Information and Communication Technologies for Development

Cool! I think Justin's got connections because he told us we're going to be on the MIT homepage and then voila! our project was on it. THE LINK: web.mit.edu
It leads to here: http://www.beehiveschool.com/mitatbeehive.php
Also apparently a group in Mexico wants to bring the K-Box there, Paul talked to them after the presentations last week. I think Christina had like 2 other D-Lab classes this semester in addition to ICT4D, that's pretty bad-ass.
We're going to do a final report/video combo for our last assignment. It's been a busy week since our presentation last week in terms of other classes, but I feel like our project really made a difference to a part of the world this semester, so i'm glad I took the class. It was kind of just a random decision, in February I was just like, I should get involved in some international development stuff. Inter'l development can lead to so many different opportunities, glad I finally caught on in my last semester of MIT....

This document contains the installation guide, configuration guide and administration guide of K-Box server.

[Operating System Installation]
The procedures below show how to install K-Box.
1. Install Edubuntu 8.04 Classroom Server
Download Edubuntu from https://wiki.edubuntu.org/HardyClassroomServer or get the CD Images in K-Box DVD.
"In order to install an Edubuntu 8.04 Classroom Server, you will need the following two CDs
   - Get the Ubuntu 8.04 Alternate CD - Don't forget to select the checkbox for the alternate desktop CD on the download page!
   - Get the Ubuntu 8.04 educational add-on CD
See the detailed installation instructions for Edubuntu 8.04 LTSP Classroom Server.(https://wiki.edubuntu.org/HardyClassroomServer)"

Prototype Partition - 100G HD
/ 		 4.5G	# operating system
/var		 2.5G	# system logs
/data 		42.5G	# apache document root and web content
/backup		42.5G	# local backup storage
swap		 1.5G

2. Install required servers and applications
Login Edubuntu Desktop GUI
Go to "System"->"Administration"->"Snaptic Package Manager"
  

I thought it went fine, though i find it ironic that Luis thought our demo was the best in the practice runs last week and then we couldn't get it to show up on the screen today. It's ok though it worked outside afterwards for everyone to see. We know the truth. It's awesome. Also, I thought our poster turned out well. I downloaded MS Publisher earlier this week so that I could add text to the outline Christina made, and at first I was like "omg I'm downloading this huge program for like one night of use", but actually it's a pretty cool program and in kind of weird way making a poster is a bit of an artistic endeavor, playing around with spacial arrangements and font sizes and coloring certain words and thinking about what will be relevant to present to the general population - WOW this entry sounds really lame and it makes me sound like a giant nerd. I'm sorry.....

In the poster session after presentation, everyone likes those pictures in our demo.
Unfortunately we just cannot project laptop display on the screen in the demo.
I think we won the cutest kid picture award in ICT4D class.

Dear ICT4D blog,

The final presentation is coming up this Thursday. I'm a little uncertain what the audience is going to look like, but it sounds like some important people might be there. In order to open potential opportunities for the Beehive project, we need to present ourselves as confident, competent, and visionary.

I think our team is adequately prepared to do a good job. Paul and myself have been working to make sure the demo goes off without a hitch. Christina and LeAnne have been doing a great job providing content and working on organizing our presentables.

I'm looking forward to Thursday. Should be great event. I love you ICT4D blog. You are the only one that understands me.

xoxoxo
justin

One of the most profound experiences I've had in this class is that of working with my team on a weekly basis. The Beehive team is an international powerhouse of up-and-coming talent headed straight for the streets of Mzuzu. We've got Malawians, Koreans, Chinese, and Midwesterners - that's enough cultural diversity to host one of those MIT culture shows that I never go to.

LeAnne is bright and cares about the world immensely. Unfortunately, she can probably beat me at any sport that exists. The other day, she got out of her chair to go to the bathroom and I flinched because I thought she was going to hit me. I took some karate when I was in middle school so I could probably take her out, but I just didn't want her to get first-punch. Wouldn't be fair.

I stole this from LeAnne. Insightful, profound, grounded. . . really a game-changing blog post.

I decided to browse the CIA World Factbook on Malawi. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/mi.html
Almost half the population is between the ages of 0-14, and the other half is between 15-64 years old. They gave the median age to be 17 years old, which is radically different from the US and other countries that I've experienced thus far. The infant mortality rate is almost 1 out of 10 births. The life expectancy is about 43 years old. If you think about if that were the case in the US, that would be like saying your parents weren't alive for your high school years (approximating).

I thought I'd share some experiences from my Spring Break trip to Mzuzu.

The groundlings' drink is Chibuku. Its served exclusively at these "Chibuku bars" that make skeezy Boston bars look like grandma's house. The brown toxin is served, and most often chugged, from a milk carton whose top has been chopped off with a machete. I, being a man of the people, indulged myself. It has a flavor that the virgin drinker can handle for about three gulps (maybe add another three since you are so "into" the culture) before resigning to the fact that there is a 60% chance that you are going to vomit in ten minutes. To go along with the fermented yogurt taste is the texture: thick and gritty, as if the stuff was stirred in a mud hole and poured directly into the carton.

For twenty-five cents, though, you certainly get the bang for your buck.

I've been really excited over the last few weeks seeing our idea unfold into something that I think could make a lasting impact on the developing community in Mzuzu. Though it was a bit of a let-down to see the locals uninterested reactions to our SMS project, it is refreshing to now work with confidence that the K-Box will provide real benefit. Though our egos may be a little bruised, how much better our project is now that we have suffered such blows.

I couldn't think of a creative blog title....
Anyway, we did our prototype demo today, I thought it went fine, it's pretty straightforward. I mean we have our content in a server that's offline, soooo voila! That's the K-Box.
I'm working on the Use Cases for some of how to use the K-Box like the forum or how to update the server whenever it gets the chance to connect to the internet, but I'm having difficulty understanding the technological concepts behind it all, like I understand what the spider does, but not enough for me to discuss it in a Use Case outline, so I don't know how good of a job I'll be able to do on them, they'll probably be heavily edited by our tech guys.....I understand the Forum though. Pretty sure.
We're going to do some filming this weekend, which'll be fun, though I'm sure we're underestimating how long it's going to take to edit it all.
Lastly, it'd be cool to get funding from this class to go to Malawi for some of the summer!

Today we demo our prototype to Luis. Luckily, all functions work fine.
Luis gave us some advice after today's demo. We will definitely find a certain interesting website for our demo and find a solution to pack our system. We also got a Nokia N800 from Luis. Our web portal looks good on N800. We will prepare a wireless access point on May 08, so that we can use not only PC and laptop but also the N800 device.

This morning, when the fire alarm at Eastgate went off, my first action was turning off our server and preparing to take it out. Fortunately, the alarm stopped soon and nothing happened. We do need a portal and reproducible server for our project. We plan to migrate the whole system to an external HD or another PC. The whole migration process will be logged and documented as installation procedures, which can be used for both new K-Box at other schools or system recovery and can also save us from crisis.

It is amazing the number of websites that are out there on puberty, sex education, and tribulations of growing up. I'm not sure whether these didn't exist when I was a preteen or I just didn't know about it, but they are a great resource. Hosts of these sites range from popular media stations such as MTV to more educational sites and independent groups. http://www.kidshealth.org/kid/ is a fantastic site with information about a wide variety of things. The main problem, as mentioned before, is that this site, too, is not entirely culturally relevant. However, it addresses sex ed, puberty, infectious diseases, common cold, relationships, healthy eating (though not applicable for Malawians) and pretty much everything you could think of. There is a lack of images, which makes it a bit bland, but the colors and font make it more child-friendly and interesting.

I decided to browse the CIA World Factbook on Malawi. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/mi.html
Almost half the population is between the ages of 0-14, and the other half is between 15-64 years old. They gave the median age to be 17 years old, which is radically different from the US and other countries that I've experienced thus far. The infant mortality rate is almost 1 out of 10 births. The life expectancy is about 43 years old. If you think about if that were the case in the US, that would be like saying your parents weren't alive for your high school years (approximating).

This week we started turning the concept into reality by working with the webpages we had chosen and actually creating the programs we wanted. We did realize that it is not practical to try to make all the webpages culturally relevant. It is ideal so that the material is relevant and there isn't talk about planes, trains, surgeons, orthodontists, vacations to Cancun, and more (things that can make them feel inadequate and that the material is not applicable to them). However, due to time constraints and lack of anthropological experience, the group decided this was not in our best interest. There was a little mixup of communication with the instructors about our group dynamic, but some of our group members met with one of the instructors to clear things up. Now, we are working on grabbing all the websites with a Spyder, and finding more websites to include. It is now more feasible to include more webpages since we do not need to go through them. I still think that it would be better to change the websites, but it would be an inefficient use of our time, so it is the best decision.

Right now I'm on the hunt for:
A book to buy online of Malawian folktales/children's stories. This one website I found that I thought was a winner, apparently might not have the book in stock. Alas! This leaves me with my other alternative, which was a book with just one folktale from Malawi called "The Mean Hyena", which seems to be a well-known one. I'd still like to get as many as possible though. My Plan B is to search some libraries for it - I have a library card to Harvard's library, although I think it was good for only one semester. Maybe I could still get access. They're pretty strict on outsiders using their libraries though...

Our original plan with the website contents was to go through each potential website that we wanted to use, open the source code in Dreamweaver and take out what we didn't want or needed to modify. This would prove to be extremely complex and time-consuming - in short, nearly impossible to do on a large number of websites. So instead, now I'll look for websites for us to use, then Paul has a "spider"(?) program which can streamline websites and cut out external links.... it sounds like some sort of magic program, but I like it!

My apologies for not updating sooner, but here are the blog entries for the previous weeks ::

Week up to 04/10/08

We have our next presentation to the class this coming Tuesday. Our last presentation apparently didn't come across as well as it should have, even though we actually do have focus, and I should HOPE that the pre-spring break presentation will change a lot after we actually visit Malawi, because that was the whole point in visiting, to get a firsthand impression of our region of work and see what does and doesn't work in our initial plan. I feel like that's one of the whole points in taking an ICT4D class, to learn about how your initial ideas change in the context of the setting in which you'll be implementing the technology, the whole "use the appropriate technology" idea. And we are doing that just fine. In conclusion, I feel like our group got unfairly judged. Our sponsor organization, the Beehive school and our local contact Niall who teaches there, are very enthused about our project, so in terms of the comment about our presentation and making a "lasting impact on our sponsor organization", we are very well-supported by the Beehive school, and ultimately that is what matters the most.

Christina and I are working on the educational content of our project. GO TEAM!

Next order of business now that someone from our team visited Malawi firsthand is to modify anything from our project plan that didn't fit as well as expected. Apparently our idea involving SMS is a no-go. Text message reliability isn't fast enough, and sometimes messages get dropped altogether and never delivered. Thus, our idea for the community network that the school children could be in charge of to inform the community of local events won't be implemented yet.

Some great ideas were brought up about what to put in our "internet in a box" - Christina mentioned a facebook-type application, where the school children could have their own profile and share stories about themselves and get to know their other classmates and share pictures and send messages, just like Facebook - the kids would love it, I am sure. Plus, Niall mentioned how he'd like the kids to work together more and learn from each other, so this application could (and would!) facilitate that very well.

Luis found the START project that is a great fit to the Beehive project.
The START project parses natural language questions and returns the answer in text and pictures. The user interface of START is simple but clear. A user can type question like "How far is Boston from Malawi?", and START returns "The distance between Boston, Massachusetts and Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, is 7,624 miles (12,297 kilometers)." in one second. Moreover, when there is a typo, START will list possible words for users to choose.
This will definitely help students at Beehive school to learn English and new knowledge at the same time.

Luis and our team met Dr. Katz, the START project leader, today to discuss the possibility to integrate START into Beehive project.

Justin flies out to Malawi today. I believe he has to connect about 4 different times, including Frankfurt and Saudi Arabia!

This week was very productive in terms of flushing out the project idea. Our team finished the write-in, heard back from our community partner in Malawi, and met several times with community partners, mentors, and as a group. We found out detailed information about the Beehive school including number of students/teachers, computer abilities, demographics of their students, and the price of electricity. We met with the course instructors to clarify our project idea and to receive feedback from them. Through the write-up, we determined a tentative timeline, assigned individual roles, and figured out the different steps of our approach to solve the problem.

Overall, the week was very successful and the team has a good sense of what we need to do and where the project is going.

At another productive meeting, we defined the scope of our project. Essentially, our project will accomplish several educational goals.

1. We will teach students of the Beehive school how to navigate the internet. They will learn how to make webpages and use search engines. Since internet access is extremely limited in Malawi, we plan to remedy this deficiency by storing a portion of the information from the internet in a server, and software engineering a program that mimics the set-up of a web browser. Then students can search through the different "webpages" that will seem like actual internet sites, but are really stored remotely in the server. This means that the server will have to connected to the internet periodically in order to get updated, but in general it will store and large amount of information. By teaching this generation of students how to use the internet and gain confidence in their programming skills, we can prepare the country for when the internet does finally arrive.

The first few weeks of class felt chaotic and unorganized, but I think our teams has managed to create a base from which we can now spring and produce something valuable.

Our first challenge was the broadness of the project. Though it seemed like most of the team put Beehive as our first choice, we were given three community partners, each from a different part of the world. This immediately struck me as a misguided decision; everything I had ever learned about development work suggested that one should start from the bottom and work up: that is, gain an intimate understanding of a specific community, develop a solution that meets their needs, and then look for opportunities to generalize. Starting with three different communities with vaguely similar goals seems doomed to failure.

There was also a concern with the size of the team. About half of us felt that the team was too large and would benefit from a split. After discussing the issue as a group, we decided to stick it out. Since Chris ended up dropping the class, we are now much more comfortable with our 5-person size.

Sunday, March 2
5:30 - 7:00pm
The entire beehive team had a teleconference to discuss team status and project status. There was debate about splitting up into two teams of 3 and working on 2 separate projects. The consensus was to remain a group of 6 but to focus only on Beehive.

Tuesday, March 4
11:15am - 12:30pm

Paul and Christina had a teleconference with Niall from Beehive (currently in Malawi) with Spencer moderating the call. During this initial contact, Paul and Christina learned Niall's opinion on Beehive's needs and codeveloped a project idea.

Date: 02/28/2008
Attendees:
- Instructor: Gari Clifford
- Project Contact: Eva Markiewicz(Beehive School), Aisha Walcott(Lacotec), Elisabeth Megally(Smart Classroom), Ranjani Saigal(Smart Classroom)
- Beehive Team: Chris Aden, Justin Cannon, Christina Soyeon Kang, Angela Mjojo, Leanne Veldhuis, Jen-Hao Yang