Administering Computers With Limited or No Internet

Computers remain a valuable tool independent of their use as a portal to the Internet.  But our experiences in São Tomé are demonstrating the challenges of administering computers that have limited or no Internet access (this includes computers on fast last mile connections like ADSL, but with slow Internet to the whole country, as is the case in Sao Tome).

First, Windows is highly susceptible to viruses unless an up-to-date antivirus software is used on the computer.  But we are discovering that even with dialup-speed Internet access, antivirus programs are unable to download the database updates needed to block the newest viruses.  Many of these viruses can spread through USB flash drives, which are prevalent on island.  As a result, even our laptops brought from the United States with the best commercial antivirus software available were becoming unusable because of viruses spread through USB flash drives.  Once infected, removing the viruses required downloads of special software, something difficult given slow Internet to São Tomé as a whole.

Second, while debatably Linux remains safe from viruses, it has become dependent on the Internet for installation.  There was a day when installing programs on Linux was a difficult process requiring specialized knowledge to turn plain text files into executable binary files.  Today, package managers have been critical in streamlining and simplifying installation.  But in researching how to install applications offline, I discovered that interdependencies between programs and the decentralized update process of those programs, necessitates a careful consolidation by the package manager to assure what is being installed integrates properly with what is already installed.  This consolidation depends on access to an Internet-based database and Internet-based installation files.  The recommendation is that installation first occur on an online computer, that the installation files be captured on that computer, and then transferred to offline computers that otherwise have identical software versions.  But what if downloads to the whole nation slow, and the only recourse is to distribute installation disks for single applications?
Access to high speed Internet is no longer just a requirement to access the vast resources of knowledge stored there, but it has also become a cornerstone for simple and effective administration of computers.  But while this may foster inclusion of many more people into a technology-based society, it is also unintentionally excluding others who do not have access to the necessary base network infrastructure needed to properly administer their computers.

The Birth of an Independent Nation

In 1975 Sao Tome and Principe was granted its Independence from Portugal.  Multi-party elections were first held in the early ’90’s.  Yesterday we were priviledged to meet Henrique Pinto DE COSTA.  He is not only a scholar, but also a wonderful orator who brings to life the history of Sao Tome and Principe and also keen insights into how that history deeply influences the country today.  It is told in first person by someone who has lived through that history.  We so often forget how deeply history impacts the present and future, and it is good to have scholars like Henrique who are passionate to not only understand such impacts but to also share their knowledge in any and all ways possible.

Prior to independence, Sao Tome was divided into a complex set of regions which supported plantations, with each plantation in a region owned by a different individual or corporation.  Managers reported to the foreign owners; they had the power to decide who lived where and even who could travel and when.  Workers on the plantation essentially lived isolated lives from those on other plantations.  Their strongest identity was typically with their country of origin from which they were taken.

Today, national Sao Tomean identity remains limited.  Travel from plantations to the main cities for commerce and also inter-marriages have begun to change that some.  But there isn’t a clear vision for what it means to be Sao Tomean around which citizens can rally.  Further, civil society often still awaits direction from the government in keeping with the hierarchical control of just a few decades ago.

Sao Tome’s birth as an independent nation is ongoing as efforts continue to establish a united national identity and to engage citizens to become more engaged as active participants in civil society.  It is amazing to be present to see that happening and to be involed in very small ways.

Why I am in São Tomé

I have come across two quotes that I believe capture in large extent the great value I find in traveling to a place like São Tomé, a place quite different from my home town in many ways (although the more I am here, the less different it really seems).

“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

- Lilla Watson,
Aboriginal elder, educator, and activist

“And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God.”

- Paul in his letter to the Philippians, first chapter.

In his book “Travel as Political Act”, Rick Steves points out that travel not only can change us in many wonderful and positive ways, but it also can significantly impact our communities as we return home with changed perspectives regarding our own communities.  Unless I challenge myself by going to places that are far outside my daily experience and that put me outside of my comfort zone, my knowledge and depth-of-insight will not grow more and more, and my love will be immature and limited as well.  I go not to serve, but I go because my liberation from my self-centered, self-serving, parochial view of the world is bound up with the liberation of those whom I go to meet and to form partnerships.  And in so doing, I am also able to better serve in my home communities to which I belong.

Laughing Readily

The people I know in Sao Tome:

• laugh readily;
• argue passionately; and
• complain rarely

A people who face chronic un-/under-employment, a lower quality of health care, and the other typical challenges of a developing nation have much to teach us.  Elves says his country is a great country because if someone found themselves stranded here with just $1, they would find that they will be fed, will have a place to stay, and will find friends to laugh with.  I believe it, for the culture here is that everybody is family, everything is shared, everything is appreciated.

We travelled today to a resort island on the equator.  It was a 2 1/2 hour bus ride and another 30 minute boat ride.  With us travelled a Sao Tomean family.  We ended up eating our lunch at the same time.  At the end of their meal, they brought out a birthday cake they had brought with them from Sao Tome so they could celebrate the 50th birthday of one of the women.  She made a point to carry a piece of cake to each of us in the restaurant, as well as to the servers and cooks.  It was such a joy to celebrate her birthday with her.  It is nice to come to Sao Tome and find so many family members!

The small one-room shops

Departing from the place Paul and I sleep, we passed by a small one-room shop, maybe 6′x10′ in size with a counter and a few shelves.  Paul mentioned that a truck comes by every morning to sell them fresh bread that many workers eat for breakfast on the way to work.  These little shops are located up and down many of the side streets of Sao Tome.    There is such a shop across from the house where the core of our group sleep.  The lady who runs the shop is often open early in the morning until late at night.  Sometimes others run the shop, sometimes it is closed during short stretches in the day.  But much of her waking time the person running it is in her shop, serving out small food items, phone cards, and cold beer. People hang out in front of the shop eating snacks and drinking beer from the shop.  But they also play cards, gossip, and just watch people.  We’ve done that ourselves.

Other than the size of the  uilding and the wares being sold there (beer vs. ice cream), I could be describing my favorite East St. Louis hangout, Pirtles Ice Cream.  Or it could be any the mom and pop shops throughout America, where the dedicated owners and employees spend many of their waking hours at their shop, and as a result serving as a gathering place for community to come together.

Beach song

I went down to the beach to find a little quiet time to write up some notes on my computer for a news report on our experiences.  After a short time, three older girls started watching over my shoulder.  One in particular watched intently for some 5-10 minutes.  After a bit, I stopped what I was doing to show her the computer.  She didn’t want to try typing, so I pulled up Audacity and recorded myself whistling.  She laughed.  I tried to get her to say something but she wouldn’t, so I made a few other sounds and played them back.  She laughed each time.  Finally she started saying “nao” and “oui” into the mic, and I played that back and she laughed even harder.  Then a friend of hers joined us and they both started talking into the computer and laughing as it was played back.  Finally, the first girl encouraged the second girl to sing a song together.  They were very pleased when I played it back. Next we played around with Photobooth, and they especially enjoyed seeing themselves after viewing the special effects.  The episode led to a few more youth joining me, including one who had taken english for a year and wanted to practice.  But up to that point, conversations were all non-verbal.  And even then, with the boy practicing his rough english wdere facilitated by having pictures of my life available, and songs from iTunes.  In all, it was a great diversion from work!

http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~mwolske/SongOnTheBeach.mp3

http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~mwolske/SongOnTheBeach.wav

Keyboards are still important!

An interesting interview with Walter Bender, the creator of the version of Linux that has been included in the One Laptop Per Child project, appears in this month’s Learning & Technology magazine. When asked whether Sugar, the Linux version developed, would be modified to support tablet PC’s and other keyboard-less devices, he responds:

But to me, the thing you want in elementary education is a tool that makes writing easy. So I am hoping that the idea of a keyboard isn’t totally abandoned. I think keyboards are the most efficient tools we have for entering text. On-screen keyboards and pen-based interfaces are nice romantic notions, but they are not very pragmatic.

I couldn’t agree more.  I’m often asked in relation to my proposed Citizen Professional Toolkit why my focus isn’t more on the new smartphone and similar moblie devices.  I must admit I’m very impressed with these devices and do see considerable merit in them.  Indeed, I am finding I depend on my Blackberry Curve for an increasing number of activities, allowing me to travel without my laptop a lot more.  But I still don’t use it to create much more than brief notes or short email messages — I can’t type 80-100 words per minute on it yet, nor doubt I’ll ever get to that speed.  I’m even slower on the new iPhone than on my Curve.  Worse still on pen-based devices.

Bender continues:

Now, there is something about using paper and pencil, rather than a computer, that is undoubtedly important, in terms of motor-skill development. It’s important to interact with the physical world and manipulate things. But I don’t see it as an either-or proposition; you can have kids be doing lots of things with the physical world and also be using a computer. The big danger is not whether they are using computers instead of paper and pencil, but whether they are using iPods instead of paper and pencil. With these little touch-screen devices, rather than being expressive and making things, are they just consuming information?

I appreciate Bender’s take on what’s important here.  While smartphones and other mobile devices are making great strides in becoming devices that allow creative expression, price plans, an emphasis on consuming multimedia hosted by the telecom site or their partners, and limited text input capabilities mean I can’t use my Blackberry to the extent I would prefer as a readily portable, always with me device.  Laptops and ultra-mobile PCs still seem to have an important role as bridge devices, if nothing else, until these truly mobile devices reach the needed functionality level to allow for real freedom to creatively express what we’re thinking and feeling.

Microsoft Office Labs vision 2019

Microsoft has an interesting video envisioning our interactions with Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in 10 years.  A short version as well as the five minute version can be found online at http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090228/microsoft-office-labs-vision-2019-video/.  I found the five minute version well worth the time.

Youth crossing cultures

The tag at the very end of the video stated “productivity”. But what impressed me so much more was relationships. Technology is presented as ubiquitous, but in a way that compliments our interactions with other people and things as opposed to disrupting it.  Our ability to interact with those immediately around us is enhanced as we can quickly share information and even be assisted with translations. Our ability to interact with those at a distance is enhanced; what a great example with the two youth drawing from two different sides of a board, learning about each others culture and language.

Our ability to interact with the environment is enhanced, allowing us to not only work outdoors but gain new abilities to rapidly identify, and hopefully gain new appreciations of the plants and species around us.

What a fantastic example of the most important productivity of all: building relationships!

Citizen Professional Toolkits

Chip Bruce speaks of exploration kits in a recent blog post

[Backpack-based exploration kits] would be available to individual youth, or to organizations such as community centers, after-school programs, boys and girls clubs, 4-H, and so on. They would allow youth to take tools into many different settings, thus promoting ubiquitous learning.

I have been obsessing on the technical components of such an exploration kit.  Is there a certain set of technologies that various professionals use in their daily work lives that could be included in such kits and made available to youth and other citizen professionals?

I’d like to propose a group brainstorming exercise to design such a toolkit, and invite comments on what others would see as the ideal components for such a kit.  To kick things off, here’s some components we’re beginning to play with for our first kits.  In choosing the specific items, I’ve tried to balance cost, ease-of-use, quality, and completeness of the kits.  As such, devices are sometimes chosen because they can serve multiple purposes, although it sometimes may sacrifice a bit on ease-of-use and/or quality.  At other times, components were chosen to improve quality even if it increased cost to some degree.

Base Kit

• MSI Wind 10″ ultra-mobile netbook PC (UMPC). Laptops are becoming the general computing device of choice over desktop computers.  The UMPC shows great promise of providing an increasingly mobile format that remains fully functional. The slightly larger screen and near full size keyboard of the MSI Wind are expected to serve well as a general purpose computer, while the under 3 pound weight and relatively small size maximize portability.  The specific model includes a 6-cell battery to provide over 5 hours of charge in the field, a 160 GB hard drive to allow storage of digital photos and video for editing, and bluetooth to connect to GPS and other wireless components.
• Sound Professionals ‘Super Stealth’ High Gain, High Sensitivity Omnidirectional USB Microphone. We’ve had great success using this external microphone to enhance Skype conference calls and to capture high quality archives of interviews and group discussions using Audacity software.
• Garmin 10x Bluetooth GPS receiver and Mobile PC software.  As geo-coding becomes integrated with a growing number of applications, it seems valuable to equip toolkits with a GPS receiver.  The Garmin 10x receiver was chosen because it works with any GIS-enabled software, for the flexibility of wandering with the receiver within 30 feet of the UMPC, and its quality of satellite reception.  The Mobile PC software provides driving directions and resource location within North America.
• Canon Powershot SD1100IS digital camera.  A highly reviewed sub-compact camera that provides good quality still images and potentially YouTube quality video.

Possible add-ons

• Pinnacle Studio Ultimate 12.  This has been used very successfully by some of our community partners to enable youth to produce quality video presentations with minimal up front training.
• Tripod.  Something like the Canon mini-tripod 7 is highlight portable and provides a stable base for long exposure captures, for time-lapse photos, and for shots in which the photographer is included in the image.  A larger tripod, such as the Proline ST-400, while less portable, provides eye-level positioning of the camera and greater stability in windier conditions, among other advantages.
• Logitech Clearchat Comfort USB Headset provides the ability to listen to recordings live to confirm recording quality, and to also provide improved recording quality by an individual when doing things like voice overs or podcasts.
• Canon ZR930 Camcorder.  This DV-based camcorder provides higher quality video recordings, but just as importantly provides an external microphone input for improved audio recording in a consumer-level camcorder.  We’ve had many reports that the most problematic aspect of video capture has been the audio input when interviewing people in the field.  The tradeoff of using a higher quality, DV-based camcorder is that transfers to PC occur real-time (1 hour recording requires 1 hour to transfer) via firewire (which is not included as part of the MSI Wind and therefore must be performed on a separate device).
• Azden Cam-3 passive mixer, Audio-technica ATR-35S wired lavalier microphone, Audio-technical ATR288W wireless microphone system.  Combined, these provide a mechanism for a mix of lavalier and handheld microphone inputs via mini-phono plug that can be used with either the ZR930 camcorder or the MSI Wind laptop.  As pointed out above, audio recording quality has been a major issue during interviews.  There is considerable value in having a mixture of different microphones to best meet the recording needs under different environments.
• Garmen eTrex Legend.  This standalone GPS device has been field-tested in many different situations.  It remains to be seen whether the UMPC combined with the Garmin 10x bluetooth receiver can fully replace this tried-and-true method for collecting geo-coding data.

With each of the add-ons, a kit runs around $1600 USD including various incidentals. Certainly to make these widely available, a number of logistics would need to be worked out regarding maintenance and security.  But I’d like to focus this brainstorming session on components.

So what do others think?  When sending out citizen scientists, citizen planners, citizen journalists, and other citizen professionals, what technologies are most needed?  Is it possible to create one exploration kit to cover most or all citizen professional needs?  Is it possible to create one base unit and a mixture of add-ons to include as needed for specific purposes?

Equal Voices in a Digital World

I’ve been working on an exercise to develop a mission statement for my research.  I think I’m settling on the following.

Helping communities have an equal voice in a digital world.  To accomplish this mission, it is important to:

• inform communities on how emerging technologies and trends are opening up new possibilities for community action;
• enable communities through access to, and education on, appropriate technologies; and
• collaborate with communities, giving them an equal voice in my own research and helping them have an equal voice with others.

As technology becomes increasingly ubiquitous, to fully participate in this digital world it is important to have the literacies needed to harness technology when appropriate, and to judge when technology is a hindrance instead of a help.  But while there is a significant economic and technical hurdle in achieving full digital inclusion for everyone, I think at the core this is a social problem.  Achieving an equal voice requires new understandings regarding the value and indeed necessity of diverse voices in all aspects of our society.

But too often we as researchers do not practice what we preach.  For in research many would argue that what we do is too specialized to engage citizens, or is contaminated through subject involvement.  I take an opposing view.  While it is helpful to regularly take a 10,000 foot view of communities, it is also critical to utilize a scholarship of engagement approach in which citizen scientists participate as equals with academic researchers.  In so doing, it becomes possible to gain unique, deep perspectives to important social issues.

While it is important to inform the community regarding the possibilities of harnessing new technologies, and to also enable them to utilize those technologies effectively, the cycle isn’t complete until there is also meaningful collaboration.  We must practice what we preach lest we live our professional lives as blind men who only percieve the full shape of an elephant through the touch of its trunk alone.