I don’t read self improvement books as a rule but this struck me as interesting. .. for school leaders
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic as a Personality Ethic and a Character Ethic. (note the sub title) Covey reviewed American self-improvement literature back to 1776…
I began to feel more and more that much of the success literature of the past 50 years was superficial [focused in a Personality Ethic]. It was filled with social image consciousness, techniques and quick fixes–with social bandaids and aspirin that addressed acute problems and sometimes even appeared to solve them temporarily, but left the underlying chronic problems untouched to fester and resurface time and again.
He then goes on to distinguish the Character Ethic as follows:
In stark contrast, almost all the literature in the first 150 years or so focused on what could be called the Character Ethic as the foundation of success–things like integrity, humility, fidelity, temperance, courage, justice, patience, industry, simplicity, modesty and the Golden Rule. Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography is representative of that literature. It is, basically, the story of one man’s effort to integrate certain principles and habits deep within his nature.
Earlier this year I had a meeting with Gary Phillips who has very similar ideas to me in terms of getting technology into Ladakhi schools. It’s taken me a while to write it up – sorry!
Sending the Acer Aspire One netbooks for a cost of GBP 200 is a great solution. At 1kg + power supply they are light and cheap. These can be used with an external monitor & keyboard in school and be taken home by students. Linpus Linux is pre-installed. The 3 Cell battery only lasts 2 hours but makes the unit light. 6 Cell batteries are not worth the extra weight or money as electricity from solar power is available during the day.
People visiting Ladakh from UK can be asked to take a laptop with them. Visitors might even buy one themselves to donate, netbooks are useful whilst traveling then can be left at the end of the trip. Weight wise it would be feasible for a person to carry 2 laptops but this might cause customs problems.
Theoretically it might be tempting to find or customize an ideal version of Linux for our uses. But without reliable Linux knowledge or support in Ladakh this solution won’t fly. The netbook’s Linpus lite is ok and will allow us to standardize.
Why not Desktop computers?
Sending parts out to India is fraught with difficulty due to customs and getting people with the right expertise to build machines. Getting CRT monitors to Ladakh is still quite a costly due to relatively high resale value, large transport cost and possible damage caused in transit. CRTs also need more power. We estimate that at least two times the number of netbooks can be run off solar than desktop machines.
Windows is still the OS of choice in Ladakh but is virus ridden due to pen drives been carried around and machines are often out of service. Linux avoids the virus problem
Based on a Phone conversation today with Dorjee in Ladakh.
DWLS is still waiting for a computer teacher. But the solar power seems to be working well using 4 panels for 12 machines.
Solar power is also working well for the Siddartha School, recently installed in March.
Notes
Gary Visited Drukpa White Lotus School in 2007. I visited Siddhartha School in 2007 and 2008. In summer 2008 I stayed with my friend Dorjee in Choglamsar, and his brother in Law works at DWLS so I have a connection there and subsequently met Gary in London.
Came across this post again today and I wanted to make sure I recorded it here on my blog. Its one of those stories that stayed in my head. This was the quote that got me
I went to a school where on my first day I walked into the games hall to watch a sixth year boy, wearing a GB vest, slotting baskets from the sideline one after another. He was a legend in the school and was playing for the senior men’s GB team whilst still at school. In the rest of the games hall there seemed to be hundreds of other kids of all ages playing games, dribbling, making shots and having a great time – yet there wasn’t a teacher in sight!
However , I was interested to know why they chose dance in their school as a major sport for boys considering that Don was a rugby player.
I always enjoy Don’s Blog – especially during the holidays when I get time to catch up on my reading.
We’ve been discussing our assessment tracking requirements at school – excel spreadsheets versus various database solutions always the same old problems the trade off between flexibility, usability, reliability and accessibility for different parties.
It would be great to do the task in SIMS our School Information System (SIS). However, SIMS incumbant in the majority of UK schools was an outdated clunker ten years ago and has a glacial product development record.
Even if anyone had the expertise or the required permissions in school to try and use SIMS for the job, the lack of deep linking, copy and paste and rss make it a miserable task. And as for finding any online help forums – forget it. For me SIMS turns the db mantra “write once, read anywhere” into “write into SIMS, never see it again”. At least not until a few weeks later when a deputy head thrusts a printout in front of you and starts asking questions.
So the classic question arose again in my mind. Isn’t there an open source alternative yet? So today I allowed myself 15mins to sketch a few requirements down (so I could judge if a solution was maturing or not), then set about looking for a development effort.
It seems that SchoolTool.org is the only credible option. I do remember reading about it before but that must have been over 3 years ago. Interestingly Tom Hoffman the project manager in this paper offers some explanation of why an open source success in this area has been so slow to develop ( I would add that many innovative teachers have anti-assessment tendencies.) But it seems that SchoolTool is getting to the stage where some adventurous schools (or even individual teachers) might want to be trying it. In other words they are nearly at version 1.
I’m installing it now on my Linux machine.
This documentation seems incredibly well written but difficult to navigate, in fact I found the whole website a bit confusing. I nearly gave up because at one stage it seemed that development had stopped a year ago (not true). Development has been fragmented it seems in different sites in USA, Belgium and Lithuania. And it seems that there are different parts School Bell and Can Do (assessment) that can confuse the casual observer.
It would be nice to have the user forums (actually mailing lists archives) to be more obvious too. Also as a self taught asp/php sql coder I have no idea if their none LAMP choice of ZOPE is a good one or not.
I’ve mentioned Helena Norberg Hodge’s Book Ancient Futures before but I’ve just found the video that was made a few years after the book on Youtube. Well worth 23mins (in 3 parts).
I found both the book and video to be an amazing summary of the effects of globalisation on an indigenous people – perhaps due to the perceptiveness of the ladakhi people – I spent a long time in the mountains in Venezuela but the people don’t have the same perspective.
Less convincing however, were the solutions that she offers in the second half of the book. Although that would be expected. Indentifying the problem clearly is a good start.
An entertaining and thought provoking talk by Ken Robinson. I have his book “The Element” if anyone at school wants to borrow it.
Whilst I support wholeheartedly moving to a more creative and project based curriculum I do have a problem with people who seem to be saying lets have no structured learning and no assessment. It is one thing to identify the desired destination it is another to work out how to get there.
I hope to post more on this later during the Easter holidays.
I felt p***ed off with University teaching methods (or lack of) when I was there 20 years ago so I have sympathy with students who find them even more outdated now.
Check out this video. I wasn’t surprised to see Marco Torres was involved He’s been getting kids doing interesting things with Video for years.
For instant and free gratification, this is a very simple and elegant way to listen to music. Downside is that its missing some of the more obscure stuff I was looking for but it seems that their commercial team are adding continually to the catalogue.
I’m just having a look at Puppy Linux again as a solution for Ladakh in the Indian Himalayas. Positives are that its light and pretty (I chose the mac version)
Its strange that you have to set the network interface to work with DHCP to get started. Then there are all sorts of utilities that are confusing. I guess it takes some time to adapt from the Ubuntu way of doing things. But hey Ubuntu won’t run in 128 MB of RAM. Xubuntu just was too heavy for a number of the machines I was trying to keep running and Fluxbuntu was confusing for students.
Ideally I’m looking for a replacement for Win98 or 2000 that runs Office, Paint and an early version of Photoshop using 128MB of RAM
It’s easy to say you can create your own version and tweak distros, but in the end its much easier to go with a distro and accept defaults especially when you aren’ t around to fix it.
I managed to get Riven the 1997 Point and Click adventure game working today. It only works with Quicktime 2 so you have to mess about a bit getting it to work on XP.
Rather than waste the whole day playing, I did a little bit of reading on Riven and Myst (perhaps its more famous predecessor). Seems like recently the code has been open sourced. Makes sense because the nature of the game’s simple (but stunning) interface lends itself to online playing – you could almost program the game in Powerpoint, you move between a series of photographs the interactive pieces eg. levers and doors are very simple animations.
In 1997 on a 800×600 screen the photograph quality images and beautiful soundscapes were quite a thing.
Doing a Powerpoint version of the school was a project that I dreamed up a couple of years ago for the kids at school. Now we have the gifted and talented kids turning up on Thursday night, I might have to dust that plan off.
That and keeping my eye on development of independent Riven games based on the opens source code.
See 30 Second TV advert for Riven. This animation is actually an unusual part of the game like a video reward for when you beat a level and go up to the next one. The game play is more sedate.
Posted by richard 
Posted by richard 
Posted by richard 
