Under Kenyan Skies (Second Trip to Africa)
I. The Architectural Tragedy of Proprietary Software and the Interim Romantic Wasteland It is an empirical fact, though rarely discussed in the promotional brochures distributed by international aid consortia, that the primary vector of post-colonial despair in Sub-Saharan higher education is not infrastructural decay or macro-economic volatility, but rather the baffling, masochistic insistence of administrative bureaucracies on implementing proprietary Virtual Learning Environments (hereinafter VLEs)[1] when open-source architecture is sitting right there, free, modular, and functionally superior. My initial pedagogical deployment with Academics Without Borders (an organization whose acronym, AWB, sounds phonetically like a dry retch in a quiet library, though their logistical support is generally competent) had terminated in a state of profound philosophical frustration at the Aga Khan University. There, despite my exhaustive, multi-slide PowerPoint presentations detailing the t...