I spent last week in the city of Jos where I went to spend some time with my family and also attend my class reunion. I had an idea to organize a seminar where I’ll teach and talk about anything I thought would be cool and constitute new knowledge.

So I went about contacting some of my colleagues who gave me pointers on whom to see and after making a few contacts, I was well on my way to organizing the seminar.

I got a lot of support there and we were able to get about a hundred diploma students at the University of Jos to attend. I was initially thinking about organizing something strictly for web developers and programmers. I had a few ideas about web-based APIs, mashups, code versioning, improving web application performance, etc. but when I was told the caliber of people who were going to be attending the seminar, I decided to stick to something regular computing students will be interested in.

I gave a presentation on Web APIs and Mashups and after the short slideshow, went into building a practical mashup. I was a little concerned about making sure I didn’t speak over the top of their heads and so looked for something very practical to demonstrate a mashup. I ended up building an application that sent a text message to their mobile phones. Afterwards, I went on to talk about the various freely available APIs on the web that can be used to build smart applications and encouraged them to try them out.

There were only a very few individuals there who had done anything for the web but based on the inquiries I received at the end of the seminar, I knew a lot of them had gotten very interested in making further exploration.

I ended the seminar by talking about web mapping and most especially Google Mapmaker and told them about how Plateau State had very little content on the Internet and how that was an opportunity to do something. I’m told that there are plans to build a team that will take what they’ve learnt from the seminar and do something about it.

The success of the event was more than I envisaged and I’m encouraged to give many of these talks and presentations in other parts of the country.