My office at ESI

My office at the Ecole des Sciences de l'Information (ESI) is quite a change from the office I had last year when I was TA. This office was actually meant for two professors, but somehow I've managed to get it all to myself. There's a desktop computer, a laser printer (to myself!), several shelves that lock for all my books and files, and my own photo of the King to keep me company during my office hours.

The four boxes of materials I sent over via the Embassy diplomatic pouch arrived in Morocco before I did, although they were a little worse for wear. I managed to pick them up at MACECE in a taxi and transport them to ESI before the start of classes.

Some of the books I brought are pictured below (at least one's already been loaned out to a colleague, actually). The folks at OCLC were kind enough to let me have a set of Dewey 22, but I had to promise to leave it in Morocco. One less thing to carry back? An offer I couldn't refuse....

The meaning of exchange

Fulbrights are meant to facilitate exchange between Americans and folks from other cultures. I get to bring bits of Morocco to the United States (or, pictured here, to SCILS at the LIS tea from atop my camel in Tangiers!), and I, just by virtue of being myself, am bringing "American-ness" to Morocco and to the library school here.

Sometimes these elements of exchange work seamlessly. Everyone loves a camel. Moroccans call them something like "Sand Schooners" (yes, I just coined that expression on the spot) and consider them to be almost magical (again, my words) since they can survive under the harsh conditions of the desert. Myself, I don't think I laughed as hard that whole weekend as the 5 minutes I was on the camel, and lots of folks in the States have commented to me in emails, on this blog, and especially on Facebook about the photo. This is a good exchange -- we all like camels. It's nice to have something in common.

I'm currently working through some of the more difficult aspects of exchange as well: the nuts and bolts of lecturing to Moroccan students. My students have a reflex to memorize the notes they take during hours of lectures and to recite them back rotely at the exam. There's no textbook. I can assign outside readings, but it's difficult/impossible to test throughout the year. It's also impossible to know in advance how many times our class will meet, since we don't make up classes missed for religious holidays, and holidays are established the night before the event.

This is one part of the exchange that's less easy for me to navigate. I talked about new internet technologies (Web 2.0) using slides that had worked just fine in France. I gave a similar lecture in March 2007 (a year and a half ago) at the French national library school (ENSSIB). In France, the lecture took 1 hour. Here, we've already spent 4 hours on it, we're still not finished, and apparently there wasn't enough text on my slides to suit some students. I can't blame them for being conditioned to a certain kind of system, but I must say that this is making me think an awful lot about the role of the teacher in higher education.

This is only the first week where I've done a significant amount of lecturing, so it'll come. We'll adapt to each other, certainly. That or I'll bring a camel to school.

After hours « ateliers » for ESI students

On Wednesday of this past week, the folks at the University of Michigan's School of Information hosted the John Seely Brown Symposium. Brewster Kahle was the keynote speaker, and his presentation along with the panel presentation that followed were made available on the web via simultaneous webcast. This open approach to diffusing knowledge seemed on par with a lot of the philosophies represented in the symposium.

Since the topics were very close to ones that we were covering in Technologies de l'Information, I suggested to students that we get a room and watch together. Especially since the presentations were in English.

There was some trouble initially negotiating a room, but the students approached the administration at the 11th hour, and Mme Zhiri kindly found a room with an internet connection for us to use from 18:30 to 21:30 (GMT-Casablanca). I brought my laptop, and once we got speakers, everything worked like a dream.

What I really couldn't believe was that roughly 30 students came -- a full third of the class of second years, along with at least one from the third year who'd seen my message on Facebook. These are folks who spend roughly 8 hours per day all week in lectures, and they showed up in the middle of their evening for more, for no credit, and IN ENGLISH.

I continue to be blown away by the students here. Truly. The presentation was great; I don't know how much they understood, but I think it was a good experience overall for all involved. Thanks again to the folks at Michigan for giving us permission to watch and follow along from Africa!

Blogs in class

Today we talked about blogs in Technologies de l'information. I took a photo of the class at the beginning of the hour, and posted these photos, as well as a first draft of this post, at the end of class. Everyone seemed to agree that it's an easy process, and about eight students came up after class and asked for me to transfer the photos to their USB keys.

The co-instructor has agreed that students can develop a blog as their end-of-semester assignment, so now's about the time that students exploring this option need to get underway. I've been basing my approach to introducing blogs on a book by Will Richardson called "Blogs, wikis, podcases, and other powerful web tools for classrooms."

Of camels and contraband

This past weekend, I took a trip to Tangiers. Not only did I get to ride on a camel on bluffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean (with the requisite goofy tourist-grin on my face), I also got to visit the new port of Tangiers, Tanger-Med that is on the Mediterranean Sea. Tangiers actually is on the point that separates the Atlantic from the Mediterranean, so it was easy to drive from views of one to the other in a matter of minutes.

The photo of me and the two ladies is taken with the currently working Tangers-Med container port in the background. It's brand new and just opened in recent weeks.

Although I keep hearing that the low prices are due to the fact that the sales are of contraband, I got a load of good deals while shopping in Tétouan. Not the least of my shopping feats included the purchase of a 5 lb. ball of Edam cheese, in its red wax wrapper, for $15 (125 dh) . FIVE POUNDS of cheese! I’m going to be eating that same ball of cheese next February at this rate. The photo of the street scene (below) was taken near the souk on the way to Tétouan.

The language of the colonizer

Before going to Morocco, everyone assured me that Moroccans speak French -- it is a "francophone" country. Since I've been here, I've discovered that most do, but depending on class and background, some really fall short of the mark.

Example: yesterday I went to the MegaMall to buy work clothes and a winter coat. After trying on about 10 shirts, I gave the clothes back to the young salesgirl in piles -- ones I wanted, ones I didn't want, and ones that I either did or didn't want, depending on the other sizes that they had (this last group I wanted to verify myself).

She promptly wadded the clothes I wanted on top of a display and wandered off. By the time I was ready to check out, she'd put away the brown shirt I wanted. I asked her to get the brown shirt (the "chemise marron") and she went and got a grey dress that hadn't fit.

I run into this a lot -- the French that people speak really isn't passable, but pretending to speak French is the only way for a lot of people to get ahead.

Most folks grin from ear to ear when I tell them that I'm learning Arabic. I guess they've just, as a people, spent so much time trying to learn the language of another people/culture that the idea of someone being interested in their own langauge is somewhat revolutionary.

Dreams of MARC?

The course called National, University, and Special Libraries met today, for the second time, at 8:30. It's a great bunch of students -- 16 total, who are in their third years. Until last year, all of the courses they took were in a group, with their 65 other classmates. Now, as third years, they are able to declare which speciality they'd like to pursue: they will either specialize to become librarians who will work in libraries or to become documentalists who will work in archives. There are more jobs for documentalists in corporate offices. Fewer jobs in libraries (fewer libraries) means fewer (but more highly-motivated) students self-selecting for the libraries option.

I'd gotten in touch with the woman teaching the "partner" course for the librarian option: School and Public Libraries. It turns out, we're on the same page in a lot of respects, so today was full speed ahead with introductory content in my class.

The students are very engaged and were asking a ton of questions. I know they all took Cataloging in their first and second years, so to answer one question, I brought up an element that we code in the fixed field of MARC records that are loaded into OCLC. The conversation then turned.

Then a few minutes later, I got another question: "Can we please talk about MARC records in this class?" "I'm sorry, WHAT?" "We only covered manual cataloging in our Cataloging course -- can we talk about MARC here, since you know so much about it?" Heads nodding throughout the room. "We know MARC is great for sharing information between libraries, but we don't know how it works."

I've been teaching MARC for at least 6 years. I've talked about teaching catalgoing at international conferences. The reaction is always the same, across the board: "Ugh." Enthousiam about the mark-up language for bibliographic materials devised by the Library of Congress in the 1960s (and a very un-sexy language, at that) among 3rd year students in Morocco is still blowing me away. "Yes, I'll be happy to talk about MARC -- let's plan to do it when we talk about cooperation and university libraries, since that's a context that's natural for me and we have some time in the syllabus."

As I say, I'm still recovering.

Fridays are for couscous

The knocking began around 6:10 pm today. I was busy trying to get my class's wiki in order, and since I wasn't expecting anyone, decided not to answer the door. When the second round of knocking began 15 minutes later, I knew it wasn't just someone trying to sell me something.

My concierge was there, motioning me to lock my door and follow her upstairs. She handed me a lovely plate of couscous and admonished me for not answering the door the first time. The plate had cooled off in the interim.

Today is Friday, the day of the week most sacred to Muslims -- Friday prayers at noon time are similar to the Sunday services that I knew growing up Catholic. Friday is also the traditional day to eat and share couscous. I don't have the heart to tell her that I'm vegetarian and that this otherwise very tempting meal is going to be wasted on me because of the few slivers of meat that were added to flavor the vegetables.

At least I know that she likes chocolate. Guess I'll be out buying chocolate tomorrow and furtively ditching the couscous in the dumpster on the next block over. At least a few of Agdal's many feline residents might be able to make a meal of it.

Is next to godliness

The panoply of cleaning products in the country has had my attention since my arrival. Aicha's kitchen boasts a wide variety of soaps, sprays, and solutions to keep the area spic and span.

One of my favorite processes at the moment is dish washing. The dish soap is quite viscous, almost slippery to the touch, and comes in a tub. Aicha cuts it with a little water before using it, and takes advantage of fishing nets instead of sponges or wash clothes to wash things.

A devotee of the scrubby-sponge for quite a while, I can't bring myself to trade in my Scotch brand green sponge for the brand new netting that came with my apartment (pictured below on my washing machine, with new rags just purchased at Marjane and with more dish soap). The slick soap and the netting just aren't a good match for me, as plates and things tend to slip from my hands while being rinsed.

A final note, I only have cold (i.e. not hot) water in the kitchen faucet. The warm summer days of late September are giving over to chillier October ones, especially the evenings, and the temperature of the water coming out of the faucet is cooling off accordingly. My clothes washer has a built-in heater that runs on electricity, so I'll be able to continue to do laundry "normally." But as it gets colder and colder here, I'm wondering if it's going to be more difficult to do dishes without heating some water on the stove first.

My concierge's cookies

With Ramadan behind us for another year, my concierge came to give me a plate of cookies in celebration. She and her husband keep the building clean, take out tenants' trash, help (me) get 30-lb Butagaz bottles up to the 4th floor without an elevator, and are all-around good people.

Ma concierge (the wife of the duo) doesn't speak much French, but she just came to the door with this festive plate of cookies and explained that she has all kinds of relatives in the United States. She and her husband feel responsible for me, I'm quite sure, because they like everyone else think I'm in my early 20s. Furthermore, my concierge saw me one day with a Kleenex and thought I was crying. It's just very dusty here; but she won't believe that I'm not sad and lonely. In fact, neither she nor her husband will take a tip from me for helping with the Butagaz tanks.

This generous and amiable couple, however, lives in a one-room closet on the top floor of the building and earns a paltry 200 Dh from each of 8 apartments as their monthly income (1600 Dh = $200). They have no bed and no furniture to speak of. My concierge is very old, and she's completely folded in half at the waist with osteoporosis. She spends most of her time balanced between her two feet and two hands, and simply can't stand upright for long periods of time. Once I offered to help her up the stairs, but I couldn't bend down far enough to be of use. And she, she couldn't be unfolded for long enough to walk up the two remaining flights.

I'm positively at a loss as to how to begin thanking them. Their selfless generosity is really commendable, and is truly an inspiration.