ricks Institute. AshCon is an off-line e-learning platform that serves high-quality educational material to students and teachers without the need for an Internet connection. To learn more about AshCon, you can visit our blog. As part of our project, we had to find and download additional educational materials, however our Internet connection was too slow. Kpetermeni Siakor, our team leader had been mentioning iLab even before we left Ghana and said that they would be able to help us. Kpetermeni is actually one of the first employees of iLab. We then contacted iLab for them to allow us to use their facility and their Internet connection and they agreed.
Our first day in iLab was really joyous, Kpetermeni was really happy to see his former colleagues and friends Anthony, Carter and Luther again. We also got to meet Teemu Ropponen the country director who was going for a meeting outside. We had the chance to meet Teemu earlier during our first week in Liberia; he was invited to the AJEN summer camp organized by Ashesi University at Ricks Institute to tell the participants about iLab and how they could benefit from it. After all the excitement settled, Anthony Kamah gave us a tour of iLab and helped us setup. Mr. Kamah was very kind and helpful. Later on, we had to temporarily move to the kitchen so as not to disrupt iLab's activities. We were so comfortable in the kitchen that we decided to stay there and make it our workspace for the following days.
Our stay in iLab was very fruitful. During the day, we would search for creative commons educational material and save the links in a download manager. Considering the volume of our download, it was preferable not to download during the day to avoid slowing the internet for everyone else. Before leaving in the evening, we would launch the downloads. This way we ensured not to monopolize the internet connection considering the volume of our downloads.
During our time at iLab, we got a glimpse of some of their activities: co-working hours, TED talk night, python for girls, social media for social change and a lot of other events.
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