Issues

Education

One of the major issues with computer literacy in Bijawar is basic English literacy because the quality of English education in these schools is poor. Since the options for computing in Hindi are so limited, the students and other people with whom we’re working have to be able to read and understand at least some English. Context menus and dialogue boxes are intimidating because learning the ways in which Windows prompts users to take certain actions are difficult enough without the additional language barrier. Students and even teachers are additionally unable to generate significant content – letters, CVs, lesson plans, essays – in English, which makes it difficult to establish a connection between the skills they’re learning and their lives. Using the Internet is also a challenge without good English skills. While there are efforts being made to generate content in Hindi, the amount of information in Hindi is a fraction of that available in English.

Learning to type in Hindi, using a Hindi font like Kruti Dev, might help with this issue. The problem is that learning to type in English is currently a necessity for operating a computer and using the Internet. While this can be accomplished through the use of free typing software, there is no software to teach Hindi typing. There are books available for this purpose, but it is an imperfect solution that is largely untested at the high school level. Speculatively, I would venture that it requires significant time and effort to learn to type in Hindi, but it certainly bears further research.

Maintenance

The maintenance of these computers is also a huge problem. When we first arrived, the computers were in terrible shape – slowed down by viruses and bloatware, suffering from incomplete Windows installations, and physically gathering dust. Portable USB drives are becoming more common, especially among those who already have a computer, and these thumb drives are vectors of infection. Although we cleaned the computers up, I have no doubt that once the students and teachers begin to use them, especially while connected to the internet, the hardware and software will inevitable develop problems. Our time spent in Bijawar elucidated the clear need for a knowledgeable part-time IT person to maintain the workstations; without someone to keep them running, the computers will be used until something goes wrong (even if that something is truly minor from our perspective) and then they will be basically abandoned. The issue of who these IT personnel are and how they are funded remains to be seen.

Electricity

The electricity situation in India, and especially in Bijawar, is also major problem because there simply isn’t enough electricity to supply everyone at all times. While we were in Bijawar, the electricity was following a three hours on, three hours off scheme. We had power for about 12 hours a day – from 3 am to 6 am, 9 am to 12 pm, 3 pm to 6pm, and 9 pm to 12 am. Besides making life generally difficult, this scheme means that desktop computers can only be run at certain times, limiting their usefulness. Although desktops are cheaper, more powerful, and more reliable, they don’t make a lot of sense in Bijawar because of this issue. The hours for the boys’ high school, for example, are from 12-4:30 pm, so there’s no electricity to run their ten computers when they’re in session. They do have a separate power supply, but desktop computers drain that pretty quickly, and it cannot handle too much of a load at once.

Physical Resources

In the boys’ HS school, specifically, the computers are being kept in a temporary room, crowded together, with no regard to proper wiring or connectivity. The fuse which they’re using cannot handle the load of ten computers running at the same time and periodically smoldered while we were there. The new computer lab that is half-built is stuck at the moment because the funds haven’t been released at the district level, the details of which are fuzzy to me. The people in charge of building this lab additionally don’t have the knowledge about what kinds of things are important when constructing a computer lab. The concrete slabs on which the computers will rest, for example, are only deep enough for a monitor – there is no space for a keyboard. The government sent them official blueprints, but they were unable to understand the plans and so have ignored them.

The final issue is that there are too many students and too few computers. We’ve found that students learn best, at least initially when they’re learning to handle the mouse and type, with one computer per student. There simply are not enough computers to teach everyone, especially when you take into account school hours and the hours during which electricity is available.

Possible Future Plans and Ideas

We are looking into multiple avenues to continue this project in the future. Our first and most important goal is to follow through on the pilot project with one or two sets of ten students, taught before or after school by some of the teachers who are either already somewhat computer-savvy or with whom we worked over the last three weeks. The logistics and details of this plan have yet to be worked out. I also want to check in with the teachers when they’re preparing their students’ marks sheets in March and April, after board exams, to see whether the templates are being used.

The possibility of opening up the computer lab, under supervision, for students or teachers to use by signing up is also something I’m interested in. This extra, free-form time would give students the opportunity to either practice what they’ve learned in their extracurricular classes or to explore the medium by themselves and would give teachers a chance to enter their marks in Excel or to hone their computer skills. In a similar vein, the option of providing computers elsewhere in Bijawar for the teachers to use in their off time is something to explore.

I’d like to find a way to connect this computer literacy to the students’ other subjects or to their lives. Computer-aided education is an entirely different subject, but it would be interesting if students could use Excel to do some math and science exercises related to their coursework. Producing essays and papers is more difficult, because students would have to be fairly proficient at typing in Hindi first.

There is a teacher training camp held every summer for two weeks, in which master trainers go through the coming year’s curriculum and instruct the teachers on how to teach their students. Some of the teachers with whom we worked suggested that one teacher from each school be trained at this camp so that they can train others when they go back to their school. This avenue is worth investigating further.

We want to find a way of contacting the M.P. Board of Education to understand more thoroughly what their plans are regarding computer literacy in rural areas where they’ve sent computers but have not made any visible effort towards developing a sustainable infrastructure within which to actually teach students. If we have more information about the official plan, we’ll be better able to tailor our work to fit with theirs.

In the distant future, I would be interested in exploring computer literacy at the elementary and middle school levels as well, to expose students to technology as early as possible. I’m unaware of any current government scheme to send computers to these schools, however. Students also only begin learning English in the sixth grade, which is a possible stumbling block. They might be able to use drawing software or play games, which would at least teach them basic mouse and keyboard skills and allow them to become familiar with Windows at an intuitive level.

To combat the electricity problem, I’m going to look into public and private schemes to implement alternative energy sources, especially solar power, to run computers.

Ten women, plus Prabha and Sonali, showed up, with varying levels of computer experience. Some had never touched a computer before, while others had taken a few hours of classes but never used the skills they learned. Three are teachers in Bijawar and two teach in even smaller villages. One woman works at an NGO, helping to build latrines.

We learned that there a reasonable amount of computers in Bijawar households – estimates put the percentage at anywhere between 30-60%, although that number seems very high to me and probably reflects the higher social class in which these women socialize. Some households have internet connectivity, which they mostly use to run small businesses, charging people for downloading and filling out government job application forms and getting test results posted online. Computers are being used quite a lot for official business, including banking (through the State Bank of India), the village panchayat (government), and the court. The Indian government has provided computers for the boys’ high school, and the girls’ high school is expected to receive some in April. In fact, the girls’ high school already has computers that are several years old and seem to be unusable. I’m planning on visiting both schools in the next few days to see for myself what the condition of the computers is.

The teachers don’t use computers, even if they are available at their schools, due to a lack of training and free time, and there have been very few attempts to teach computer literacy to the teachers at these school. The schemes have all failed due to four factors: they cost too much money, they were offered during inconvenient times (such as during the school day, while teachers are busy at their jobs!), the strange electricity schedule in Bijawar (more on this later), and finally, the dearth of opportunities to use the knowledge learned.

It’s important for a sustainable system that these teachers see the value in passing on the computer literacy they might learn. Teachers could be incentivized to learn and then teach computer skills with if someone subsidized the purchase of a laptop for their personal and work use, on the promise that they would teach in a government school. The model that might work is the same model that most other teachers use, in which they teach everyone at government schools and then tutor their most promising students (who must also have the money to afford private tutoring) in order to supplement their income. It might be possible to subsidize low-income students for such private tutoring as well.

To ensure that students and teachers are getting the opportunity to exercise their computer skills on a daily basis, the curriculum must incorporate them, the same way as is expected in the US. Papers and problem sets and essays must be written on the computer, so that students get a chance to practice their typing and computer skills. I understand that most government school students don’t have access to computers at home, so time must be made in the school day for them to finish typed assignments. Perhaps teachers could require one assignment a month to involve computer use. The utility of computers for students is the power of easy revision – when papers and assignments are written in longhand, it is difficult to write more than one draft or to fix mistakes; on a computer, such actions are trivial.

Our Lufthansa flight from San Francisco to Munich on December 23 had to land in Canada on its way to San Francisco due to an onboard medical emergency, and it then experienced mechanical problems when taking off again. By the time our flight was supposed to take off from San Francisco, the plane hadn’t even arrived at the airport, and the Lufthansa agents were saying that it would take another couple of hours to determine whether the plane was fit to take off, with a 50% chance that the flight would be cancelled.

Either way, this meant that we would miss our Lufthansa connection on December 24 in Munich to Delhi. Theoretically, we might have been able to spend the night in Munich and take the next flight to Delhi on December 25, but the airlines didn’t offer this leg on Christmas Day. We would have had to take the flight on December 26, leaving us two days behind schedule. We also would have missed our next Kingfisher flight from Delhi to Khajuraho on the morning of December 26.

When we realized all of this, we tried to get rebooked on a flight from San Francisco to Frankfurt on December 25, with the hope that we could get a couple of seats on the always-full connection from Frankfurt to Delhi.

At the ticket counter, however, the agents managed to get us on a Singapore Airlines flight leaving at five minutes past midnight, going from San Francisco via Hong Kong to Singapore. We also managed to get seats on the Singapore to Delhi connection. This plan would get us into Delhi on the night of the 25th, about twelve hours later than we had originally planned to be there. We took it.

Thirty-six hours of travel later, we finally arrived at the Radisson near the Delhi airport, having spent Christmas in two planes and three different countries. (One of those planes, by the way, dripped brownish water from somewhere between the overhead compartments and the light panels on one side of the aircraft for a good portion of the six-hour flight. Good times).

I’m writing this on the plane to Khajuraho, which has maybe all of ten passengers aboard an Airbus 320. The first leg of this flight, to Varanasi, was almost full. I can’t figure out why Kingfisher even flies this second leg – my best guess is that the Indian government has mandated service to places that might not otherwise be served by an airlines.

I grew up around computers, so it’s surprisingly hard for me to imagine what a rank beginner would see when faced with a laptop. The most relevant resource I’ve found is an Ask Metafilter question about teaching introduction to computers. The advice therein is pretty good. Starting from the basics includes explaining the distinction between desktops and laptops, and how to turn them on (or open them up!). To teach basic mousing and typing skills, we might try a little Solitaire. We’ll have to talk about running application, right-clicking and double-clicking, moving things around, what the taskbar does, how to minimize and maximize applications. Explaining the desktop metaphor will take some thought – the distinction between files, folders, and the desktop itself, as well as what a “window” is. We’ll have to point out the difference between the pointer (mouse cursor) and the text cursor. The act of highlighting something seems obvious to me, but it’s an entire skill.

And then there’s actually learning to word process and manipulate spreadsheets and create presentations. We bought three For Dummies Quick Reference books – for Windows XP, Word, and Excel. Hopefully, those will provide a basic outline from which to work, as well as a reference guide for the computer users after we leave.

According to the 2001 census, Bijawar has a population of 18,412 people, of which 53% are male and 47% are female. The literacy rate is 59%, which is a very little bit lower than the national average literacy rate of 59.5%. Males are 66% literate and females are 50% literate. (1). To my knowledge, the economy is mostly agricultural.

The advent of digital literacy in this small village would open up a new economic avenue for a great number of people.

This winter, my plan is to spend three weeks in Bijawar (my first visit in three years!) to determine the infiltration of computer education among both teenagers and adults, begin introducing high school teachers to computing, and develop a plan for a sustainable computer literacy program. By design, these goals are vague and subject to change. I refuse to start this process with preconceptions about what is needed on the ground and prefer to help people in this community actualize their own goals, instead of swooping in to solve all the problems the global North thinks they have. I’m trying to get away from the "modern missionary" mentality.

I’d like to introduce computer literacy to middle- and high-school aged students, mostly because kids who grow up with technological fluency are most able to use their knowledge as adults. The most obvious way would be to simply step into schools and teach the students how to use computers.

The sustainability of this program, however, is perhaps the most important aspect. Three weeks is not enough time to teach an entirely new skill set to 12-17 year old students. I am also not a trained teacher. I believe they would be better served if I focused on training teachers how to use computers to supplement their lessons, with the possible additional goal of helping to train people to be teachers themselves. My family and I have identified some teachers from the high schools who are very interested in learning a new skill, so this idea has some potential.

I’m also thinking about teaching other individuals, probably women, how to use computers with the idea that they might be able to supplement their families’ incomes with a job in data entry or something similar. I’m not yet sure whether this is something I want to do, or whether it’s even viable.

From the information I’ve gathered so far, the Indian government recently granted the boys’ high school with some computers, although I think they might be intended for the teachers’ use, rather than for the students. I’m not sure if anyone knows how to use them or what state they’re in. The girls’ high school has had computers for a few years now, but again, I don’t know if anyone uses them or if they’ve been kept in good condition. There are some households with computers, but the number is probably quite low. There is also no Internet connectivity, barring the expensive option of purchasing a wireless data card. I think there might be some government plans to roll out broadband or wireless to villages such as Bijawar, but I’m not sure what the timeline is on that.

There are private tutoring ("tuition") computer literacy programs for those with the proper motivation and potential, as well as a significant amount of money. As far as I can tell, there is basically no way for the average student in Bijawar to use a computer on a regular basis, so my plan is to bring this type of education to a broader audience. Fair warning: my supposition may not be correct, so we’ll see what the situation is really like when I get there.

I’m leaving the US on December 23, with plans to be in Bijawar from December 26 to January 13. Once I get to Bijawar, my internet connection is going to be limited and erratic, so I don’t know how many posts I’ll manage to actually publish while away. Rest assured I will be writing, though!