East Timor continued, video

(10 minutes)

Or see the short version (3 minutes)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C6Ru1hpDjk

East Timor continued

Saturday morning

We went to Hera market in the morning.

Hera Market

In the afternoon Tom worked on the server and I tried to learn more Tetun.

The others went to Sidhara village to see a bread making demonstration.. An irrigated community garden has been established there.

Bread oven

Later we went snorkeling at Caz Bar beach, up to the big statue at Christo Rei, the supermarket and dinner at a restaurant on the beach.

Caz Bar beach, Dili

Christu Rei

The power went off at sunset and didn’t come back for 24 hours.

Sunday morning
Power still off. Up to the school to pick up 5 laptops. Ran the generator for an hour or so to cool the refrigerators and charge the laptops. Tom worked on the school server, now working if a config file on the laptops is changed. Carol and I tried out Activity sharing on an Ad Hoc network.

Sunday afternoon, church service at Sidara village.

Sidara Village

Monday morning
Tom worked on the server
Carol and I worked on activity sharing

Up to school to do Gcompris Activity with class 2A
Video

Monday afternoon Tom worked on server and I watched

The server works!!

Monday night Into dili and stayed Dayan and Merna Barbossa of WEC. Night soccer match didn't happen because power was off.

Tuesday
Off to Care this morning, in principle permission to use digitised Care resources on the laptops.

Care Dili

East Timor Laptop Deployment

Hera,Timor Leste, (East Timor) 7 July 2011
Thursday Morning

Tom and I arrived in Hera yesterday. We were met by Branca at Dili airport and driven the 40 minutes to Hera.

Landing at Dili airport

Timor Leste is an island nation 1½ hours northwest of Australia. Originally a Portuguese colony, they declared independence in 1975 and were then were occupied by Indonesia. A bitter 25 year guerrilla war followed, culminating in independence in 1999. The nation was left with nearly all the infrastructure destroyed . Further unrest occurred in 2006. Timor Leste is now working to reestablish itself after this difficult past.

The population speaks a large number of local dialects, Tetun (the Tetun Dili dialect) is the lingua franca, and lesser amounts of Portuguese, English and Bahasa Indonesia. The two official languages are Portuguese and Tetun. Schooling is in both Portuguese and Tetun.

Kids Ark School, Hera, Timor Leste

The Kid’s Ark school is a P-4 school founded by Brazilian missionaries. It was given 20 OLPC XO1.5 laptops by the Seaton OLPC group in July 2010. One year later, Tom and I returned to evaluate progress and provide additional teacher training.

Two principles of the OLPC program are saturation (all primary school students in a region get laptops) and child ownership (the children get to take their laptops home). The Hera deployment is neither saturated nor take home.

It is not a saturated deployment because of lack of funding.

It was not made a take home deployment because of concerns that this was incompatible with a hierarchical society with different understandings of private ownership. The possibility of negotiating this with village elders has not been explored.

The main challenge facing us was to increase the usage of the laptops. The laptops are only being used for a few hours a week. They were enthusiastically adopted a year ago, the acquisition of computer skills was highly valued but now their feeling is that they had ‘done’ everything that could be done with the computer.

One strategy identified was to use the laptops more creatively, rather for rote type tasks.

A second was to identify linkages between the laptops and the curriculum.

Teacher's guide, 1st grade, in Portuguese and Tetun

Thursday Afternoon
In the morning we re-flashed the laptops and installed some extra activities. In the afternoon we did training of 10 mainly Tetun speaking teachers. I wasn’t much use there with my lack of Tetun language but Tom and Carol did a great job. First we did an activity inserting photos into a word processor document to create a personal profile. Then we used the Tux Math drill activity. Finally we showed Wikipedia in Tetun and discussed the possibilities.

Teaching the teachers

Friday
A positive sign, two teachers (class 2a and 2b) asked if they could use Tuxmath in their classes. We first did class 2a, that meant a bit of hurried installing of software for the class. Some kids had no idea of how to use the computer, one finger on the mousepad, enter etc. Nevertheless it took only about 20 minutes to get all the kids going well (video).


Next class 2b. Similar experience to 2a. Even more encouraging, the teacher when shown the Abacus Activity wanted to use it immediately because she could see its curriculum relevance. The kids continued to use this till the laptops batteries ran out, doubling and tripling to a laptop as the batteries progressively failed.

Linking the Abacus Activity to the existing curriculum

More to come.

Legends and Poems from the Land of the Sleeping Crocodile

AI KNANANUK HO AI KNANOIK NOUSI RAI TIMUR RAI NOUSI LAFAEK DUKUR or Legends and Poems from Timor the Land of the Sleeping Crocodile was written by Cliff Morris.

The following biography comes from A Traveller's Dictionary in Tetun-English and English-Tetun from the Land of the Sleeping Crocodile East Timor

"Cliff Morris went to East Timor as a twenty year old soldier during 1942 where he learned about the complexities of the Animist religion and to admire the Timorese people for their common human concern for all people. On visiting the island in 1973 accompanied by his son Peter, he learned how the friendship so freely given in 1942 had cost the people very dearly in the revenge carried out by the Japanese, after the departure of the Australian troops."

"He resolved to commit his life to do something of everlasting good for the people. For ten years he struggled to completing a 10,000 word Tetun-English dictionary from his own fading memory, then with the help of Paulo Quintao da Costa who authenticated the word list, it was finally published by the Australian National University in 1984 as a memorial to all those who lost their lives in Timor in the war against the Japanese. In 1983 he travelled Australia looking for people who were well versed in the story telling of the Animist religion and from this work produced a small book containing some of the village stories and poems to save them from being lost as they are probably no longer told in their country of origin."

The book, Legends and Poems from Timor the Land of the Sleeping Crocodile, has been digitised and made available, free, to schools in East Timor by the Seaton OLPC User Group and Caval. Thanks to Caval for investigating copyright and digitising at no cost.

Contents ....... 2MB pdf
Chapter 1 ...... 6MB pdf
Chapter 2a .... 7MB pdf
Chapter 2b .... 5MB pdf
Chapter 3 ...... 13MB pdf
Chapter 4a .... 6MB pdf
Chapter 4b .... 6MB pdf
Chapter 4c .... 9MB pdf
Chapter 4d .... 2MB pdf
Chapter 5a .... 8MB pdf
Chapter 5b .... 5MB pdf
Chapter 5c .... 4MB pdf
Chapter 6 ...... 1MB pdf
Chapter 7 ...... 7MB pdf
Uncorrected OCR 245kB text