Hangzhou Mingzhu School

One of the highlights of our conference in Hangzhou was a school visit. As always, it’s always great to visit a school and have a chance to interact with kids. Somehow I should make sure to schedule this into my calendar more often as it helps to ground you and remind you why we spend the hours that we do in the gray office cubicles.

The school we visited, Hangzhou Mingzhu Education Group school specializes in supporting the migrant population. We had a brief introduction to the school from the Principal and one of their English language teachers. Then we were given some time to visit some classes. Mike and I both chose to sit in on the Paper Cutting class. The kids were hard at work practicing traditional Chinese paper cutting. They were all cutting out their own versions of butterflies. We learned that the class is a year-long class, and something kids simply have in the schedule, and not a special elective or art class that we might have in the US.

We were offered a chance to do our own paper cutting, so we both got to work cutting out our own butterflies. It took some time, but once I got my basic shape cut out, I watched one of the girls in the class as she took her own added color by pasting paper onto the back of the butterfly so the color filled in the holes she had cut out in the design. I followed her lead, and she gave me a hand finishing my handicraft. Mike was busy doing the same thing with another student.

As class was winding down, the kids excitedly began to give Mike their butterflies as gifts. He had a healthy collection of butterflies. We joked about the fact that I was not being offered any, but eventually two boys did offer me their creations. I suspect that while they probably realized I did not speak Chinese, some of them may have assumed I was semi-local and Mike was really the guest in the room. Throughout my visit this year and last year, I find that at times, I have a way of blending into the background

We started taking a couple of photos with the kids which quickly turned into a free-for-all and all the kids jumped up and crowded around us for a group shot. After class, we made our way to a computer class.

The kids were seated at workstations and were using a table in Word to create a picture of an animal or some other basic shape. It was a rather odd lesson, and as best as we could surmise through a translator, the lesson’s goal was to give the kids an opportunity to learn to use tables in Word. I looked at the computers, and according to the case, they were very modern PCs with Intel Core 2 Duo chips. My gut sense was that the computer class was what you might see in many US schools as a basic “business” skills class covering the how-to’s of Microsoft Office quite applications.

Each classroom did have a PC station for the teacher complete with a ceiling mounted projector. PowerPoint was in use everywhere. With the exception of the computer class, kids were not using the computer as their was only the teacher workstation.

At the end of our visit, a group of kids presented to all of the visitors a framed paper cutting. I added my butterfly and the other two that I was given, and I came home with a small collection of student art work which is now decorating my gray office cubicle. A little color goes a long way!

Tags: Hangzhou, paper cutting, school visit

Tuesday, school visit and KERIS

It’s Wednesday morning here, and I’m headed to breakfast in a moment. The conference is going well. A lot of different people from different parts of the world with things to share. We’ve started talking about increased collaboration between the WorldBank and MLTI. I’ve also extended an offer to KERIS to visit Maine. We saw their offices yesterday. They have a very large organization, almost 200 people. They produce a lot of digital content, and I think they would benefit greatly from seeing MLTI in action.

They shared with us yesterday their Classroom of Tomorrow which consisted of ClassmatePCs and an interactive Whiteboard. The whiteboard had an interesting functionality where the camera could recognize certain patterns and replace the pattern on the display with some other shape and information. It was too sophisticated as it couldn’t handle more then one pattern at a time, the idea is interesting. They had a collection of small paddles that had a square with geometric shapes in it, kind of like a bar code, that the camera and computer would recognize. So, hold up the paddle, and see something different and get more information.

Similar to an iPhone app that uses GPS locations to mark labels on things when viewed through the camera. Imagine having a pair of glasses that could do that using GPS or some other marker so that as you walked around, you would learn more about that thing. Interesting for a museum to make a self-guided tour. I remember a PBS show with Alan Alda that showed this kind of thing with facial recognition software so that as you approached someone it told you who they were.

Prior to visiting the KERIS offices, we visited a girls vocational school. The school reminded me a lot of the high school I visited in Guiyang last year. Although it had one major difference…the building from the outside looked as large as the school I saw in Guiyang. I commented to one of the other folks in the group that the school must house 4000-5000 kids. When we got inside, they gave us a brief orientation to the school and told us that the school had 724 kids. It was never clear to me what all the extra space was for. I think at one time, the school may have housed more students. We learned that the school was a tuition-based school, so perhaps at one time it was either free or it simply had a greater popularity. It was supposed to be a very well renowned school.

They described their curriculum to be split into one of three tracks, International Trade, Internet Business, or … a third that I now can’t recall. I’ll have to look it up somehow…its actually now Wednesday morning as I was interrupted yesterday morning, and I never finished this post. Too much going on, not enough sleep…anyway, point is, what they described as their curricular design and what we saw didn’t really fully match up, but its tough to say what is lost in translation as well as the fact that we only saw a couple classes.

Anyway, my impression is that the cultural sense of school continues to be very powerful here as it was in China. Not dissimilar to challenges we face in Maine when we try move a school to a student-centered model, but parents and teachers have a different idea of school based on their own experiences in school. So far, no one seems to have the simple answer to total school reform!

Tags: KERIS

Morning in Seoul

The sun is up, and I’m awake. Not sure if I will be when my turn comes to present at 6 pm tonight! The KERIS staff is getting last minute setup done, and folks will start to arrive in 15 minutes. I think I’m so accustomed to being a host…and maybe Doug’s influence that I showed up a little early.

Looks like there is room for about 100 participants for the event.

Tags: ICT Symposium, Seoul

SETDA-Washington DC

About 36 hours in Maine, just enough to go do Halloween, and Steve rejoined me for yet another early morning flight.

5 days in DC and nothing spectacular to report in the culinary arena, although I did visit my favorite hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant, Chinatown Express. Bob, Steve, and Sylvia joined me for dinner, and I think we manage to spend $60 between the 4 of us including a tip. Great cheap eats for DC.

The SETDA conference was a great success in my eyes. A lot of great conversations as always. The Senate showcase went well too. Maine had a great set up along the glass wall in the Hart building with the Capitol dome in the background and of course lots of computers in the foreground. Bruce Segee had a wall of 16 laptops set up to showcase his super computing display system that joins multiple computers to make one giant display. We had a bank of MLTI laptop along with 32″ and a 50″ monitors to highlight what was on the laptops. Overall, I think was very well represented.

Our day had an extra surprise as we were able to get 15 minutes with Sentator Collins. She and Sylvia had a good conversation about her nomination to the USAC Board. The senator will be lending her support, and we are all crossing our virtual fingers that she will be named to the board by the FCC Chair.

Tags: SETDA

Changjiao Village

When we arrived at the village, we knew we were going to have to walk into the village as the busses couldn’t really drive right into the heart of the village. This gave us an incredible view of the landscape. I’m not sure the photos do it any justice, but the village was surrounded by dragon’s teeth mountains. Most of the land at the base of the mountains had been farmed, and a paved road winded through the fields to the village which was tucked up against the base of one of the mountains.

As we neared the village, you could see that they had organized a welcoming party. Not just a party of people to welcome us, but more literally a party. The road was lined with what was probably everyone from the village. Many were dressed in traditional clothing as well as a group wearing Chinese opera costumes and masks. Later the opera group would perform for us. The women wearing the blue, I had at one point thought, had dressed for us, but later I started noticing more and more women in the region simply dressed this way. I’ve decided that in general, while it is considered traditional clothing, it is also just regularly worn by many of the women. The blue we learned is from the indigo dye which is readily available.

Everyone was very excited to see us as we arrived. It was a bit overwhelming to be welcomed as we were, but given we numbered almost 200 Americans, and the village school was supposed to have about 180 kids, our delegation must have been a bit overwhelming to them as well. The kids in the village were happy to pose for photos, and like their counterparts in the city, they too flashed the two finger “V” sign. I saw this in Beijing as well while touring the Forbidden City among people in their teens and twenties, so I guess its just a common practice all over China as I’m sure the people I saw at the Forbidden City were not from Beijing but from parts all over China.
[caption id="attachment_228" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Some of the girls"][/caption]
When we arrived at the school, we greeted the children and looked at the school which was built with funds donated by People to People. Then the students sang us a song, the opera group performed, and a group of mothers performed a dance. As a reciprocal action, one of the delegations had organized themselves to sing the Hokey Pokey to the great amusement of both the other delegations and the villagers. After one performance, they pulled in as many as they could and did a joint delegate/villager performance of Hokey Pokey. All had an especially good laugh as they “put their backsides in”.

One of the things I noticed immediately in the courtyard as I entered the school was a ping pong table. Just as we were leaving, some kids arrived with paddles and a ball, but I was hustled back to the busses before I had time to try and play with them. I’ll have to make it back to the village some day for a game.

There are far more photos of this than I can post here on the gallery.

Tags: Changjiao Village, China, Education, Guiyang, Guizhou