Programme de bourses "Echanges Universitaires"
ICT to support visual art education in Cameroonian art schools
Internet is still a challenge in Cameroon. It is a very expensive good and people generally cannot afford this expense, as the cost of an internet fee corresponds to rent an house for one month. Anyway cybercafé are always full of young, even if the broadband Internet access is very low (128/64 Kbps). The 62,36% of the sample uses internet since more than three years, against the 15,07% (belonging to high school students) who never use it, and more than half (55,47%) have got a computer at home .
Universities, both the University of Yaoundé and the University of Dschang, have not internet connection and it is difficult to find also a computer classroom in which students can work, even if the 71,21% of them declares to use internet to seek information, in-depth studies, and artistic and cultural events.
The Institut de Formation Artsitique (IFA) de Mbalmayo, a private art school, the only one of all the central Africa, was the unique to have the informatics classroom, without internet connection. Anyways this classroom was totally unused, with eight working computers. I reinstalled all of them with a new update version of Microsoft suite and I provided to each computer the Adobe Photoshop software. During my permanence in Cameroon I worked mainly in this context, with different categories of art students and teachers in order to build or to increase ICTs capacities, understanding their skills to plan an eLearning course focused on the art promotion and production.
I notice a general interest in learning how to use ICTs and, not only internet as medium of communication, but also software to edit photos and videos. The quality of teachers curriculum has been improved as they hard worked on the contents development of the school website, writing texts, doing photos and learning how to edit them. This work brought to the set up of the school internet connection, useful to upload and update the website.
The majority of high school students has not skills in using the computer as informatics lectures are only theoretical. Indeed, the 33,93% of students have no competences in using Microsoft Word, while for software like Microsoft Power Point, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premier skills are quite nulls.
A weekly workshop with university students, belonging to the fine art and art history section of the University of Yaoundé, showed their great difficulty to use the computer and to formulate thoughts and express them automatically: someone didn’t know how to use the right button of the mouse, the copy and paste function, the underline, the bold; sentences had a very poor vocabulary and lot of orthography and syntax mistakes. At the end of the week each students got his artworks portfolio and learned how to update it, understanding its professional value.
Finally Cameroonian galleries and contemporary art centers consider technology as an important medium of promotion of exhibitions but also as a new expression of contemporary art. The more involved with technological applications is Doual’art, an international contemporary art center of Douala, working as experimental laboratory for new urban practices in African cities. It strongly exhibits and promotes digital art, both from Cameroonian and international artists, as a medium of education of the new artists generations . Moreover through its international partnerships and online programs it offers good visibility to its artists connecting them to curators all over the world.
The final result of my research is that last year students of the high school are the most suitable target to address an eLearning course of art promotion and production. They are preparing to go on the university or to afford the world of work and so, they are who most need some basics knowledge on ICTs. The course will be planned in a way that it could be reused in future by others institutions, especially as a parallel activities of art galleries. It will be organized each Saturday morning in the computer classroom of the IFA, for a maximum of sixteen students (maximum two persons for computer). Students will be invited to subscribe to the course and to pass a preliminary test in order to check their personal skills on the use of ICT. The only prerequisite for the course will be the ability to manage the Office suite, especially Microsoft Word, if not it will be impossible to start teaching directly Photoshop.
Photos
Institut de Formation Artistique, Mbalmayo
Workshop with art teacher of the IFA
High school students working on Microsoft Word
Workshop with students of the University of Yaoundé
Seminar on art promotion at the University of Yaoundé
Conference on art promotion at the Institut de Formation Artistique, Mbalmayo
Contacts
Marta Pucciarelli
Master in Technology-Enhanced Communication for Cultural Heritage
Università della Svizzera Italiana
pucciarelli.marta@gmail.com
Tel. +39 346 2444617
Partnership in Switzerland:
New Media in Education Laboratory
Università della Svizzera Italiana
Via Buffi 13, CH-6900 Lugano
Lorenzo Cantoni: thesis supervisor
lorenzo.cantoni@usi.ch
Isabella Rega: thesis co-supervisor
isabella.rega@usi.ch
Partnership in Italy:
Centro Orientamento Educativo
Via Milano, 4
23816 Barzio (LC)
Tel. 0341.99.64.53
coebarzio@coeweb.org
Arte e Luogo, Intercultural Project of Higher Education in Art
Salvatore Falci: Arte e Luogo project manager, international visual artist and teacher of the Academy of Bergamo and Brescia
salva.falci@tin.it
Armida Gandini: project assistant, international visual artist
armidagandini@alice.it
Partnership in Cameroon
Institut de Formation Artistique
Mbalmayo
Mr. Vincent Mbassegue : school dean
ifa_art@yahoo.fr
Centre D’art Applique
Mbalmayo
Maddalena Assako: graphic designer
maddy@libero.it
Université de Yaoundé I
Faculté des Arts, Lettres et Sciences Humaines,
Section de Arts Plastiques et Histoire de l’Art
BP 337
Yaoundé
Paul-Henri Souvenir Assako Assako: project tutor in Cameroon, art history teacher
assakopaul@yahoo.fr