In 1996 the Multimedia and Academic Communication project (MAC), a long-term collaboraton between the Universities of Oslo and Zimbabwe funded by the Norwegian Research Council, invited me to join with it in using digital media for educational and cultural purposes. Oslo's Institutt for medier og kommunikasjon (IMK) -- the Department of Media and Commication -- headed by D. T. Brathen provides the home for MAC, and the project's principal members include the hypermedia theorist and developer Gunnar Liestøl, a Senior Lecturer at IMK, and two faculty members of the University of Zimbabwe who also hold research positions at IMK: Tawana Kupe, Lecturer, English Department, and Andrew Morrison, Lecturer in the Linguistics Department, who has used Storyspace and other hypermedia environments for teaching in Harare.
The Oslo-Zimbabwe-Brown Project in its initial stages encompasses a number of activities involving the Postcolonial Literature and Culture Web, which is based at the Scholarly Technology Group at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA. First, we shall make the Postcolonial Web as a site of collaboration among the three universities, by using it as
Since IMK publishes an important series of books on the relations of media and democracy, one of the first actions of the collaboration has been to draw upon this series for materials in the Zimbabwe and other sections of this web. Other activities will include a Summer 1997 conference and workshop in Harare and conversion of both print and hypertext materials produced in Zimbabwe for use on this website.
If you would like to participate in the project or contribute materials to this website, please contact Tawana Kupe, Gunnar Liestøl, Andrew Morrison or me.
