by Pockey Lam
The trip to Cambodia was amazingly excellent! Not only I went to the Open Institute Organization to know more about how they spread Open Source in Universities, joined the newly re-established Phnom Penh LUG first initial meeting, but also had a lot of great Cambodian food in Phnom Penh, as I never had any Cambodian food ever! As an animal lover, Phnom Penh is a paradise, full of wide life too!
Followed by Beijing, the second GNOME.Asia Summit was successfully hosted in Ho-Chi-Minh, Vietnam from 20 – 22 November 2009. I am always happy to join International Open Source events, especially outside of China, I got to talk to the local communities from all over Asia like core members from Saigon LUG, Hanoi LUG, Phnom Penh LUG, Taiwan LUG, Open Institute Organization in Vietnam! I even got to talk to the Chief Director of the Government Information Center in Vietnam and learned that all the government officers will start to use Open Source Software like OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird in 2010. Implementation will begin with massive training. The main reason for the migration is that the government wants to reduce illegal use of Windows. Isn’t it cool?
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:
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!
In Wende School Trial Part 1 and Part 2, I mainly introduced how we identified the school, 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).
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!
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:
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.
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.
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.
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!