Author: Pockey Lam

An event helping the Migrant Workers Families

Posted on by Pockey Lam

As a volunteer of the Greenboard Free and Open Teaching project, I was invited to join the charity event hosted by Friends of New Citizens and 10 other NGOs on December 13 Sunday. The event objectives were mainly to:

  1. give awards and recognitions to volunteers and migrant schools teachers (and RMB 50,000 red pocket will go to 99 teachers during the coming Chinese New Year, it was announced by Mr. Xu from Narada Foundation during the event)
  2. give subsidies to Migrant workers’ families (a total of RMB 600,000 to 300 families)
  3. enjoy the day with nice songs and dance (it was definitely a very nice show for all of us)
  4. panel discussions trying to solve problems

It was a very successful event with over 400 participants. The whole venue was seated with migrant workers families and migrant schools teachers as well as volunteers coming from different NGOs all focusing on helping migrant workers families. It was also full of touching stories and hot discussions about how to improve the quality of living for migrant workers families. It was very nice to see that so many organizations were concerned about this society problem. But we all know that subsidy can only help in the short term, policy and education are the only long term solution. In order to solve the root problem the society should provide migrant workers with trainings in order to be able to access better job opportunities and their children with free and decent quality education. We should definitely invite the government and Ministry of Education to participate in these kinds of events and panel discussions 🙂 Yes, it’s time to nurture and be responsible for migrant workers!

Helping the migrant workers and children
Awards given to volunteers from different organizations all over China
RMB 2,000 subsidy was given to 300 Migrant Workers' families
RMB 2,000 subsidy was given to 300 selected Migrant Workers' families
Best Teachers Awards were given to 99 selected teachers at Migrant Schools
Gardener Awards were given to 99 selected teachers from different Migrant Schools

Volunteers dancing with 4 volunteering children, nice performance!
Volunteers dancing with 4 volunteering children, nice performance!
A few folk songs given by Chinese famous singer
A few folk songs by a Chinese famous singer
During the event, there are a few Panel Discussions by NGO organizers, teachers, volunteers and even media
Different Panel Discussions by NGO organizers, teachers, volunteers and even media

A productive day at “Coding for Fun”

Posted on by Pockey Lam

As you may know Beijing Linux User Group has a lot of interest groups and one of the most popular groups is “Coding for fun“. The purpose is to bring together developers in an informal way to encourage them to share their projects and coding experience. It’s basically like a Hackathon, everyone hacks on their own code. Even you don’t have anything to hack on? Just look around and join anytime if you feel interested!

I personally found this group very interesting and joined numerous times already! Especially for computer science students, it’s a great place for them to learn how to get involve in FOSS projects as they can always get guidance from other experienced hackers. For other members, it’s their regular meeting place to meet and discuss about their projects. If you work alone on your own project? You can see from the pictures that the environment is very nice, it’s definitely a cool place to spend a day  working there. For myself, I always work on random stuff related to BLUG, GNOME.Asia Summit, Software Freedom Day , College OSS Society and Open Source deployment in schools. My projects of the day are mainly the BLUG website news / events announcement and TuxTyping localization. Here it is, the most popular group in BLUG!

Everybody hack on their own project there
Everybody hack on their own project there
Here is a group hacking on the Linux kernel
Hacking on the Linux kernel
Quadcopter Open hardware project
One of the projects is “Quadcopter Open hardware project”
All the projects of the day would be listed in every coding for fun
All the projects of the day would be listed in every coding for fun

First Joint Event with Beijing GNOME User Group

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Beijing Linux User Group (BLUG) and Beijing GNOME User Group (BGUG), two of the most active open source communities in Beijing just celebrated their anniversary in November (one day after the other)! With 7 and 1 year of services for BLUG and BGUG respectively it was about time we organized a joint event. In fact being a core member of both groups and a close friend of Emily Chen, BGUG’s President, I can recall how it all started: in 2008 we worked very closely to organize the first instance of GNOME.Asia Summit 2008 in Beijing, bringing passionate GNOME people from all horizons together, discussing and willing to contribute to the GNOME project here in China. The rest happened “all by itself” and it is really nice to see BGUG growing up strong with now a few core members taking over some of the group management responsibilities!

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
Emily Chen, President of Beijing GNOME User Group
Peter Junge, OpenOffice.org community member
Peter Junge, OpenOffice.org expert, represented BLUG to join the OpenOffice.org Conference
First joint event of BLUG and BGUG, over 60 members joined!
First joint event of BLUG and BGUG, over 60 members joined!

Wende School Project – Part 4

Posted on by Pockey Lam

Just back from Cambodia and Vietnam, I returned to Wende School to see how things were going.  With the help of Julien and Jason, they already incorporated computer classes into their existing curriculum, once a week for grade 3 to grade 6 (grade 1 and 2 should have it soon) teaching children how to use the keyboard and mouse with Gcompris and giving Art classes with Kolourpaint. Miss Liu already scheduled each grade classes until the end of the school year. When we arrived grade 5 was actually using the computer lab, it was so cool! At the end of the class, we discussed again with Miss Liu and gathered more comments.

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!

Computer class of Gcompris and Kolourpaint, not demo any longer!
A real computer class of Gcompris, not demo class any longer!
Teaching children how to use keyboard and mouse with Gcompris
Teaching children how to use keyboard and mouse with Gcompris
Concept of FOSS, Operating System and Educational Apps training
Concept of FOSS, Operating System and Educational Apps training
Italc Classroom Management System Training
Italc Classroom Management System Training
Computer classes are already incorporated in their existing school program
Computer classes are already incorporated in their existing school program
Happy kids in Wende School!
Happy kids in Wende School!

Open Source Education and Loongson reduce the digital divide for migrant workers kids

Posted on by Pockey Lam

After months of work from corporations, institutions, universities, Open Source communities and NGOs the first fully Open Source based lab is launched in Beijing. The purpose of organizing this Opening ceremony on November 12th is to raise concerns of Migrant Schools education from different organizations!

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.

The inauguration was organized by Greenboard core members
As a core member of Greenboard, we hosted an inauguration on 12th November at Wende School
Celebrated our success with Chairman Lu and Kewei from Chinese OSS Promotion Union, Dr. Qiu from CSIP, Liwen and Garfield from LEAD, Laurette from the French Embassy, Professor Zhuang from Beijing Normal University, YunYun from Friends of New Citizens, Wende headmaster / teachers / students and many more
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!
Professor Zhuang, at School of Educational Technology of Beijing Normal University will definitely join the Greenboard project helping to improve the teaching skills of Wende and other Migrant Schools teachers!
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
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, students could paint something really amazing with Koularpaint, isn't it coo?
After 3 classes, primary students could paint something really amazing with Kolourpaint!