Category: General
In which I ask some very important questions
The first question I asked was of Caroline. She was taking a nap, and I entered the bedroom with a little ring box. She woke up and saw the box, and after a little nervous fumbling, I got down on one knee and asked the most important question I’ve ever asked anyone:
“Will you marry me?”
Thankfully, for my sake, she said yes. Actually, it was more like “YES!!!”
Anyway, I am now engaged. That’s the first important question I have to talk about.
———-
The remaining questions I have to ask are from my students. We’ve been studying the internet this term, and at the beginning of the term, we did a group project where I posed the following scenario to them:
Pretend that you have been asked by the government to represent the youth of Ghana at a congress of world youth. Every country in the world is sending a delegation of their best and brightest students to represent them. As part of the congress, you will be asked to give a 20-minute presentation on any topic you like. There will also be a question period where you can ask 5 questions for the other congress attendees to answer.
I then asked them, in groups, to write down:
a.) the topic that they would present
b.) their 5 questions for the rest of the congress
I went around to all 8 of my classes and had the students vote on their favorite topics and questions, and told them the winners would be posted on the internet for the whole world to see.
So, now I make good on my promise, and let you see their questions. I’ve organized them by classes, so you can see the similarities and differences between each.
—–
3 Arts 1
Winning topic: Teenage Pregnancy
Winning questions:
1. What can we do to limit and reduce unemployment?
2. How can we make sure that the schools provide adequate ICT education?
3. How can we deal with the problem of street children?
4. How can we prevent deforestation?
5. How can we avoid teenage pregnancy?
—–
3 Business
Winning topic: Teenage Pregnancy
Winning questions:
1. What are the causes of increased teenage pregnancy in Ghana?
2. What can we do to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS?
3. Why do African countries find it difficult to develop?
4. Why should students have access to the internet?
5. Why are foreign industries developing faster than local industries in Ghana?
—–
3 Agric
Winning Topic: Teenage Pregnancy
Winning questions:
1. How can we avoid teenage pregnancy?
2. How can we bring teenage pregnancy under control?
3. As future leaders, what can we do to stop HIV/AIDS?
4. Is teenage pregnancy only an African problem?
5. What is the world doing to curb the effects of global warming?
—–
3 Arts 2
Winning topic: 3 year vs. 4 year high school education
Winning questions:
1. How can we prevent bush fires?
2. What punishment should be given to those who start bush fires?
3. Can the government of Ghana provide enough infrastructure for a 4 year SHS system?
4. What can we do to control teenage pregnancy?
5. Why is teenage pregnancy such a big problem?
—–
2 Arts 1
Winning topic: Teenage pregnancy
Winning questions:
1. Why is it important to educate our children?
2. What can we do to eliminate malaria in Ghana and the rest of Africa?
3. How can we support democracy in Africa?
4. Will there be enough security at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa?
5. Why do Ghanaians have freedom of speech, but other countries don’t?
—–
2 Agric
Winning topic: Girl-child education
Winning questions:
1. What can the government do to create more jobs?
2. Why do we put so much money into football?
3. Why are farmers poor?
4. Is HIPC a good fund, and should African countries join it?
5. Why can’t university graduates in Ghana find jobs?
—–
2 Business
Winning topic: Education
Winning questions:
1. How can we prevent corruption?
2. How can we prevent serious accidents in our countries?
3. Why don’t Europeans like Africans?
4. Why did HIV/AIDS spread so quickly?
5. How can we improve education?
—–
2 Arts 2
Winning Topic: Bush Burning
Winning questions:
1. How can we prevent deforestation?
2. Why is Africa the “poverty continent”?
3. How can we prevent bush burning?
4. What can we do to improve the standard of education world-wide?
5. How can we prevent HIV/AIDS from spreading?
—–
Now, it’s my turn. How would you answer these questions? What questions would you ask my students? What questions do you have for me? If you send me your answers, or things you want to ask my students, I will pass them on.
Cheers,
Grant
And now, I pour a little out for my homies
I wanted to document my school’s technology situation, and how I have chosen to tackle the gargantuan task of teaching computer skills to 300 kids with 5 computers. Rather than doing this in an email, which is a waste of bandwidth and would fill the inboxes of those who don’t care/don’t understand, I have decided to do it as a blog post.
I came to Nkoranman Senior High School in late July of 2008 on site visit as a then-Peace Corps Trainee. I was presented a pile of computer equipment and told “this is what we have.” I had a pile of approximately 15 computers, split between Dell Optiplex GXpro 200s and Compaq Deskpro 5400s. In addition, I also had 3 computers that had been tasked for use in the administrative offices, mostly for word processing.
HARDWARE
My first task was to figure out what worked. I removed the parts from pretty much all the machines, set up a couple of testing stations, and proceeded to identify the working hardware. Out of the 15 machines, 6 of them worked — 5 Dells and an AST Advantage. I also had a tidy pile of spare parts — hard drives, video cards, network cards, memory, CD-ROM drives, and a couple of spare power supplies. I took these, set them aside, made a list of parts I needed to make the 5 Dell machines usable, and stripped down the rest. I did save one of the Compaq machines, as well as some of its parts, for use in teaching hardware. As for the AST machine, I decided to save it for a later project in which I try turning it into a router using the LEAF Project‘s software.
My next task was to get the machines I did have to an operational state. They turned on, they would start to boot, but they didn’t do anything. After a trip to Kumasi to pick up more hard drives, and a few donated floppy diskettes (remember those?), I was able to put together some computers that were ready for software.
At this point, my 5 machines had roughly the following hardware specs:
– Pentium Pro with MMX 200MHz
– 32-64 MB of EDO DRAM, depending on the machine
– 3-10GB Hard disk space, again depending on the machine
– Onboard USB 1.1 (except for one machine)
– Onboard 10/100 network interface cards
– 16X CD-ROM Drive
– 1.44MB 3.5″ Floppy Drive
The far end of trailing-edge hardware. The rare memory and lack of it made doing anything fancy out of the question; these machines were not going to run Windows XP. At the same time, I was reluctant to try anything like Windows 98, due to the fact that it’s no longer supported. It looked like Linux was about my only option.
SOFTWARE
At first, I was limited to what I brought with me: Ubuntu and Xubuntu. Both of these ended in resounding failure, due to the ridiculous amount of resources required by Xorg and Gnome. Luckily, about the time I cleaned up the remnants of Xubuntu, I had internet access at site. I thus began to download and test the following distributions:
– Damn Small Linux
– Puppy Linux
– cAos
– TinyMe
– Debian Etch (netinstall)
In the end, Debian won out. The rest were either too rigid or difficult for me to work with, and Debian allowed me to install only what I needed to teach. Due to the homogenous nature of my hardware, I also had the added benefit of being able to create one “build” of Debian, which I could then copy to all of my machines almost verbatim.
The next task was figuring out what software I needed within Debian. I needed something that wouldn’t be too intimidating for a first-time computer user, but would still run smoothly on the hardware I had. I also needed a few basic apps for teaching keyboard skills and mouse usage, and a way to make everything accessible graphically. The whole setup had to be secure and contained, so that I could control the computing experience without the kids changing the wallpaper or screwing with settings as they became more familiar with the setup. Finally, I needed to make the user interface look aesthetically similar to Windows so that my students wouldn’t be incredibly confused the first time they used a Windows box.
In the end, I opted to use a combination of Xorg, IceWM, and iDesk to give me a Windows-like feel that I could keep somewhat locked-down. I also installed XDM to present a graphical logon, and customized it a bit to make it look less like XDM. The only two applications I have installed at present are TuxTyping 2 and TuxPaint. I figure that if I have nothing else installed, it’s nothing else that can turn back and shoot me in the face.
INSTALLATION
I finished tweaking the settings, gave it revision number 0.1, and moved on to the arduous process of getting the software from 1 computer to 5. Rather than configure each box by hand, and because my hardware is pretty much all the same, I opted to use disk imaging for my lab. I used the System Rescue CD 0.2.19 live CD and my trusty USB pen drive to create the image, then deployed it to my 4 other classroom machines in the same way. Once the imaging was complete, I’d reboot, change the hostname (I’m using lab01 through lab05) and reconfigure X to use the proper resolutions for that monitor.
There were a few snags in this plan. First off, I had to rob memory out of all of the machines in order to provide the machine I was imaging at the time with the 128MB required to boot the live CD. Second, not all of the machines had CD-ROM drives that were CD-RW friendly (one of the more useful tools I brought to Ghana), so I had to install a drive that was in order to boot the live CD. Finally, I have one machine that doesn’t have USB, which resulted in me using two CD-ROM drives and two CD-RWs to install the image. All things considered, the process was cumbersome, but I’d expect any first-run system to be so.
TRIAL BY FIRE
The only true way to test software is to give it to users. In an educational setting, that means sitting a kid down in front of the machine and letting them bang on it. It has been nothing short of a resounding success — the kids love to use TuxPaint, and they scramble for the opportunity to play TuxTyping games. The first night I had the lab open, I came home feeling like a king. These kids finally have the chance to learn practical computer skills, and I managed to do it without any horrible crash-and-burn failures.
THOUGHTS AND NEXT STEPS
I’ve been using this build for about three weeks now, and it’s been surprisingly issue-free. I do have some cosmetic gripes, of course — I want to find a display manager that’s more user-friendly than XDM, I need to find a way to lock the icon position on the desktop, and so on. I also would like to optimize memory usage, both by compiling a custom kernel and removing unnecessary services from boot. Finally, I’d like to set up another small linux system just for re-imaging the machines, so that I don’t have to go through the cumbersome process of frankensteining together hardware every time I deploy a software update.
I also still have the administration machines to worry about. Right now, they work, so I’m trying not to change them until I have a reason to. At some point, however, I’ll probably end up deploying some sort of system for storing documents in a central location, as well as some sort of student information system — whether that ends up being a glorified spreadsheet or something more meaty is yet to be seen.
In which our intrepid hero shakes hands and imparts the wisdom of the ages
I would like to begin this email with a prepared statement:
Dear sweet mother of everything holy and awesome, I have the *worst* craving for pancakes and (due to a lack of baking powder) no way to rectify it. I hope you all appreciate your proximity to places that serve breakfast 24 hours a day.
I taught my first lesson last Monday to a class of very eager, very intimidated form 2 students. It went well, but I caught myself rushing a few times and noticed that I get pedantic when I’m nervous. My second lesson on Wednesday was much better, and by Thursday afternoon, I felt like I was beginning to accomplish something.
We’ve begun with a basic overview of how human beings communicate using technology, which covers things like broadcast media, print media, and computers. This week, I’m going to start introducing computers, specifically the stuff they need to know in order to practice mouse usage and typing. My main goal right now is to get the students to a point where they can actually use a computer without too much
handholding, so that I can feel confident in moving on to to more complex material next term.
My average class size is about 90 students. Right now, I’m teaching remedial ICT to forms 2 and 3, which gives me about 180 students. When the form 1 students arrive, I’ll have 300 students in total for this term, which ends on 19 December. Next term, ICT will be an elective course for forms 2 and 3, which will result in fewer students for me to
worry about.
Thursday afternoon and almost all of Friday was spent with the headmaster, traveling around to different government offices and talking to various people in an effort to find out why the construction of our computer lab was being held up. We think we figured it out; it has to do with the construction funding. A few in-person conversations, a few well-placed phone calls, and now we’re supposed to be expecting a contractor sometime this week or next week. Just goes to show that it’s not what you know; it’s who you know.
Alright, that’s enough out of me. Enjoy your week, everyone.
In which our intrepid hero shakes hands and imparts the wisdom of the ages
I would like to begin this email with a prepared statement:
Dear sweet mother of everything holy and awesome, I have the *worst* craving for pancakes and (due to a lack of baking powder) no way to rectify it. I hope you all appreciate your proximity to places that serve breakfast 24 hours a day.
I taught my first lesson last Monday to a class of very eager, very
intimidated form 2 students. It went well, but I caught myself rushing a
few times and noticed that I get pedantic when I’m nervous. My second
lesson on Wednesday was much better, and by Thursday afternoon, I felt
like I was beginning to accomplish something.
We’ve begun with a basic overview of how human beings communicate using
technology, which covers things like broadcast media, print media, and
computers. This week, I’m going to start introducing computers,
specifically the stuff they need to know in order to practice mouse
usage and typing. My main goal right now is to get the students to a
point where they can actually use a computer without too much
handholding, so that I can feel confident in moving on to to more
complex material next term.
My average class size is about 90 students. Right now, I’m teaching
remedial ICT to forms 2 and 3, which gives me about 180 students. When
the form 1 students arrive, I’ll have 300 students in total for this
term, which ends on 19 December. Next term, ICT will be an elective
course for forms 2 and 3, which will result in fewer students for me to
worry about.
Thursday afternoon and almost all of Friday was spent with the
headmaster, traveling around to different government offices and
talking to various people in an effort to find out why the construction
of our computer lab was being held up. We think we figured it out; it has to do with the construction funding. A few in-person conversations, a few well-placed phone calls, and now we’re supposed to be expecting a contractor sometime this week or next week. Just goes to show that it’s not what you know; it’s who you know.
Alright, that’s enough out of me. Enjoy your week everyone.