Interview-Namibia-OpenLab
From OFSET Wiki
[edit] Please introduce yourself.
My name is A.J. Venter, I am chief software architect and co-owner of OpenLab International. As such I am in charge of development and design and the actual creation of products are my responsibility (in close discussion with customers, users and partners of course).
[edit] What is OpenLab, what is SchoolNet, and what are their respective goals?
OpenLab: OpenLab International provides the digital tools to power eCommunities
- bringing life, empowerment and enlightenment to the individual, and community as a whole. An eCommunity is a social group (school, business etc) whose members are connected by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), and who use the technology to empower and support their needs and functionality.
Whether your eCommunity is a school, business, InternetCafe or an entire Education system, OpenLab provides the BuildingBlocks to ensure seamless, effective and productive technology environments, where the eCommunity is the focus and its members' needs are met.
SchoolNet Namibia (Please note there are several schoolnets in many countries): SchoolNet Namibia is focussed on youth-empowerment through internet and computer access. Their goal is to help schools obtain computer labs with connectivity at the lowest possible costs. The methodologies they have developed over the past years have been highly successfull
- there are now over 400 schoolnet labs in Nambia. Namibia has 1600 schools of which 430 have computer labs, 410 of those are SchoolNet labs running OpenLab. SchoolNet is dedicated to FLOSS in all their operations. Their goals and OpenLab's expertise matched up closely enough that they started using our systems exclusively some three years ago. SchoolNet now boasts the largest free software schools roll-out project ever in Africa (and probably in the world).
[edit] In Namibia, what is the state of free software in schools. Is it used on the server side, on the client side, or both?
Well SchoolNet Namibia uses thin-clienting so the answer is a qualified both. Each school gets a more powerful server (usually a pentium 4 with 2GB of ram) - so more powerfull but not enterprize class - and a number of clients from 5 to 20 depending on the size of the school. Their servers are used as an additional terminal - so all the desktops have OpenLab on them.
[edit] What is a typical solution provided by OpenLab? How to you support it?
OpenLab does not directly deal with users unless it's a very large project, instead we keep our focus on develop and third-tier support (e.g. bugfixing). Then we work with partners in various regions. Some of these partners are commercial companies doing sales, some are OEM providers and others like SchoolNet Namibia are charities. Each of them are themselves responsible for providing support to their customers (although we do train them in this). The specific support structures therefore vary with the partners. OEM's for example have very different support structures to charities. In SchoolNet's case they have their own call center as well as a support center staffed by volunteers who work for training with additional help from the Peace Core and similiar organisations doing both on-site and call-in support as per the requirements of the case.
[edit] Do you get support from your government and/or from the education system?
Well OpenLab doesn't since we are a company, but various governments have been our customers (or our partners customers) in the past. In Namibia the government and education sector is highly keen on the SchoolNet mechanism since it has achieved so much. So for example SchoolNet was able to lobby for a special exception to the telecomunications monopoly law that allows them to provide free-of-charge wireless internet to schools outside the phone-network.
[edit] How do children react to free software?
In our experience very positively. Children are naturally inquisitive and years have taught us how to design a desktop the is fun to work on and makes it easy to access those parts they are interested in - they explore and learn almost without assistance. Many of the more experienced teachers have taken to an approach of a free computer period once a week where the children are allowed to do as they please
- and have achieved very good results with this approach because exploration is a very good way to learn.
[edit] And how do the teachers react? Is the use of free software explained to them, and is this important for them?
The teachers are bigger hurdle, most of the teachers in Namibia have never seen a computer before. They are afraid of breaking it and they don't understand it -a fear that if left unchecked leads to restrictions on the children which nullifies the value of the system. For this reason teacher training is a very high priority for SchoolNet. Hai Ti being a prime example of it. Hai Ti (meaning Listen Up in Oshiwambo) is a comic book done by us, schoolnet and Strika Comics under a creative commons license designed to teach ICT skills inside an entertaining character based storyline. It is distributed weekly in the Namibian newspaper and we have had great success in using it to address this problem. Hai Ti won third place in the youth category for the WSIS awards last year.
[edit] You wrote TappyTux, an educational software. What is it used for? Do you have feedback from teachers/children using it?
Oh I love TappyTux, it's one of my favorite projects. It started out as a thin-client friendly typing tutor game, but over time as we strove to meet the expressed needs of the children and teachers using it, it has grown into a plugin architecture which allows it to also be used for other types of educational games. I occasionally have the pleasure during teacher training work of actually leading some classes in schools to show the teachers how one teach computers. When it is a young class, I invariably do this by starting them off on tappytux. The feedback from those sessions, as well as outside that has been highly positive, the game is really a hit with it's target audience and they guide the development, they tell me what features they need and I work on those.
[edit] What do you miss, what do you think developers focusing on free software in education should do to increase the adoption rate in schools?
Well speaking from an African context I would say our biggest shortcoming is local language support. Mothertongue education is a very real need, and this applies to computers in the classroom as well but there is very limited support for African languages in any software. It is true that free software is far more readily available in African languages than non-free because it is easier to translate, but it is far from good enough. The translation projects tend to focus on openoffice and firefox, which while crucial applications does not cover the desktop you need to understand before you can even find them - and certainly does not help with young children who need other programs more critically. Considdering this, I think the number one thing developers can do to increase adoption in Africa is to ensure their software is easilly translateable, make the POT files available as a quick download, with sufficient context for non-programmers to know the concepts they are trying to translate - basically lower the bariers to entry for translators so that volunteers can more easilly carry some of the burden.
