• Doing an evaluation of the first phase of the project
  After one year, Web2Thai has donated computers to five schools, done a lot of on site support and followed each of these schools closely. We feel that they are partners now, just like we hoped when the project started.
  But we have not yet sat down to analyze how things have gone and tried to draw conclusions about how we will continue based on our experiences from these five schools. So for the rest of 2010 we will follow up on the schools, study the way they work, the way the hardware and software is used and the progress the pupils and teachers make in using the computers.
  We will also evaluate the work of our own group and our Web2Thai school which has also been operating for a year now.
  At the end, we will present a report to our sponsor with a resume of what we have learned and what we will change for phase 3 of our project, the establishment of a Thai Web2Thai foundation that will continue the work with Thai village schools.
  

  What a Teacher Should Know

  Pom and Kla with course material for Web2Thai’s server admin course for teachers

• The Web4Wheels project
  In this project, a computer classroom packed into a 4 wheel drive Toyota will go from school to school in the Si Saket province to teach the use of computers to schools that own very little IT equipment themselves. The teacher will be hired by Web2Thai, the classroom will be established in a room in the schools we visit.
  The project is only in the starting stages – no schools have been found and no teacher and driver for the car have been hired.
  

  The 4 Wheel drive for the Web4Wheel project

• Small Linux project
  Many Thai schools have a classroom full of old computers that are not used very much any more. They are from 2000-2002 and run on anything from 64 MB to 256 MB of ram with Pentium CPUs of about 500-700 megaherz. Some of them are simply broke, others have had Windows XP installed and take ages to start – not to mention use for any relevant tasks.
  Web2Thai has started testing various small Linux versions to see if one of them can be used on these old Pentium computers.
  Our own Linux guru, Kun, has found one which looks promising and has made a Thai distro out of it. The original name is Slitaz, we will probably name the Thai version ‘Beung’ or Spider.
  Beung will be able to boot in 64 MB of ram – but will work better with 128 MB. It will be able to run both Open Office and to browse the Internet with Firefox or Chrome.
  We have already a test version running in Nong Ya Khao school and will now plan how to pilot test in some other school in amphur Sikhiu, near our first office. When the W4W project starts, we will also offer to help the schools upgrade their old computers to this operating system.
  This project is potentially very big – but we will start it slowly, for in the first phase we want to be able to control how much work this will mean to us. If it is a success it is easy to imagine many schools contacting Web2Thai for help with installation and for using the Linux version afterward, and that is beyond our capacity even though the software itself is free.
• Creating educational content
  We now have our Bangkok office in Lard Krabang with room for several creative educational content writers. But they have not been found yet, and hiring them plus producing the content is the part of the Web2Thai project that has proven to be by far the most difficult part to implement. We have not yet found a way to cooperate with Thai school teachers to start creating our Moodle and wiki based courses, and we do not yet have the resources to make them ourselves. In Denmark the Danish Web2Thai group is planning to do a project based five lesson course about drought which also aims to teach the pupils about finding information in wikis on the Internet – but nothing is ready yet and will not be for a couple of months to come. We need help and inspiration here!
• Web2Thai Foundation
  Finally, we have handed in all the papers necessary to establish a Thai Web2Thai foundation so that from the start of 2011, the project is no longer based on the Danish company Web2Thai Aps. but on a legal Thai entity. (The Danish company will continue to exist).
  This does not mean a change of policy or plans but it means that we will be able to continue for years to come and thus plan ahead much better.

My father collected stamps when he was a kid. One of the places that fascinated him was Straits Settlements or ‘Strait Settlemang’ as he called them, a place in faraway Asia with beautiful islands, exotic towns and pirates. Well – they are all still there, you just have to go and find it!

The view across the Straits to mainland Malaysia

Last week [i.e. May 2010] I was at an e-learning conference on Penang Island in Malaysia. It was a kind of homecoming to be back in Penang and to be among education professionals after a pause of about 30 years. And it was simply staggering to witness the amount of research, experiments, visions and really hard work that everybody produce to make distance education and other types of e-learning really work. All the more dreamlike for me after speculating for two years about what working with this kind of education in Asia is really like. Suddenly I am among 500 people who know all about it.

Areas of primary interest were

• Ways of creating content for Moodle that are both interesting to the writer and the pupils
• Research in educating teachers in using e-learning methods while teaching
• Global projects regarding free and open courseware – turns out they are called OERs (Open Educational Ressources)
• Down to earth experiences with schools, teachers, computers and developing courses, the grittier the better.

All points were well covered. There seemed to be no – or very few – papers about projects gone wrong so it was good talk to people who had been involved in both succesful and less succesful projects in ICT (Information, Communication, Technology).

Conclusion:

There is a lot of good, free material out there, we have to study this much more before making our own material.

Authentic and project based learning seem to be two methods that involve the kids much more than the rather static courses we have started planning.

Moodle can be hard for teachers to administer, we have to consider easier ways of distributing our educational content – or a combination of Moodle and a wiki, for example.

All this influences our current plans as future posts will show.

Ah! I forgot. The island is still beautiful and Georgetown is one of my favorite towns in the whole world. And the pirates? I know they are there, but I didn’t see any. I guess I just didn’tstay long enough to find them.

Rung now has 4 classes each week, and Pom teaches teachers from our schools (plus one school in Sikhiu starting on Ubuntu), so the new office is off to a good start. Rung and I are planning our first Moodle courses to be tested out in our school soon, hopefully in May. We have plans of inviting ‘our’ teachers to come and teach in the evenings in our school, giving them an opportunity to learn about Moodle in a small, well controlled environment, and us a chance to broaden the schope of our Web2Thai school.

One Moodle course will be about Ban Chiang and the beautiful pots

In Bangkok, the office will be ready about the first of May, and here Kung and Kun, who has worked with us about a month now, will be the first to move in. There will also be office space for Khwan, Per and me and hopefully some nice evenings when those who work elsewhere join up with the local Web2Thai staff.

Foundation and evaluation

The idea of establishing a Thai company have been replaced by the decision to form a Web2Thai foundation. Establishing this foundation will take quite long (6-10 months), but it will give us a much better opportunity for long term work and planning.

In the meanwhile, our main projects will be:

• Creating our website and Moodle courses
• The Web2Thai school
• The Classroom on Wheels project
• Evaluation of the first year’s results

The evaluation will take several months and involve both our choice of hardware, software and of schools, our education of the teachers we cooperate with and the way they are teaching with the computers – plus the way we conduct our own work in the Web2Thai school. The result will be a report with suggestions for changes and new processes, and it will give us all a better understanding of the work we are doing. In the meanwhile, no schools will be accepted into the project apart from those that participate in the Classroom on Wheels project.

After evaluating the project and implementing the necessary changes to our processes, we are ready for a new round of schools late 2010 or early 2011. By then, the selection of new schools will go through a Web2Thai ‘school committee’ that has to approve of all schools admitted into the project.

Kung's welcome speech

Today, the first of April, saw the official opening of the Web2Thai offices in Sikhiu. Per and Khwan, our teacher friends, politicians and pupils of the Weekend School (soon to be renamed) joined in the opening. Per bade everyone welcome and Kung held a speech about the project, how far we have come and our future plans with new schools and the kind of teaching that will take place at our own school.

The ribbon is cut and the open doors reveal the pupils seated already

When the ribbons were cut, everybody went into the office only to find that the pupils of the weekend school were already seated at the 8 computers in the school, quietly working away, lost to the world behind their screen and earphones.

The main part of the first floor is used by the school – while the second floor has desks for Pom and Kla – and the big meeting table by the window.

Not long afterward a monk came to bless the office – at the angle I was standing it was like he was blessing the Ubuntu symbol. Quite fitting, for Ubuntu is an important part of our project.

The opening has been covered in two other blogs – in Thai:

Kun’s blog for the Ubuntu community:
http://ubuntuclub.com/node/1889

And SIPA blog (the official Software Industry Promotion Agency) – notice that the page number 4 will change over time:

http://www.korat4.net/index.php?name=gallery&category=0&page=4

We started out the meeting by welcoming Yuth who teaches computers at a school in Thonburi – using Moodle. We were all very interested in hearing about his experience which he described in great detail, summing the experience up thus: ‘This thing is so new and untried that teachers and pupils have to build it together.’

Champ listens while Yuth explains about Moodle in his school

He knows that Moodle is used in many places in Thailand but not of any schools using it in his neighbourhood. We asked Yuth to be our Moodle teacher for a meeting with our project group coming in from Sikhiu so that we all are better able to get along with Moodle.

The plan for 2010 was discussed and Per’s idea about having a mobile classroom for the poor areas in Northern Thailand really rang a bell. There will be many good ideas for this project when its time comes in a few months.

Web2Thai plans for 2010 - the bus project at upper left

The plan above was also used to explain to our new project members the responsibility of the Sikhiu office compared to the coming office in Bangkok. The dates in the plan are not yet fixed but have been added to give an idea about in which sequence we are planning to do things.

We then started discussing the website on the virtual server which Champ will set up for us very soon. He gave us a demonstration of the server set up software (called Plesk) and the response times were FAST! You can see that this server is close to Sathorn Road and not in Mumbai, India.

The website layout mind map added to this blog two weeks ago is taken as our very high level blueprint, but at some time soon I will have to make more detailed site maps for the various sections of the website. We will start out with the public website and the Moodle server, and after a meeting in the coming weeks Yuth will make the first Moodle course for the site.

After a (very) short discussion about which tool to use for maintaining our website, we chose Drupal which Champ prefers for its flexibility and the good experience he has with it. So, something I’ve been pondering for months was solved in about 3 minutes.

The link took some time to establish because of problems with both internet and mobile phones, and I had started imagining the Sisaket area as a mountainous region with bad reception for mobile phones and even worse for computer groups trying to find their way in the rugged landscape.

But as the six of us rode along in our car, the landscape just got more and more friendly and welcoming. There is something intensely beautiful about the Isaan landscape that Thais just seem to take for granted. It’s like a giant park reaching as far as the eye can see in all directions, full of trees and grazing cows and buffaloes.

Isaan landscape

After four hours we reached Khu Khan, stopped at a gas station and waited for the teacher khun Suraphong to come and show us the way. Soon he showed up in a big Himax pickup truck, gave us a friendly welcome and agreed to go to a restaurant with us before we went to see the school. It turned out he was not a teacher any more – now he is the headmaster of the school and rarely teaches. He has been to England often and is well into school politics both of the region and of the whole country, so he knew about the Linux school project that S.U.T. is overseeing near Korat, about the SP2 computer program where schools can apply for free computers just like some of the schools we are helping in Sikhiu have done, and about the free book program that enables the schools to change their books for free once a year. This free book thing means less incentive for schools to get free educational content on Moodle, something we will have to address in our project later on.

Asked why the school did not apply for computers from the SP2 program like the other schools do, khun Suraphong answered that his school would never get any – it’s too small and far away.

Khun Suraphong, the headmaster

After lunch away we went, chasing his pick up truck in the backroads of ampur Khu Khan, the roads getting worse and worse and the villages smaller and smaller. In short, it was every tourists dream of a trip to the Thai countryside! We passed several rather big schools along the way and each time hoped that they were not our destination – they looked too much like Nong Ya Khao to be really needy.

But we needn’t have worried. The school in Baan Khlong Phet Sawai is small – two buildings with only one floor each. One of the buildings has been destroyed in the rainy season and is now only partially in use.

The two school buildings in Ban Khlong Phet Sawai

At the back of the school the damage is easier to see. Khun Suraphong told us that they have problems keeping the children from climbing the walls while playing and that stones can then fall down, making it a rather dangerous place to raise children.

The ruined wall with the loose stones

Strangely the school does not give an impression of neglect because so much is going on all around. At one end of the school is a place for experimental projects like creating organic fertilizer and building a well in the ground.

Organic fertilizer experiment

At the other end – the school has 9 rai of land and so a lot of room to be creative on – is a fish pond for food for the children, a vegetable garden, a wind mill for pumping, a compost walled in and two lean pigs who are fed with lettuce and water from the ponds.

Lettuce and herb beds by the pond

After the tour we saw the room that might be used for teaching computers and then sat down to discuss the possibilities. There are two teachers in the school able to teach with computers plus khun Suraphon himself. The school and the village cooperate about protecting the school, and while the headmaster has been there there has been no break ins. The maximum number in a class next semester will be 11 children so a set of 11 computers and a server will be more than adequate.

The school is willing to cooperate on our software development and Moodle classes and khun Suraphong even volunteered for participating in the ‘travelling friend’ project where a teachers writes emails to – and receives answers from – a farang travelling to some exotic country.

Pom demonstrating Ubuntu

Khun Suraphong was rather anxious to see Ubuntu, maybe fearing that Linux might be the fly in the ointment, a great obstacle to be conquered to participate in the Web2Thai project. But after seeing Pom’s demonstration everybody agreed that Ubuntu will not be too different from Windows to be a problem.

We spent the evening together in Sisaket town and discussed education, football in England and the possibilities for farang to come and teach in the school. Khun Suraphong has had good experience with such volunteers and new farang are welcome! I immediately volunteered.

Next morning we met again and went so see the Nikhom 2 school where khun Suraphong had worked for many years before starting in Phet Sawai. This school is larger, has a few working computers to teach with – and a lot broken ones awaiting their fate. Apparently it costs 5.000 baht per computer to have it repaired and seeing that they must be 6-8 years old, this is no good deal. The school may be a good partner in our ‘Old PCs as thin clients’ project, though.

The sad array of useless old computers in Nikhom 2 school

Going home we had a lot to think about. Helping schools in Sisaket is not a very different undertaking from helping those in Sikhiu – it is just so far away, and we have to find a good computer savvy partner in the area to help us with support. We learned that not all schools in the area are more poor that the ones we know already, that books and software come cheap because government pays. But for the schools other things come very expensive on the tight budget the schools are running on. And we saw how many good and interesting projects a school with very little money can get up and running. I for one would like to have been a pupil at Ban Khlong Phet Sawai school.

The juices in Bar Italia

We went there to meet Kun, our Ubuntu specialist, and Champ, a friend from the Ubuntu community. Champ knows about Linux servers and currently works for company that offers hosting of virtual private servers (VPS’es).

After choosing our meals, we started discussing plans, current jobs and Italian food in general.

Champ explained about the advantages of the VPS’es his company are hosting and we described the Web2Thai future plans for him. One of our primary priorities is finding a powerful, central server that may expand as our project expands.

Kung explaining the Web2Thai project to Champ

After some discussion it became clear that both Champ and the teacher who knows about Moodle that khun Kun has also contacted, are not interested in finding a new job with Web2Thai. But they are interested in participating in the project like khun Kun has participated for the last 7 months.

So now we have a Bangkok group working with us who know about virtual servers, thin client servers and teaching with Moodle. Kun will be the supervisor of this group so all of us don’t have to meet every time a decision has to be made.

The first thing Kun and Champ asked for was a plan for the future Web2Thai website, the map for the local site this year and the global site (possibly) next year with notes on technologies used, user access and so on.

The first outline is ready and is shown below. But first a mockup of the future ‘Moodle Store’ where teachers will be able to browse and download courses for use in their schools. The idea is to make the courses look appetizing. Hopefully the content will match the sleek surface!

Mock up of our future 'Moodle Store'

The website overview is shown below in mind map form. It is not as detailed or thought through as Louises plan for Books2Web, but that must follow for the the site will be big and it must be well planned.

Overview of Website Plans

These plans will be sent to Kun who will forward them to our new project members. In one or two weeks we will meet in our house to discuss the future website and – hopefully – agree on the fundamentals for its construction.

Per and Khwans family and friends – plus all the many presents – filled up four mighty SUVs, and away we went, reaching Nong Ya Khao in record time. We were wondering how the school would top the reception we had when we came to see them in November. We needn’t have worried.

Lines of children were greeting us at the entrance to the hall

The hall was filled to the bursting point with children, teachers and people from the village. The children were dressed up in various costumes and uniforms and everyone was excited. They certainly know how to give people a warm welcome in Nong Ya Khao!

The children were dressed for the performance to come

It turned out that an elaborate program was prepared. Speeches, the gifts for all the children of the school (and later on for all the rest of the kids of the village), dances, games and a play about the famous local heroine Ying Mo which had won the school a price in the Korat region a few weeks before.

The final tableau of the Ying Mo play

After the performances our group went to see the computer room. Unfortunately the computer teacher, our very able sparring partner khun Burapha, was away, so the demonstration was one of play rather than teaching.

After the visit to the school Per had some suggestions for making the computer room better – a bigger TV and clients with monitors instead of the little netbooks half the class are using.

But he also had a more far reaching comment: The Nong Ya Khao is a school of many resources, well run, relatively well equipped technically and not one of the poor, needy schools he had imagined like the one the Pandora company were helping in Mae Hong Son on the very same day. So for phase two of the Web2Thai school project (phase one ends with school #3 in Sikhiu) Per wants us to find much poorer schools in areas more needy of help. He mentioned hill tribes in Northern Thailand but was open to where we would find them. This phase is new also because we haven’t planned for a second school phase without new sponsors before.

At the same discussion Per also talked about how to make certain that the standard of teaching with computers in Thai schools is high. He proposed that we only make our Moodle material open to teachers/schools who have passed a Moodle exam. This will mean that our material will not be open to all. But it will still be free and it may motivate many teachers to make an extra effort to be able to participate in our program.

During talks with Mr. Suthee, one of the managers of the Pandora company, we later heard about a contact to very poor schools in Si Saket, an area somewhat closer to Sikhiu. As Mr. Suthee told us, some of the schools are so poor that they have no walls and children lack both food and clothes. A new challenge for Web2Thai, for our finely crafted processes will not be of much use to us here!

The view from the new weekend school - still under construction

Meanwhile, the new office space is being finished so the group can move there around January 20th. Big windows are being set up, furniture ordered and the accompanying apartment scrutinized for the best place to put the visitor’s bed.

The layout will be reception and school room on the first floor with room for eight pupils, twice the amount we can accomodate today. On the second floor will be the working space for Pom and Kla where they will set up servers and clients for the new schools and test out possible remedies for problems reported from the schools. They will offer telephone support for the Web2Thai schools from 8 to 16 Monday through Friday.

Trying out chairs for the office

At our latest status meeting yesterday night – catastrophically starting out at a restaurant with very loud music, very little light and very slow service – it was decided to listen to the recommendations from Mr. Suthee at Pandora and the contact he has made for us in Si Saket before going to Si Saket on a two day trip. It takes about 5 hours to get there, so counting the meeting with the teacher and a visit to 1 or 2 schools we must spend the night in a hotel near the place of interest. The whole group are quite excited about the new turn of events.

The meeting last night was probably the last in our house. With the new meeting table we have bought for the office, next time we meet will probably be in the street without a name in the nice pink house with big new windows.

I told Per that work in Sikhiu is going ahead a little more slowly than originally planned but that everything seems to be going well. The project is well managed, we have the schools we need and our cooperation with SUT is progressing too.  After discussing a bit we agreed to speed things up in Bangkok and start the new web2thai.co.th software company much sooner than planned.

So when Kung, Christoffer and I come back from Denmark we will talk to one of Per’s lawyers and go about establishing the company. This means that the Web2Thai group in Sikhiu will soon have a proper Thai company to work for.

The first person to be hired will probably be a teacher in Bangkok with Moodle experience and lots of ideas. Later will come a programmer and a person who is good with graphics (painting, drawing, creating graphics on the computer). But that will have to wait a while.

This weekend we were at Khwan’s and Per’s wedding and talked with the monk who lead the marriage ceremony. He is a famous monk and a very charismatic person. He and others from a temple in Loey are establishing a large temple school in Loey province for orphans. This school is interested in getting computers from Web2Thai. We will be talking about this with the school project later next year when we visit Loey.

The monk at the very left led the ceremony

Now this is not a typical Web2Thai project. Setup in the school and the first introduction to the system will be possible for us if we send a team up to Loey for a few days. But support will be very difficult. We shall probably have to make a deal with a computer company in Loey to do support for the school if we cannot help with remote desktop. This will be a new challenge for us but at the same time open up possibilities that may be very positive to our project and work for Thai schools.

And today we will be off to Denmark, Christmas celebrations and some really cold weather.

He brought with him a contract which Kung and he signed after studying it in great detail (the whole process was new to the three of us).

The contract is studied carefully

He told us that we could also rent an extra set of office rooms – or a private apartment behind the first row of houses. We politely declined.

When told about our project he mentioned that his brother is working in the Technological University in Thonburi with Dr. Chit of the Robotics department . They are using ‘the little green computers’, he said.

He must mean the XO computer that we planned on using at the start of our project. Now it turns out that our schools are not interested in lending computers to the kids – they are afraid that the computers break. Maybe if they had seen the green XO they would not have been so afraid, it is pretty sturdy! I still remember about a year ago when I tried to order 100 XOs for our pilot project and was met by the answer: ‘If you are in Thailand you need a specially built keyboard – and then you have to order 1000 computers at the very least’. That was when ours and the XO’s path parted.

At work today, talking to Per about the new office space, he mentioned that it would be nice if there was room for him to stay if he went to visit the project in Sikhiu. I told him that he could bunk up on an interim bed in the meeting room or that we had just had the offer of renting a one room apartment in the row of houses just behind the office. We talked about the need for a room for other visitors to stay overnight and decided on renting a first floor room along with the office. Kung promptly called the owner and after 5 minutes the deal was done.

So there you are – opposite the new office, 5 minutes to the night market, 7 minutes to the Beung swimming pool and even less than that to Pom’s family coffee shop. That’s a good place to stay for project members!