Use Patterns

I must admit, one of the more fun aspects of teaching has nothing to do with instructing, but has everything to do with observing. I particularly enjoy watching the patterns that develop amongst my students when using software. In some instances the patterns are based upon mimicry (actually, I bet all of them are, but I don’t always see the original inspiration), where I demonstrate something, and then everybody executes the task the same way. This occurs during lessons when I am teaching.

The real fun begins when people are put in front of new software with no instruction, but with self-motivation. The self-motivation is what propels the exploration of software through the hardships and failures which will occur frequently during the process. In these particular cases, the self-motivation comes from the want to play. My students are exploring all of the games on the computer.

Advertisement

One Weird Dream

I had a weird dream where I was secretly part of the North Korea/South Korea/America Peace Alliance Military, basically a sham agreement to maintain the illusion of collaboration and peace between the nations, but I was undercover in North Korea and they couldn’t find out.

I never knew what my mission was, except that I had a rucksack. When I got in country I got another rucksack that had the logo of the military, which would immediately blow my cover if somebody saw. Now I had two rucksacks. This was a big deal in the dream.

When leaving the country through border patrol, the North Koreans had to scan my hard drives and computers, which contained secret data and were running KDE netbook edition. However, the North Koreas never got my information because they were too stupid to read the EXT4 filesystem.

Of course, the "North Korean," who told me I was cleared to leave was actually a small Irish-American who looked an awful lot like Mr. Lynch, my high school Latin teacher.

I got off the hallucinatory anti-malaria drugs a year agao, what the heck?!

Signs of Cultural Adaptaion…

…or lack there of.

When I get home at the end of the day, I typically empty my pockets onto my desk so that I might pick the contents up and pocket them again for the next morning. Since coming to Kenya I have noticed that my pockets are oftentimes filled with trash. That’s right, honest to goodness trash. Ok, maybe not honest to goodness, seeings how I am not carrying around used baby diapers (they are called pampers here, fyi), but instead the trash takes the form of plastic bottle cap wrappers, Safaricom cell phone credit top up cards, and candy wrappers (ok, maybe there were candy wrappers back in the States as well…).

I take this as a sign of a lack of cultural adaption on my part. Walking around the city, it is not uncommon to just see people throw things in the street… or out the bus window… or on the ground walking through the park…. or at your face (ok, it was a soccer ball, once, in the back of the head, but still!). I just can’t do it. For the longest time I had a huge collection of plastic water bottles. I searched and searched the Internet, asked my friends in development, and the best re-use of plastic water bottles included: using them again as a bottle of sorts (holy crap, genius!), using them to aerate plants (NYS does this when it plants trees), and possibly hang them from a string and use them as bird feeders (I am not feeding birds, as that might convince them that i want them around; stupid hornbills).

The reason why I can’t dispose of my trash? In the cities, very few places have rubbish bins to just toss things out. Luckily in Mombasa Safaricom sponsored rubbish bins along Digo Rd, which is nice, although they are also a one stop source of food for the street people at night :/, and they are few compared to the size of the city. At NYS, there is only one trash bin that I know of, and it’s the little wicker paper-trash basket in my computer lab. Otherwise, everything just gets burned.

I put things in my pocket thinking that if I bring it home I can do something about. But I can’t. We just burn things here too. Trying to educate people that burning plastic can be bad for their health, to which they agree and understand, is a futile effort because convincing people of the need for centralized trash disposal simply raises the inevitable, "so you will pay for it?"

It’s a tough call. I would love to do some research into the history of landfills in the USA and see what prompted our obsession with trash collection. Maybe there are some hints there at what could possibly catalyze a cultural attitude change towards the whole situations.

Of course, to single this out as a Kenyan thing would be to err greatly on my part. We find inappropriate ways to dispose of our trash in the States (and the West) as well, it just happens at a different level of abstraction. In our case, toxic chemicals and e-waste.

Wow, It’s Been 11 Days?!

It’s easy to just let the time slip away. No, I have not forgotten my blog, and it is still my hope to keep this updated as regularly as possible. But honest to goodness I have been busy. Electricity has been haphazard around here as always, to the point where some surges burst some power cords and whatnot. As a result, I have been running around town to access information and replace broken things. But there have been some positive developments in my Peace Corps life as of late!

First and foremost, we have gotten our new dedicated ICT instructor here at National Youth Service Technical College. The new instructor is actually an old instructor, having served here from 2007 to 2009 before the big 2009 recall of ICT instructors back to Nairobi NYS HQ to plan out the curriculum. He has taken over about half of my course-load, which is amazing for me! It means a return to secondary projects that were sorely lacking last term. Hooray for that!

Second, part of my running around in Mombasa Town so much was also due to getting all the software necessary to install the latest version of Ubuntu on the NYS Lab machines. Thanks goes out to Paul Blair who is in fact my hero for allowing me to abuse his Internet connection so much, and of course for being just a generally awesome person and Peace Corps volunteer. I will of course write up an uber-geeky blog entry later about some of my experiences and thoughts on installing and upgrading the machines, but for now, I think mentioning it is enough.

This leaves me in a good place. Life, which has been crazy the past few weeks, is finally settling down again into a groove, and when things are in a groove I feel like I have more control of my time. It makes me happy because it means I can plan out secondary projects and not feel guilty that I may not be giving enough attention to other priorities, all of which is critical to happiness in Peace Corps.

PS, I know nothing about the show Lost except that, IT WAS ALL A DREAM!

Powered by ScribeFire.

The Power of The Mind, Relatively Speaking That Is

The power of the mind never ceases to amaze me, particularly in regards to the relative outlook on everything us Homo sapiens have. What brings such a notion to mind is of course the weather and my recent, bizarre, behavior modifications regarding it. Just this morning I wore a hoodie to work. It was about 75 degrees out and overcast. I wore a hoodie. Somebody call Medical.

It would seem that my mind has adapted to my climate, though that doesn’t change the fact that I was sweating a bit on the 4 minute walk from my house to the lab. It’s not that I don’t sweat, or shiver, those being the fixed bodily responses to hyperthermia or hypothermia. Instead, it’s that my mind no longer registers them as discomforts. My first, “autumn,” (that’s what I nostalgically call March through May) in Mombasa, I chuckled every time I saw one of my students wearing their NYS-issued sweaters, shoulder patches and all. It was 75 degrees out and they were cold. Now I understand it.

Yes, there is such a thing as a specific, measurable temperature. But simply because it is measurable does not mean all of us will react the same and in fact, as we adjust our lives in such a way that reaction is no longer necessary based on our old behavior model, we simply adjust our behavior. It seems that the absoluteness in existence resides not in the reaction itself, but more the need to react.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Using Sudoku In The Classroom

I needed a warm-up for my students. I told them that the most important muscles for them to exercise were their fingers and brain. I had KTouch to help them warm-up their fingers, but what to use for their brains? Sudoku of course.

Every class period, especially the early morning periods, my students will do 20 minutes worth of Sudoku puzzles. I have incentivized the time by offering points on their final grade for every puzzle completed during this, “official Sudoku,” time period. This is only the second day of trying it, but as we speak, my students in their free time are playing Sudoku and not even for points.

I picked Sudoku for a few reasons. First off, it is part of the default Ubuntu distribution, which means no need to maintain yet another piece of software on my computer images. Second, the game allows for multiple solutions to achieve one goal. I immediately drew the comparison between fixing computer problems and playing Sudoku: there are many ways to go about achieving the same thing. This of course being part of my continued battle against the rigid form of thinking enforced within the Kenyan education system. And finally, the application itself has many forms of interaction (mouse, keyboard, etc), allowing for my students to develop not only their own method of solving Sudoku puzzles, but also their own use-patterns with the application. The end hope is for them to passively develop efficiency in application interaction.

We’ll see how it all turns out.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Whistle While You Work

I am a whistler. Anyone who has been around me for more than say, five minutes, knows that I am a whistler (much to their annoyance or amusement or both I am not sure). I like to whistle in my free time, when I am alone, when I have friends around, when I am walking to work, when I am programming. Heck, I just like to whistle.

That is why it has been my great pleasure to discover that students at NYS love to whistle as well. I hear them whistling when walking, I hear them whistling when working. Some of them will even whistle in class if I start to do so. At some points, I have been whistling and from across the field a student will pick up on it and continue whistling in tune with my own whistling! It’s amazing!

My life is one big, happy, whistle-fest!

Powered by ScribeFire.

The Future of Social Networking: A Video Gaming Analogy

In a recent post I talked about what I perceive to be the technical future of social networking. Coincidentally, around the same time as my post, a news storm began surrounding a new programming project called Diaspora, where four guys from NYU have been able to raise ~$20K to fund a, “code sprint,” this summer to build what they call a distributed social network. It is in fact almost exactly what I called for in my own blog post, it is what others have been predicting besides myself, and I think based on the fact that they raised the money in less than two weeks, everyone in the social tech scene seems very happy to at least give these guys a shot.

The Web Doesn’t Suck

The web-world has been awash with the the sounding trumpets of the next round of battles in the long war to web perfection (whatever that may be). With the battle over web standards ending, the dust barely settled, new combatants and their champions are lining up and taking aim. As of late we have had, HTML 5 vs. Flash, CSS3 vs. its naysayers, and h.264 vs. Ogg Theora vs. V8. Of course, these are all the proxy wars being fought so that the real competitors, the browser makers themselves, don’t actually have to quantitatively prove whose browser is better, because honestly, what average user cares about Javascript execution time and page render speed when differences are measured in milliseconds? Barely registered by normal human perception!

Haller Park Photos

I have added some photos from today’s trip to Haller Park to my Flickr Photostream. Make sure to check them out over at the right.

Powered by ScribeFire.