After moving to Southern China, we have been attempting to meet with local FOSS communities. Finally we got to visit the Shantou University (STU) and talk to the core members of Linux Association, one of the winners of  Software Freedom Day Innovative event award 2009 from sfdchina.org.

Since its establishment in 2005, STU Linux Association has been hosting regular meeting on a weekly basis (except holidays and exam period). They strive to introduce members of different FOSS applications and give technical lessons that their core members are familiar with. They even have members dedicating to help students with difficulty in installing Linux.

It was a great pleasure to meet with all of them due to their enthusiasm towards FOSS. Some of them have been the core members for 4 years, that’s usually not the case in other universities I’ve met. This year they are planning for a double capacity SFD event. Fred and I promised to support them with more goodies and be the SFD speakers. We are looking forward to celebrate SFD with Shantou University and wish everybody Happy Software Freedom Day!

For this joint event we presented to both groups a report of the second instance of GNOME.Asia Summit which happened in Vietnam this year. Emily, Fred, Ray and myself were giving presentation there and we gave a summary of what happened, who we met, how vibrant the local Open Source scene is and showed of course many pictures of the 3 days event. In the second part of the meeting Peter Junge, core member of OpenOffice.org community, presented his experience while representing the BLUG and attending the OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon) in Italy. It was really a wonderful evening flooded with event highlights, innovative technology, travel and funny stories. After witnessing the success of GNOME.Asia Summit in Beijing and Vietnam, I can’t wait to know where it will be hosted in 2010 and of course participate again!

Emily Chen, President of Beijing GNOME User Group

Peter Junge, OpenOffice.org expert, represented BLUG to join the OpenOffice.org Conference

First joint event of BLUG and BGUG, over 60 members joined!

The main reason of our visit was to give formal training to the English teacher (whom I mentioned in my previous blog post). For this session, we tried to deliver a class that would enable her to teach at the end of the course. We managed to build a new 2 hours class focusing on:

1. Concepts of Computer, FOSS and Open Education in education (10 mins)
2. Hardware and Operating System introduction (30 mins)
3. Apps to teach English (30 mins)
4. Italc classroom management system (30 mins)
5. Q&A (20 mins)

The purpose of the shortening of the initial teacher training class is mainly due to the high turn over rate of teachers in Migrant Schools. After 2 hours of training, the teacher take the Gdium home and practices with it during her spare time. Any question is then directed to either Miss Liu who is already trained (and of course ourselves).

This time again, at the end of the training section, the Maths teacher this time popped in and expressed her interest to join the training next time. It seems that word of mouth is doing wonder at Wende School hopefully we can spread the word all over China soon!

A real computer class of Gcompris, not demo class any longer!

Teaching children how to use keyboard and mouse with Gcompris

Concept of FOSS, Operating System and Educational Apps training

Italc Classroom Management System Training

Computer classes are already incorporated in their existing school program

Happy kids in Wende School!

Everyday hundreds of thousands of children from migrant workers families who are building modern China fail to receive proper education and can’t get basic computer teaching, leaving them even more behind and increasing the digital divide. The complexity of addressing education needs for the part of the Chinese population requires a lot of problems to be solved and computer access is only one of the problems. However computers coupled with the possibilities of accessing the Internet will give them the chance to discover and access invaluable content which can secure their future and give them access to job they didn’t even know existed!

Delivering proper computer based education to poor schools issues range from electricity consumption from a full classroom (one normal PC can easily consume 60 to 200W, multiplied by 20 or 50…), teacher knowledge about IT and integration of the digital tool into their curriculum, content cost and licensing, and of course computers cost.

Today in Wende we have managed to address all the problems above thanks to technology, vision, and collaboration from various parties. The Chinese Academy of Sciences has built a general purpose low powered CPU that runs free software and which enables to consume as low as 15-17W per machine at a very competitive price, enabling manufacturers such as Lemote and Dexxon to build some of the cheapest netbooks on the market.

Thanks to Dexxon for its contributions and sponsorship of the classroom, WenDe today has a fully equipped 20 Gdiums Loongson based set up. Dexxon has sponsored Mandriva, a French Linux software company to bring the latest technology on the Loongson architecture and customized a Linux distribution for education.

Furthermore non-profit organizations such as Greenboard and LEAD have been building the education material together with teachers and released them under an Open Source license so any school can use them for free, modify and improve as they wish.

The last part has been completed by Greenboard and CSIP who are also graciously training the group of selected teachers by WenDe’s headmaster in order to get them ready to deliver the initial curriculum. LEAD is currently training some of their members to get ready to deliver the same kind of training to other migrants schools.

A special thank you goes to COPU for their support throughout the project and helping Greenboard and Dexxon to connect the dots.

So from now on the children of Wende school will be able to access the latest software and technology to become computer literate but also to improve their knowledge in general topics such as maths, English, geography, arts, problem solving, programming and much more.

The organizations involved will continue to build new curriculum, more exercise and will also get more teachers involved in the near future. One of the advantages of using a free software licensing model is that all the cost of such a solution only goes to the hardware and any school can just download, use and adapt the content to their needs. Hopefully we will soon see a strong teacher community improving this initial work and working together to create better free educational content for our children.

As a core member of Greenboard, we hosted an inauguration on 12th November at Wende School

We had people from Dexxon, Greenboard, Chinese OSS Promotion Union, LEAD, CSIP French Embassy, Beijing Normal University, Friends of New Citizens, Beijing LUG, Lemote, Wende School and other Migrant Schools!

Zhuang Xiuli, Professor at School of Educational Technology of Beijing Normal University will definitely bring a lot to the Greenboard education project helping to improve the teaching skills of Wende and other Migrant Schools teachers!

Class demonstration given by Wende teacher, students were very concentrated to learn how to paint with computer (even the room was full of visitors)

After 3 classes, primary students could paint something really amazing with Kolourpaint!

There were a lot of presentations and workshops covering many topics other than GNOME during the whole summit! The full schedule can be viewed here. As a woman leading the Beijing Linux User Group, I gave three talks and led one panel discussion:

1. Women_In_IT / FOSS
2. Building Communities
3. FOSS Deployment in Schools
4. Panel discussion about Women Participation in GNOME

I was very impressed by the whole GNOME.Asia Summit!  First, Vietnamese participants asked really a lot of questions which is not so common in China. Second, there were a lot of volunteers from different Universities, students of different domains like Computer Science, Trading, Economy and so on. They were very energetic and helpful.  Third, there were a lot of girl volunteers as well which is very rare in Open Source conferences! I can see that the GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 is just a start in Vietnam, with all of these young students’ energy, community building and government support, I am sure 2010 will be a great FOSS year in Vietnam!

GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 in Veitnam

GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 Workshops

A lot of interaction with audiences

GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 Panel Discussion: Women Participation in GNOME

GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 Speakers from all over the world

GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 has over 100 volunteers full of energy (a lot of girls as well)

Teacher Training - Week 4

In Wende School Trial Part 1 and Part 2, I mainly introduced how we identified the school for trial, our preparation work and part of the training. In this post, I will cover the demonstration class that teachers give us and how efficient our training has been so far.

With the target of having the children use the Gdiums by November, we have been raising our teacher on-site training session to twice a week. Another part of the training should be done by the teachers themselves and we insisted that they take the Gdiums at home in order to get familiar with the machine and the system when they have free time.

Migrant Schools always run on very low budgets, making them nearly impossible to attract qualified teachers, buying updated textbooks and avoiding high turn-over in both teachers and learning population.  Talking to the English is was a great example of this, and bringing her the few educational applications we had (dictionary, text-to-speech, vocabulary learning exercises, with native speaker voices, etc) definitely made a great upgrade to her existing teaching arsenal. She is now hoping to use the Gdium classroom daily or as much as possible based on other teacher schedule. She gave us a copy of the textbooks she uses so we can incorporate the vocabulary and the prerecorded words into the software we’re using (LLN (Linux Letters and Numbers). And we’re glad to see her joining the teacher training classes once the (children) mid term examination is over (in 2 weeks).

Class Demonstration from Wende teacher

So 4 sessions into the teacher training it was now time to give them a little exam and see how they would be doing using the system with their students. We started off with 4 children, then 10 and then a full 20 children classroom. It was really exciting to see the classroom being used for its intended purpose: getting the children to learn maths, English and art without even noticing it! For most of them it was there first encounter with a computer, but this didn’t seem to slow them down at all. The teachers did really well as well and we should be starting teaching them content development to build upon and enhance the existing Open Educational Resources we have provided to start using the Gdiums in the classroom. In order to make the project more scalable, we are cooperating with organizations like LEAD and CSIP to have more trainers. If you are interested in this project, feel free to jump in!

Computer Room at Wende School - Before decoration

Welcome to part 2 of my early post written in October 2009 which is mainly about the school selection, the preparation work and training.

During the school summer holiday, we went back to Wende School a few times and discussed with the headmaster about the computer room decoration and set up. We look at things like:

• Class orientation (make it easy for teachers to monitor & manage)
• Server / computer for teacher
• Internet and Wifi network
• Electricity and cabling
• Hardware protection (avoid dust and direct sunlight to computers)
• Safety management (prevent kids from accessing the electricity sockets)
• Security and thief proofing (install bars on windows and locks on doors)

By mid August, we visited again to check on the decoration status. What impressed me is that the headmaster actually was renovating the school with his wife by themselves, I saw them sweating while painting the walls and building the fences of the kindergarten. We were however a bit disappointed on the computer lab renovation progress: nothing had started yes and it was still the same storage room that you can see on the photo above. So we could only review the room requirements, discussed about who would be receiving  the training and whether they had a candidate to become part time system admin to manage the lab. Headmaster Cui had already thought about it and suggested to select a few teachers who have been working by his side for a while with some computer knowledge. We didn’t want to train someone to see leaving the school within months (which is currently a generic problem of such schools for migrant workers kids). He of course included himself in the group so they can also manage knowledge transfer by themselves.

Donated 20 Gdiums to Wende School

Early September 2009, Dexxon / the Gdium Foundation donated 20 Gdiums to Wende School as initially agreed. We were very excited about the start! The room was almost ready. It was decorated with nice white paint (it’s a bit plain but we can always add some colorful drawing later), carpets, bars, locks and clean tables and chairs. Not enough electricity sockets were installed, so we had to add a few wire extensions and plugs. Of course there were still some sundries here and there but we were ready to start teachers training sessions. The same day, headmaster Cui provided a server and Wifi router for us to prepare and use in the newly installed lab.

Testing 20 Gdiums at Wende School Computer Lab

One week later the whole set up was ready and we could start training the four selected teachers.  In my opinion Mr. Cui did an excellent job by choosing people with a very diverse background: we have a young teacher who is very open to new things; the administration manager, a 40+ years old lady who is only familiar with Windows; a college student who was just hired as part-time system admin to manage the computer room, and himself.

After discussion with the headmaster and the teachers, we agreed to give 4 to 6 days of training depending on the progress. 4 hours per day with a break every hour. 1 training day per week so they have enough time to digest and practice what they have learned. We printed and binded 5 Greenboard Open Textbooks covering all the initial deployment courses, 1 for trainer and 4 for teachers. Seeing the 5 textbooks print out, I got the feeling that a milestone of the project had been reached. Of course this is only version 1.0 (beta) and we already have a roadmap for future versions to come. Besides since the courses are released under a Creative Commons license, anybody can just jump in, give their feedback and actively contribute.

Giving training to Wende School teachers

On the first day of training, Jason was the key trainer while I was the assistant trainer. Julien and Liantao were testing the server performance with 20 Gdiums. It was exciting to see the reaction and get feedback from the teachers! The student sys-admin and headmaster seems quite familiar with Gdium and its operating system already. I guess they took a bit of advance by taking them home and exploring all the options.

The young teacher (Miss Liu) was very eager to learn and excited to discover new things. the only slight resistance came from the administration manager who had to learn a different system, which is not what she has been using for the past years. At the beginning, she showed her frustration and asked a lot of questions about what’s the hardware performance and if Linux could do the same things as Windows. During each break, we spent some time to explain the benefits of Open Source in general and in education in particular. The last training session covering Gcompris education suite nailed it: we saw her trying out all the educational activities supplied by the suite, with a big smile and satisfaction on her face and she said:  “These games are good for children to learn Maths and English!”  Say no more! What’s better than experiencing it by herself?

As mentioned earlier, making schools understand the benefits of Open Source can be challenging, “Free” as Free beer doesn’t work as almost every software is free in China, we focus on “Free” as “Freedom” but how many people care about it? Most people have habits and are addicted to Microsoft software. It will definitely take some time to change. The good thing is that Open Source and Linux are not companies, we don’t have quarterly financial report to fulfill, that means we have time. By providing a total solution with education oriented customized Operating System for students / teachers / Server computers, a complete training courses / curriculum and constant maintenance support, it will definitely fasten the process. I look forward to seeing more school benefiting from it!

As this is an ongoing project, do expect to read more about our progress, experiences, and maybe difficulties right here!

Same as every year, Beijing Linux User Group supported a lot of Software Freedom Day events in Beijing in 2009. Except this year, we helped 7 Universities! Our BLUG member and long time contributor Daniel made a video of the event hosted in Tsing Hua University! In order to cope with the theme “Getting Things Done With Open Source”, we organized a speech and three booths over there to demonstrate students some great FOSS applications like OpenOffice.org, GIMP, Gjots2, Freemind, Labyrinth, Gaphor, etc. And like the excellent videos from for Beijing SFD ’07 and packing all the schwags that have been sent out to SFD teams worldwide, this one is definitely another great addition to the BLUG TV!

Normal University FOSS Club - First initial meeting

The first time I met Bauer Yung, a Computer Science student from Beijing Normal University was at a Beijing Linux User Group meeting a few months ago he was attracted by the concept of Open Source. As the leader of College Open Source Society I encouraged him to start a FOSS Club in his college. We met again at the WiserU workshop and discussed a bit more in details.  In a similar manner as what we did when Jesse Zhang (Beihang University) wanted to start his FOSS Club following the GNOME.Asia Summit, I suggested to have a meeting together with FOSS clubs core members from other Beijing Universities.

After some miscommunication about the meeting arrangement we finally ended up with a date conflicting with the Beijing GNOME User Group preventing some members to join. The good thing is that it gave us the first opportunity to share experiences about scheduling, meeting arrangement and locations.

The whole meeting went very well, there were about 10 students from Normal University and about the same numbers from Beihang University and USTB joined, as well as myself and Fred. Bauer wrote a very detailed meeting notes (in Chinese) which can be accessed here.

Basically everybody shared their views and perspectives about:

• What’s the purpose of the FOSS club
• What it takes to start (mailing list, website and regular meeting time / venue)
• What are the tasks of each core members
• How to promote the group
• What are the challenges, problems and their solutions

As a leader of Techgirls Group, I noticed and couldn’t help talking with one of the core members girlfriend, Qingning, English student in Beijing Normal University. She had of course heard a bit about Open Source (through her boyfriend) and even tried Open Solaris which turned out a bit difficult for a beginner so she gave up. She couldn’t understand why people are contributing to Open Source, and even more her boyfriend. Her concerns were mainly around the business model and opportunities as she wouldn’t want him wasting time on something that cannot help them make a living. Hence, Fred and I spent quite some time explaining her the software industry landscape in China where people do not pay for license and all the major online companies IT infrastructures run Linux and Open Source technologies. Finaly she said she’ll give another try and must be using Linux now! I strongly believe Qingning will be a great asset for the newly launched BNU OSS Club, especially for meetings and events organization and building awareness. What’s better than non-geeks like Qingning to talk to people like herself about Linux?