4
Projects to Speed the Arrival of
The Virtual School in AFGHANISTAN
•
One-page
pdf summary of projects • About
these pages •
TO HELP:
Contact implementing partner: Help Afghan School Children Org. (HASCO)
Become a Virtual School Partner: Contact
Us
New: A
project on the ground in Spain doing what is describe below!
CISCO report from Manchester
and beyond
Implications
for businesses
The kids shown are using the Internet in a bus in Malaysia.
This picture was taken from the
New York Times. CIRCUITS
| August 23, 2001, Malaysia's Internet Road Show By WAYNE ARNOLD
Yes, getting all the children to the virtual school will take time, but there is no need to wait to begin. The school has already started with students who, on their own, are learning at the Internet café in Kabul today! Add ten more doing the same thing next week at a center of another city. Add 300 next month, and 2000 in January. The Internet has always multiplied like rabbits—who do not wait to get organized, they just multiply spontaneously. It is a mistake to wait to begin to open the virtual school until a complete system can be planned and then set up everywhere. Until children in the mountains can begin, children in the cities should not have to wait. Thousands can be doing what is shown in this picture by the end of winter, millions in a year or two.
The satellites that pass above Afghanistan every day beam many things of value down to businesses, government, military, politicians, and even bad guys. But what about the children?
The picture in this section shows a satellite beaming the Internet into a dish, which then can make the virtual school available to children in two ways. 1) The signal can go by wire into an ordinary computer. 2) The signal can be transmitted wirelessly to a mobile device.
Project 2 is to make certain that the Internet is beamed 24/7 into every part of Afghanistan, by commercial and military satellites.
GO
TO: The
Afghanistan Jumpstart Pavillion
There is no obligation or cost.
The picture
here is from
www.palm.com
and shows
elementary students in
North Carolina.
See even simpler Barbie devices for learning spelling, reading, and math from Oregon Scientific.
Many very effective learning programs use small computers that are not connected to the Internet. These devices can hold wonderful teaching programs for reading, writing, arithmetic and other basics. Afghan language materials can be used in these devices.
They can also hold entire books; these e-books can be downloaded and read by students on their own at school, at home—anywhere. Girls and women who are discouraged from going to school could use these devices, working alone or in small groups.
Palm is a company with many education projects that use the handheld computers in many different ways to learn. Their Pocket PC competitors have equally powerful devices. These companies should be asked to equip and provide their devices with both basic learning and special Afghan learning programs to give to students. Recharging requires electricity or batteries. Again, beginning in the cities would be the most practical, but like their cousins the cellphones, the devices would undoubtedly spread to rural areas.
Shown in the picture here is the
OQO wireless pocket PC which became available October 2004.
It is one of the latest devices in
this trend.
Much of what is described in this report is happening spontaneously, and things are changing rapidly, and for the better, opening a new global virtual school where the digital divide has disappeared.
One of the most interesting and rapid factors in this happy revolution is the emergence of a personal handheld device of the future that will combine the desktop computer, the personal organizer (PDA), the cellphone, and Internet access. Like transistor radios and cellphones, the price of these devices will keep going down until virtually every person can own one.
Project
#4 GROW THE WI-FI
Click here for descriptions of Apple's Airport education applications.
Begin
Immediately: FIND A PARTNER COMPANY THAT WILL SUPPLY 50 BASE STATIONS
AND 1000 WIRELESS LAPTOPS TO ESTABLISH LOCAL AREA NETWORKED SCHOOLS. REPEAT
AND REPEAT.
One telephone line connection to the Internet can be used to provide a
local network for many wireless laptops located nearby. Starbucks now
does this in its coffee shops so its customers can use their laptops without
a wired connection. These networks use a transmitter base station like
Apple’s Airport. The two children in the picture here are using
Airport in their school.
Base station transmission has become so commonplace that new soon-to-be-global
coverage for the Internet, called WI-FI, is being spontaneously generated,
as described in this October 2002 article: WIRED
Magazine
Page 2 of the article has the most exciting prediction, that WI-FI will
spontaneously bring the Internet to: "some of the most rural, remote
parts of our world."
Ongoing: CONTINUE TO ACQUIRE
WI-FI EQUIPPED LAPTOPS TO KEEP UP WITH THE SPREAD OF WI-FI IN AFGHANISTAN.
Every commercial base station set up in Afghanistan provides wireless
access for free to anyone within a circle of more than 1,000 feet, including
any student or teacher. Partners who would provide a base station and
wireless laptops for students to use would be growing what is referred
to in the WI-FI world as lily pad coverage.
The WI-FI coverage is one possibility for making the virtual school available
to Afghan students in the remote mountains and deserts. A more immediate
method is discussed in Project 2 above.
Weighed against the cost of building new school buildings and filling them with libraries, furniture, and school supplies, the wireless devices are both a fraction of the cost and absent nearly all the construction and delivery challenges. That is not to say buildings will not be needed, but the devices are themselves the library and most of the supplies, and in fact make any building in which they are used into a school.
Costs and energy saved by providing the devices, instead of buildings, libraries, and massive supplies, would make it possible to spend the saved money and effort on recruiting and training teachers.
There is no reason why Afghanistan cannot become, within a year or two, the prime model for showing other countries how to create a 21st century school system!