Good News For Rural Students In Nakhon Nowhere

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Bringing the market to the village

'Classroom for Life' provides email, e-commerce, video conferencing and video-on-demand to remote areas

Story by Don Sambandaraksa

Children are the fastest to learn. — Photos by DON SAMBANDARAKSA

The tiny village of Baan Nong Pai in rural Sakhon Nakorn (population 500) is the test bed for an ultra broadband solution to bridge the "Digital Divide". There are no fixed line telephones in the village and mobile phones do not work unless people stand outside or on a roof, but these villagers now have a "Classroom for Life" that gives them access to email, e-commerce, video conferencing and a video-on-demand library thanks to the work of a certain Canadian-Australian by the name of John Hawker.

"ICT centres have failed because it cannot just be an Internet cafe. We need to create an ICT centre that is like a mini-mart where people buy milk, beer and cigarettes. No one application is funding the shop," explained Hawker.

Baan Nong Pai is situated literally in the middle of nowhere, one and a half hours from both the main city of Sakon Nakhon and Ubon Ratchathani.

Hawker said he was inspired by Meechai Viravadhya's concept of sustainable development; in bringing the market to the village, rather than bringing the villagers to the market.

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John Hawker

Many of the villagers in Baan Nong Pai weave silk for a living which they sell to middlemen at 150 baht a metre. This is then sold on a few times and the typical retail price in Bangkok is around 1,000 baht a metre.

"We just opened an eBay account for one lady and soon we will see if she can sell her silk directly to purchasers in America for much, much more," he said.

Mass migration, be it to Bangkok, to factories in the East or South, or to construction sites in Taiwan or the Middle East, put a huge strain on the social structure and on family ties. Most parents leave their children with grandparents, many only visiting them once or twice a year.

"One thing we did not anticipate when we set up the centre was how people loved to use VoIP and video conferencing. One person told her sister to go to a local Internet cafe and get an MSN account. Within minutes, she was seeing her children for the first time in many months and the children were so excited to be in contact with their mother," Hawker beamed. Linking migrant workers to their children now seems to be one of the most popular uses of the centre.

The village also has one deaf-mute child who can now contact many other deaf mutes and learn proper sign language. He has also made many friends via chat who do not know he is deaf-mute. The boost to his self-esteem has been tremendous.

One farmer in the village borrowed 20,000 baht - four months' wages - to become a papaya farmer. But he did not know how or when to sow his papaya seeds and lost everything. Another built an extension to her house which is now falling apart. She does not know she could sue the builder, nor does the builder know his legal obligations and that he could be sued.

The set top box can play, pause and fast forward videos teaching everything from long division and cattle rearing without the need for a computer.

Providing information on basic legal rights and how to run a farm is another area that Hawker is trying to push, but not through the computer.

"This is what our centre can do - give them easy access to education. But giving them access to a computer is not the answer, not even half. TV is what can reach out to the rural farmer," he explained.

Hawker has found out that in general, older rural people are afraid of computers, many thinking that if they touch it and break it, it will cost them a year's income. "Of course, there are exceptions, but generally, older people are much more comfortable with a remote control on their television, rather than a computer," he said.

The centre also provides video-on-demand to villagers either in the centre or through a set-top box at home, and the Pep cram school and Kasetsart University have agreed to provide videos and courses as part of the test project. The server at the centre also acts as a cache for these videos which can be delivered via IP Star overnight during off-peak periods.

The difference between this system and others is the cache and the data cast. It would not be possible for one server to stream information on papayas over the Internet to hundreds or thousands of centres nationwide as the communication costs would be too high, but with satellite IP broadcasting, it does not matter if the data is sent to one centre or ten thousand. True broadcasting cannot be done over the Internet and what many think of as broadcasts are actually multiple unicasts.

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Pailin, standing on the right, and Lek use the system to enrol on Ramkhamhaeng's distance learning course. They can now study and continue to help their parents on the farm, rather than become an economic burden on their parents.

The system will know which video clips are popular and can pre-deliver that content to local hard drives. Once it there, people in the centre can access it at "ultra-broadband" speeds, either via their computer or their television with an appropriate set-top box connected by LAN or Wi-Fi. Anything not cached locally will then go through the slower satellite connection.

Hawker said he's actually cabled some houses nearby and would love to work with Intel to cover the entire village with Wi-Fi.

Through his day job in satellite e-learning, Hawker seems to have come up with many answers that have eluded our central planners in Bangkok.

"Many teachers are afraid of e-learning or a television replacing them, while the idea of students using e-learning presumes too many things ... that they can type quickly, that they have computers and they have access to the Internet," he explained.

"Just think how much bandwidth you would need if every student logged on at http://www.moe.go.th at the same time? And even if they did have bandwidth, the MoE servers could not cope with the load. I am working with a school in Krabi where the teachers warned me that if I wanted to use the Internet I would have to do to before school starts, or after everyone has gone home, due to lack of bandwidth."

Hawker's next site for the Classroom for Life is in a small Muslim fishing village near Krabi, with a population of 5,400. There, he works with a school to provide guidance clips to help the classroom.

For instance, a one to two minute clip can help a maths teacher explain a problem. He can then teach for a while before telling students to think of how they will approach the solution. Then another clip can be shown of other students going about it both correctly and incorrectly. The teacher can then ask which students got it right and which got it wrong before putting on another video of the solution.

"Teachers used to be scared of having the TV on all the time. This solution supports them and makes them a better teacher," he said.

"Students do not need a PC eight hours a day. You need a PC room. You don't need to give every student a PC, but you need to give every student access to a PC," he replied when about his view on the One Laptop per Child project.

The centre in Sakon Nakhon has already proved self-sustaining, with enough income from game downloads, Internet access, photocopying, sales and repairs of computers to pay for staff wages, Internet access and electricity bills. It has generated employment and new opportunities for the villagers.

"We turn over around 300 to 400 baht a day, but that is enough," he said.

However, the government will need to help by making more content available.

Hawker also said that it would be great if the government could provide soft loans of around 400,000 baht for other people who wished to take this model and set up more Classrooms for Life around the country.

"We are also a great showcase for using Open Office in Thailand, as we cannot afford Microsoft Office," he said.

The centre relies on an IP Star satellite link which Hawker says is much better now that the real IP Star satellite is up and running rather than the previous Thaicom 3-based emulation.

"Sipa always help us. I asked them for some free games and within 24 hours I had a stack of CD-ROMs. These are Thai games from Thai developers and we want to help these developers make an income. Mobile phones don't work in the village unless you're on a roof or in the open, but everyone has one anyway, so our ICT mini-mart sells games for the phones."

While the systems and middleware are being developed by Hawker's company in Bangkok, it has been the Lao and Malaysian authorities who have been most enthusiastic and have commissioned him to set up pilot projects. He also hopes the solution will be well received in India, Africa and China, which all have the need to disseminate knowledge over vast, rural areas.

source: http://www.bangkokpost.com/030506_Database...006_data001.php

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