TWBSA 2009 Impressions
Aaron Culliney
Driver and IT Support
asc@deadc0de.org
+1 808-280-1576
My TWBSA 2009 Roles
The 2009 Teachers Without Borders South Africa (TWBSA) trip was an amazing introduction to the country and its people. We got to see places and events that few tourists will encounter.
I was the secondary driver and the IT support person for the Maths, Science, and Leadership workshops. The driving was exciting: the South Africans’ drive on the left and most cars are standard transmission. Although driving rural roads dodging livestock was fun and stimulating, it quickly became a routine that I was comfortable with. The real challenging, rewarding, and spontaneous work involved conducting computer workshops for South African teachers, many of whom had never used computers before.
The workshops for TWBSA 2009 were conducted at the TRINSET facility of the Eastern Cape Leadership Institute in Mthatha. The computer lab was filled with modern PCs connected to the Internet through a closet of switches and DSL router. There was a monthly bandwidth quota that sometimes was exhausted and required additional purchasing, especially at the end of a month of intensive use. To conserve bandwidth, IT support at TRINSET did not perform software updates regularly, but only at times when the computer lab had not received much use. I honored this policy decision when I was in charge of the workshops, ignoring prompts to upgrade to the latest Windows or other software. Unfortunately this limitation was a contributing factor to the malware problems plaguing the machines.
Although the Windows PCs were riddled with malware, it didn’t present a substantial security threat to the teachers because most of them didn’t have any online accounts that could be hijacked. The problems with the Windows PCs were more of an annoyance for this group of users; in engineering parlance: these computers had a poor signal to noise ratio! However the poor user experience and possibility of security issues for lead me to install Ubuntu Linux on all the machines for the third workshop. More on this below.
For TWBSA 2009, we conducted a total of three workshops in about so many weeks. Computer lab sessions were about 2 hours and we conducted about three sessions per day, for each day of the workshop. We had a TWBSA CD with Maths, Science, and TWB materials, and also copies of useful websites should Internet access not be available.
First Hour Computer Lab
I began each computer lab session by asking how many of the teachers had used a computer before. Usually only a handful ever raised their hands. I encouraged these people to start exploring the CD without necessarily keeping pace with their peers. Then for the majority who had not used computers before, I would begin with the basics: putting the CD into the computer and waiting for it to load. Although I had prepared the lab so that all the machines were turned on, it was inevitable that during the course of inserting the CD and pushing the CD tray loading button, they would mistakenly press the reset or power button and cause a reboot. This was a good time to mention to them that they shouldn’t fear making mistakes because they could always get back to where they started.
Once everyone had gotten the CD loaded and could see it on their monitors, we proceeded to learn to use the mouse with the goal of navigating down the folder hierarchy on the CD. If, for instance, it was a session of maths teachers, I would have them navigate to the Maths folder on the CD and start looking at the documents there.
In the computer lab there was about 20 working computers and we often had twice that number of teachers. This was not a problem because when they doubled or tripled up to a machine it allowed them to more quickly work through issues. I had a computer at the front of the class connected to a projector where they could see what I was doing and practice the same mouse movements. Although I would initially demonstrate a task to them, most of the time I would walk around and help those groups with questions or who had gotten a little lost.
Eventually all groups had gotten the hang of mousing around and were perusing the materials on the CD. At this point I usually declared that it was an open time to explore whatever interested them on the CD. This could fill out about the first hour of their lab session. Occasionally I would go back to the projector to highlight something of particular interest or some issue in common to many of them. Often these issues were how to “get back” to a different portion of the CD, or how to close or maximize windows.
A few of the teachers would have a problem using the mouse. In particular it often took a bit of practice to get used to double-clicking, or the difference between a left click or a right click, or even just holding the mouse steady over a target while clicking. In general it was useful to have two or more at a computer so that they could help each other learn these processes.
Second Hour Computer Lab Time
If we had Internet connectivity, the second hour of the lab session was dedicated to searching the Internet for information of interest to them. I would start off by having them close down everything they were doing, getting back to their desktops and then loading a blank word processing document. (Although they had plenty of practice with the mouse, they hadn’t needed to use the keyboard yet, which is a prerequisite to typing Internet search queries). Within the context of the word processing document I had them type a sentence or two, showing the backspace, shift, caps-lock, space bar, arrow keys, etc. It was also useful to show using the mouse to highlight text for quick deletion or applying styles, etc.
After about 5-10 minutes of this, we quit the word processing and loaded the web browser. We would start with the Google South Africa webpage: google.co.za Our initial search would be for something maths or science related, but would branch out to many other subjects of interest to them. At they started to branch out I would alert them that they could search for anything online, and find good results, bad results, and naughty results 🙂 Then I would mention that as long as what they were searching for didn’t offend their neighbors, I had no problem with it too!
The top searches and investigations beyond looking for maths and science curriculum, were (not necessarily in order): South African Department of Education websites, positions available at various schools and institutions, salary searches and comparison with teachers in U.S. and elsewhere, email account setup, purchasing an automobile, Nelson Mandela, Jacob Zuma, football scores, music downloads, Youtubemusic videos, etc… Once realizing the scope of the web of information available, most of the teachers chose to spend the remainder of the second hour of lab time online.
At the end of the day, I left the computer lab open and allowed the teachers to come back and continue to use the machines. Again, most would choose to browse the web, but a few were interested in just the act of typing or word-processing and used their time to develop their resume, and print or copy to a USB drive. Some would also come back to play the standard desktop solitaire-style card games.
Ubuntu Linux Experiences
Initially we were using computers running Microsoft Windows, but by the last workshop I had successfully installed Ubuntu Linux on all the machines. I did this because Windows on these machines was riddled with malware and there were no installation CDs available to fix windows, or the anti-virus databases were out-of-date and not easily updateable! So with Ubuntu Linux, I was able to get all the machines to work in the same way and be less susceptible to getting screwed up.
As mentioned above a few teachers had USB thumb drives. And on a few of these USB drive, anti-virus programs did detect malware which could be transferred between Windows machines but which would be unlikely to affect Ubuntu Linux.
In addition to eliminating the malware problems, installing fresh Ubuntu Linux provided a way to standardize all desktops. (The Windows desktops were all configured differently; not just different backgrounds, icons, and fonts, but different default actions that lead to the overall confusion for many first-time users). So a standardized Ubuntu desktop which was easy for my to reconfigure back to the default improved their learning experience. And I was also interested to see how well teaching on the Linux platform would work.
Although this wasn’t a scientific study, my experience with teaching on Ubuntu Linux was generally positive. It certainly was no worse than teaching on improperly configured Windows machines. The Open Office suite of programs had no problem reading information in Microsoft formats, including Word files and Powerpoint presentations, although the formatting was occasionally different. I did feel it was important to mention that we were using something different than Microsoft Windows to alert them to the fact that they may encounter something different when they use computers back in their schools.
The Ubuntu Linux lab configuration (for future IT support): Ubuntu installed with Wubi from the Windows partition and the boot.ini set to load Linux automatically (to prevent unconcious reboots into Windows). Automatic user (not admin) login, admin password required for configuration (to prevent misconfiguration), Firefox browsers set with google.co.za as initial page and home page, installed the flashplayer plugin.
Installations were performed with the latest Ubuntu Linux ISO in the CDROM drive to prevent downloading the ISO for each computer installed (and killing the monthly bandwidth total). Again because of bandwidth issues, software updates to Linux were not performed. I did consider trying to create a cluster server for the updates so they could be downloaded once to a master machine that all the other machines would pull from locally. However the state of such support in Ubuntu Linux was lacking, and I didn’t have the time to roll my own solution.
After each lab session I would go around and run a quick script to force the Ubuntu desktop back to its default configuration for the new session.
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Ideas and Suggestions
During one lab session we attempted to get everyone signed up with Google Gmail accounts. It was a little difficult to lead an entire group through the signup process, but that wasn’t the show-stopper. After about 10 successful account creations, Google shut down further attempts from the account (IP address) of TRINSET. We had tripped an automated anti-spam-accounts software at Google that basically shut down any further attempts for 24+ hours. To remedy this for future attempts would require high-level liaisons between TWB and Google to open the window during our lab sessions…
If time allows, it would be worthwhile to conduct a general computer maintenance/safety and online safety course for these teachers. Having seen the problems with infected Windows PCs, they are operating in an environment that might be dangerous to their continuing use of online resources, in particular personal accounts.
The TWBSA trip was a wonderful experience, and was very personally rewarding. I was honored to be part of the 2009 team!
Aloha,
Aaron.