Sabbatical Clippings 2005 Stephen Cysewski

Many links from the Bangkok Post and The Nation do not work for Blogging. Those articles are tracked on my clipping site. A horizontal line separates each of the messages. There is a separate site for 2004 and 2005.

Please do not link directly to this page because these articles are copyrighted.

Chaturon calls for drastic measures; educators propose raft of initiatives. Calling for an overhaul of the teaching of English in Thai schools, Education Minister Chaturon Chaisang said that most students’ inability to communicate in English despite spending years learning the language pointed to a clear failure in language-teaching in Thailand.

The minister’s comments came yesterday during an Education Ministry workshop on improving the teaching and learning of English held at the Prince Palace Hotel. A total of 135 language-school executives, English-teachers and education professionals participated in discussions.

Chaturon stressed that both the teaching and learning of English must be refashioned, including curricula, textbooks and tests, in order for Thai students to acquire an acceptable level of competence in the language. He added that the practice of encouraging students to memorise grammatical rules by rote must be discontinued in favour of providing them with opportunities to practice speaking, listening and writing.

“Most of our students have been taught with a heavy emphasis on grammar without having the chance to practice the language verbally,” the minister explained. Such practices have had sorrowful results, he said. “When many of our students go overseas to study, all they can say are things like ‘What is your name?’ and ‘I love you’.”

Chaturon said several questions in the standardised TOEFL had been changed to make the language test better measure students’ grasp of English usage in everyday situations, integrating writing, speaking, reading and listening skills.

It transpires, Chaturon noted, that even many of those Thai students who score well on their English exams in Thailand encounter severe difficulties in writing and speaking during their studies abroad.

The General Achievement Test last year found that the English language ability of primary and high-school students in Thailand was equally low. Their average mark for English was among the lowest in all subjects. According to the Commission on Higher Education, the average score of Thai students in English tests administered during university entrance examinations has not reached 50 per cent in the past three years.

Dee Parker, an executive of the American University Alumni Language Centre (AUA) in Bangkok, added, however, that the ministry’s goal to have Thai students learn only enough English to “understand” was aiming too low. Thai students should be encouraged to express themselves fluently and descriptively in both spoken and written English, Parker stressed.

Arunee Viriyachittra, a consultant for the English Resource and Instruction Centre (Eric), in turn said Thai teachers of English needed training themselves as many of them were still grappling with the vernacular. She explained that a recent survey showed that some 40 per cent of 100,000 Thai teachers of English had a poor grasp of the language with their grammar and communicative skills hovering in the low to middling range.

“I recommend that all new English-teachers be required to demonstrate high degrees of linguistic competence through rigorous evaluation,” she said, adding: “Old English-teachers who don’t show signs of improvement should in turn be moved to other positions.”

Arunee went on to say she had found that several schools which used native English-speakers to teach even one class a week had achieved demonstrable improvements in their students’ ability to communicate in English.

She added, however, that she disagreed with the policies of some schools to go “overboard” by teaching all subjects in English, arguing that many students’ language skills remained too deficient for them to handle complex subjects in a foreign tongue. “We might create a situation in which many of our students become inferior not only in English but in many other subjects as well,” she warned.

Arunee added that current curricula also failed to differentiate between students with different learning abilities, whereby slower students risked falling further and further behind their more gifted peers. “Would it not be better if schools tailored their English classes to students’ individual levels of language competence, rather than lumping them all together in the same class?” she asked.

Boonladda Chainam, a professor at Mahidol University, stressed that the surest way to encouraging students to master English was to have them develop an affection for the language so that they considered studying not as a gruelling chore but rather as a rewarding activity.

“In a like vein, we have to find further ways to enable students to use English often outside classrooms,” she added.

Cellphones Catapult Rural Africa to 21st Century

CP Seven Eleven Plc, the local convenience store chain, has set up a new business arm to train retail professionals. In two months the company will officially open the country’s first vocational college for retail education. More than 1,000 students will graduate each year into a fully guaranteed job at CP Seven Eleven, or 13 affiliated retail firms.

The “Panyapiwat Techno Business” vocational college will train retail staff for their primary vocational education, deputy director Poontana Musikaboonlert said.

The curriculum will be joint-ly developed by managers of the college and CP Seven Eleven bosses.

Human resource staff at CP Seven Eleven will screen applicants. CP Seven Eleven executives will occasionally be asked to give lectures on their retail experience and practices.

The retail vocational college is the first educational business formed by Sueksapiwat Co Ltd, a new educational business arm set up two years ago by CP Seven Eleven Plc.

The company acquired a 10-year-old vocational college named “Bangkok Technic Nonthaburi” on Ngam Wong Wan Road, which was later renovated and converted to Panyapiwat Techno Business.

The new vocational college has been operating for two months. It has 35 teachers with an average age of 30. All teachers will have on-the-job training at CP Seven Eleven to gain real retailing experience.

Poontana said that in addition to Panyapiwat Techno Business vocational college, the educational arm also planned to open an undergraduate institute for retail management and technology.

A workshop training centre for retail practice including marketing, sales and service-minded development will be set up in the near future to train retail professionals from middle to top levels.

“All students who graduate from Panyapiwat Techno Business will have full knowledge about retail practices from store management to sales and marketing, merchandising, product display, inventory management and promotion management,” Poontana said.

Poontana has significant experience in both marketing and human resource development, as he worked for Siam Cement Group in both areas for almost 20 years. He retired from Siam Cement and worked for the past three years as director of Thai Rubber Latex Corp’s management development office. Poontana is also the assistant vice president for business process improvement at CP Seven Eleven’s headquarters on Silom Road.

“We will teach our students real retail knowledge and make them into retail entrepreneurs. Graduates can either work at our CP Seven Eleven or other retail operators, or set up their own small retail business,” he said.

CP Seven Eleven and 13 affiliated companies had a lot of demand for new recruits every year to fill their business expansion.

“CP Seven Eleven and its 13 affiliates, including Counter Services, recruited a total of 5,000 new employees every year. About 2,000 of them are needed each year to fulfil the expansion of 7-Eleven stores only,” Poontana said.

He said the group planned to increase the number of 7-Eleven stores from 3,000 currently to 5,000 in the next two years.

CP Seven Eleven and its 13 affiliated firms currently employ more than 30,000 people within its retail organisations.

Piyaporn Chalapinyo, deputy academy director at Panyapiwat, said students would spend three years at the college for the primary vocational level and another two years for the higher vocational level.

Graduates would become store personnel at 7-Eleven outlets, and could become store managers within about a year, she said.

The Education Ministry will invite 100 experts to a brainstorming session on August 27-28, with the aim of finding strategies to improve the standard of English education in schools across the country.

Khunying Kasama Varawarn na Ayutthaya, permanent secretary at the ministry, said the sessions would focus on reaching a mutual understanding of what quality English-teaching methods consist of, what results should be deemed to be satisfactory, and how to develop teachers' abilities.

"We have discovered that schools still have different views about what quality English classes actually consist of," she said.

She added that the sessions were in response to Education Minister Chaturon Chaisang's announcement of a policy to improve English education.

Kasama was speaking after she met with a working panel Chaturon appointed to improve the quality of English education.

"Basically, we plan to shift the focus from English grammar to communication skills and we need to develop teachers' abilities continuously. Just using native speakers would not be the right solution," she said.

Recent official evaluations have concluded that after six years, education reform in the Kingdom remains far from achieving its goals.

Those goals include encouraging self-motivation, boosting analytical abilities, enhancing academic knowledge, promoting vocational education and developing teachers’ skills.

“This reflects a need for improvement in different areas. Our primary concern should be developing children’s analytical abilities and encouraging them to embrace life-long learning. We also need to focus on improving teachers’ abilities,” Education Minister Chaturon Chaisang told a seminar this week.

He said his ministry would set up a working panel to take charge of learning reform and developing teachers’ abilities.

Chaturon said that since the National Education Act of 1999 took effect six years ago, the country has focused mainly on restructuring government agencies and passing relevant laws.

A representative from the ministry’s Education Council told the seminar the government wants a fifty-fifty ratio of general to vocational education by 2008, but statistics from last year show a ratio of 63-to-37.

He said the average for national test scores in Prathom 6 and Mathayom 9 and 12, as well as Toefl results, also point to low levels of academic achievement for students, who especially need improvement in maths and analytical ability.

Furthermore, the council pointed out that most schools still cram too much material into classes, reducing chances of children developing analytical abilities. There are also not enough classes for pupils with special needs.

He said the had also concluded that teachers’ skill development has not progressed satisfactorily during the past six years.

“Delegation of education-related tasks among the relevant agencies is still inefficient, and educational services are concentrated mostly in urban areas,” he said. Private operators and local administrative bodies still play a very limited role in educational services.

In addition, the council said a failure to inform the public about new educational options has provided opportunities for unethical operators to trick students into paying for uncertified home-school courses.

The ministry’s Office of National Education Standards and Quality Assessment reported it had conducted quality checks at 17,562 schools across the country, or 49 per cent of all educational institutes.

Of the schools assessed, 39.2 per cent provided satisfactory instruction with a student-centred approach, and only 13.5 per cent impressively arranged activities to promote creativity and analytical and problem-solving skills.

The office said students at 47.6 per cent of the schools had very low levels of foreign-language ability.

The Education Ministry concluded that most teachers clung to old and outdated teaching methods and lacked efficient techniques. The problem exists mostly in small schools, where heavy workloads prevent teachers from improving themselves.

Students and parents have urged the Education Ministry to rectify teachers' misunderstandings of child-centred teaching saying it led to too much work and stress for students instead of analytical thinking, creativity and academic achievement.

Their move follows the ministry's assessment, to mark the 6th anniversary of education reform, that 90% of the 17,562 schools included in its survey had not succeeded in developing students' analytical and critical abilities.

About 60% of the surveyed schools had failed to adopt the child-centred learning curriculum which answered to the educational needs of children in different localities, and most were clueless about formulating an effective curriculum.

Wilaiwan Laichanthik, a student of Huay Thalaeng Pitthayakom School in Nakhon Ratchasima, said the ministry should find ways to urgently end confusion among teachers nationwide about child-centred education as the evaluation results found most schools still failed to teach students to be analytical and creative and that the method also caused them to perform worse in major subjects.

She said teaching reform over the past six years had failed because all teachers had been forced to change their teaching methods to child-centred teaching without guidelines or plans for them to adjust to the changes systematically.

Natsuda Chuchart, a Mathayom 4 student of Triam Udom Suksa Pak Tai School in Nakhon Si Thammarat, said students were now in trouble because teachers had no idea about proper child-centred teaching techniques and thought their only duty was to assign students to do research themselves on the internet and in libraries and to check and grade reports submitted to them.

``Now, teachers of most subjects assign students to do research and learn by themselves many times a week. Each week, I'm assigned to write reports for at least four subjects. We study harder and become more stressed than under the old curriculum which focused on rote learning.

``We study very hard, but feel as if we've not got as much knowledge as is expected. In class, there is no process leading to analytical thinking and teachers do nothing to help and fail to explain to ensure basic understanding before assigning research.

``Now, it's like students have to depend on themselves and teachers have a smaller teaching role. This does not seem to be right,'' she said.

Danaisak Nuphuak, a student of Thart Phanom School in Nakhon Phanom, said teachers were doing poorly in their jobs to their lack of understanding about child-centred learning, and were also busy with other tasks such as preparation for academic accreditations and school evaluations, skipping classes for training outside the schools several times a week.

Namfon Rangket, a student of Doi Saket Witthayakom School in Chiang Mai, called for urgent action to ensure teachers' understanding of the child-centred learning curriculum and to bring teaching methods in line, saying students were now really confused since teachers adjusted their own teaching methods, designed what they would teach themselves and chose textbooks in their own particular ways.

Somsri Sunanthawiwan, a parent, said the permission for schools to design curricula themselves without limits caused many schools to sink below standard, caused students to become more stressed than when they learned by rote, and increased the burden of parents since their children could not use the same textbooks anymore.

Another parent, Chingchai Charupanichkul said teaching under the new curriculum was badly organised with teachers of different subjects assigning too much homework, which was sometimes similar, to students and schools not allowing parents to take part in drafting the curriculum and formulating policies.

Softer Cell
In Mobile Phones,
Older Users Say,
More Is Less

All the Features Just Confuse,
They Tell Vodafone, So It
Tries Making a Simple One

Pushback From Young Staffers

By DAVID PRINGLE
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
August 15, 2005; Page A1

At a time when cellphones are letting users do more tricks, from video calling to downloading digital music, one of the latest models from Vodafone Group PLC has no camera, no browser and hardly any icons. Instead of being sleeker and cooler than ever, the phone is large and ordinary-looking.

What it is, though, is easy to use, and if Vodafone is right, the market will love it. That's because of who its market is: people getting up in years.

If the battery on the Vodafone Simply, as it's called, gets low, the phone doesn't signal this with a tiny icon somewhere. Instead, on its screen, the words "please charge" appear. If a message is waiting, a light flashes, like in old-fashioned answering machines. To help people who tend to lose their phones around the house and let the battery run down, this one comes with a stand that serves as a place to stow the thing, and charges it while it's there.

Ann Ridley is the kind of customer Vodafone has in mind. A 65-year-old ballet teacher in Claygate, near London, Ms. Ridley rarely gives out her mobile-phone number, never uses text messaging and doesn't store her friends' numbers on the phone. "I can't see the numbers, and it's too complicated," she says. The result is that she uses the cellphone for fewer than a dozen calls a year, spending less than $18 annually.

The Vodafone Simply handset.

The hope at Vodafone is that when people like Ms. Ridley, who said she wasn't familiar with the Vodafone Simply, hear about it, they'll find its ease of use so comforting they'll start to use their cell service more. If so, Vodafone, which collects a fee for each cellphone call, can expect more revenue.

Vodafone isn't the only company -- nor cellphones the only industry -- trying to shape some products for older consumers or to simplify them. At Ford Motor Co., designers who test-drive prototypes sometimes wear a "third-age" suit that gives them a sense of an older person's experience by means of stiff fabric at the elbows and knees and thick padding at the waist. Ford has made many modifications to cars as a result, from wider doors to more-comfortable seats, says one of its technical specialists, Jeffrey Pike.

Philips Electronics NV, whose many products range from beard trimmers to X-ray systems, has a "Simplicity Advisory Board" of outside experts, and next month will bring out the first products of a companywide simplicity drive. Consumers are saying, "Many products complicate my life instead of making it easier," says the head of Philips's global marketing management, Enderson Guimaraes.

The Vodafone Simply isn't an attempt to match certain ultra-simple phones sold to the elderly for emergency use, such as one from a France Télécom SA unit that has no keyboard but just three big color-coded buttons linked to preprogrammed numbers such as that of a doctor. Instead, Vodafone is trying to appeal to a large market of middle-aged and older people with a handset they won't find intimidating. The company's European target market is everyone who's 40 years of age or over and isn't issued a cellphone by an employer.

That's a sign of how young the usual market for cellphones is -- and what a change this move is for an industry that keeps adding features to get customers to upgrade. Vodafone's plan reflects the need for new sources of growth. Cellular markets in much of Western Europe and Japan are becoming saturated, so that the middle-aged and older are among the few places to look for new growth.

Vodafone is offering the Simply in nine countries so far, not including the U.S., a market in which it participates through a 45% stake in Verizon Wireless. The U.S. cellphone market still is growing briskly, although its growth, too, is expected to slow before long. The countries where Vodafone Simply is available are the U.K., Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Greece and New Zealand.

Other European cellular operators have ideas similar to Vodafone's for more effectively tapping into the older market, says Kai Oistamo, a senior vice president at Nokia Corp. The Finnish manufacturer of handsets is in discussions with some other service providers now, he says.

Vodafone's initiative began two years ago, after the company surveyed 5,000 Europeans about what they wanted from a cellphone. What it heard from consumers aged 35 to 55 shocked executives of the Newbury, England, company. Many in that age range didn't know their cellphone numbers or how to use basic functions.

One-third, for example, said they didn't know how to tell when they had received a text message. Some thought the envelope icon that signals a message meant their phone bill had arrived.

One woman in Italy told Vodafone she didn't know how to reply to a text message, so she would send back handwritten notes through her son, on his bicycle.

Many 35- to 55-year-olds also didn't like going into Vodafone retail stores because the young staff -- average age 24 -- talked in acronyms they couldn't understand. These consumers said they weren't interested in the cameras, Internet browsers and many of the other features that are becoming standard on the latest cellphones. "Our biggest customer segment turned round and said: 'You haven't been listening to us,' " says Guy Laurence, the company's consumer-marketing director. "It was an industry for kids."

[Chart]

As the Vodafone Simply project took shape, company executives debated how much emphasis it should get. The company's chief executive, Arun Sarin, a silver-haired 50-year-old who once headed a Silicon Valley start-up, was convinced the appetite for a simpler handset was substantial. "It's not tiny. It's a chunk," he said at a recent news conference.

At an industry gathering in early 2004, Mr. Laurence invited manufacturers to build a basic handset that could make voice calls and handle text messages and do little else. "They looked at me like I was from Mars," he recalls. "They said: 'It's not needed.'"

Eventually, Vodafone found a supplier in Sagem SA, a Paris-based electronics maker. Vodafone also engaged IDEO, a London design agency that had worked on the Palm V personal organizer, widely acclaimed for ease of use.

During development, young Vodafone product managers kept trying to add features, like software for sending picture messages. Mr. Laurence said no. He showed them an old TV comedy sketch about an elderly person being humiliated by a hi-fi salesman who delighted in the customer's technical ignorance.

Vodafone ran the ideas of product managers past groups of over-40 consumers. One finding was that the consumers tended not to enter many names into their cellphone contacts books because they thought they might lose the handset and have to do it all over again on a replacement. This wasn't good news for Vodafone, which finds that the more names in a phone's contacts book, the more the phone gets used.

To allay people's concerns about the hassle of re-entering numbers in a replacement phone, Vodafone made it easier to copy the contacts book onto a personal computer for storage. The handset automatically transfers contacts to a PC when connected to it, something that with most handsets can't be done unless owners first install special PC software. It is then straightforward to transfer the numbers from the PC back to a replacement cellphone.

Based on what older customers told it, Vodafone also installed dedicated buttons for volume control and for locking the keypad, to prevent accidental redialing of the last number called. It added a 'tips' function to give users guidance if they got stuck in any of the menus. The handset is bigger than most and has a spacious keypad.

Gary Sheehan, a 38-year-old director of a London information-technology company, likes that keypad, along with the phone's simple menus and large screen. He replaced his Sony Ericsson camera phone with a Vodafone Simply in July. "It was all singing, all dancing," he says of his old phone. "But if I wanted to change the ringer volume, I couldn't find it."

On his new one, "I can see what I am typing without squinting," he says.

The downside is that his colleagues at the IT firm, mostly in their 20s, frequently mock his choice of handset. He says his wife, using British slang for "idiot," calls it the "Vodafone Wally phone." But he doesn't care: "I just wanted a phone that phoned," he says.

The simple handset remains a work in progress. In the 2½ months since Vodafone launched it in mid-May, the company has decided it needed to make about 60 tweaks to the software.

The company's Mr. Laurence was wary of permitting advertising agencies, typically staffed by young people, to create a commercial for the phone, fearing it would be too flashy or complicated. The company first commissioned a print ad to run in a European edition of Good Housekeeping magazine -- not a usual venue for cellphone advertising. Its print ads, which also ran in Golf Monthly, picture the handset and describe what each button does.

One of them, highlighting the volume-control button, says: "No mucking about in menus to find the right setting. So no excuses for letting your Vodafone Simply phone ring in the middle of your cousin's wedding."

Mr. Laurence ran the ad by product managers working on fancy multimedia handsets for young people. "The more they hated it, the more we knew we were on the right track," he says. Vodafone eventually ran television commercials for the phone in four of its markets.

It won't say how many of the phones it has sold, but Mr. Laurence says the company expects to at least recoup its investment through added revenue. The average age of the phone's users is 45.

Many young staffers in Vodafone's retail stores don't seem to grasp the concept, because they keep pushing older customers to buy phones with fancy features, Mr. Laurence says. So the company has taken to lending their parents a Vodafone Simply. "If their parents say 'this is the best thing since sliced bread,'" Mr. Laurence says, "they are going to learn to sell it properly."

More than half of the country's schools from kindergarten to high-school levels fail to train students to be analytical, and students are doing more poorly in major subjects than four years ago, the Education Ministry's assessment reveals.

The ministry's academic accreditation and educational evaluation office said

A survey of 17,562 schools, including private ones, found 90% of them did not succeed in developing students' analytical and critical abilities, according to the ministry's academic accreditation and educational evaluation office. There are some 30,000 kindergarten, primary and high schools nationwide.

About 40% of the surveyed schools had adopted the child-centred learning curriculum and did fairly well at it. The rest failed to come up with a curriculum that answered to educational needs of children in different localities, said the office's director Somwang Pitthayanuwat.

Most of the schools were clueless about devising an effective curriculum and resorted to copying the models used by other schools, he said.

Mr Somwang said the survey also exposed a wide gap between state-run and private schools in terms of education quality. State-run schools were largely outperformed by in all areas, except relations with local communities.

The government should learn from private schools and allow them access to national education management, he said.

The survey also showed the quality of education varied depending on sizes and locations.Students of large city schools tended to perform better academically than their peers in small rural schools which were in desperate need of resources.

Mr Somwang said at least some 10,000 of the surveyed schools appeared oblivious to their own problems. They did not bother to make evaluation reports, and it was unrealistic to expect them to shape up.

The office was also alarmed by the finding that a large number of teachers employed by 60% of the surveyed schools were below standard.

The two billion baht spent by the state to train teachers was obviously not a fruitful investment, he said.

Rungruang Sukapirom, adviser to the Education Council, said a comparison with the 2001 figures confirmed Prathom 6 (Grade 6) students now performed a lot more poorly in mathematics, sciences, English and Thai languages.

Also, the opportunity for children to have formal schooling was only slightly better despite the size of the budget allocated to implement the government's 12-year free education policy.

It was found the number of youngsters who completed 12 years of education had remained capped at 84% since 2002.

The adviser said schoolchildren were forced to study too much while subject contents were often repetitive. Teachers rushed to cover the subjects they were assigned to teach and so had no time to encourage and help students develop thinking and analytical abilities.

The successful launch of the world's biggest commercial satellite was watched nervously by many, and has put a feather in Thailand's cap. Thaicom 4, also known as iPSTAR, is not just the heaviest private satellite ever launched, but is also one of the most technologically advanced. The ``iP'' of the name refers to the ``internet Protocol'', which is the manner in which information is exchanged on the computer network of networks.

Most internet data travels along wires of various types. The new satellite opens a huge new pipe in the sky, along which information can flow and be processed in 22 countries across Asia.

iPSTAR is basically a high-speed internet service provider high above Earth, in a geostationary orbit, meaning it turns with the planet and remains directly above one point. Since the satellite was conceived five years ago, Shin Corp has won both praise and some scepticism _ applause for its forward-looking plans, doubts over whether they are, to coin a phrase, pie in the sky. The theory of a huge internet provider, unfettered by wires, is unassailable. It remains to be seen whether it will work economically, and whether enough companies and outlying individuals can make it profitable.

Previous Shin Corp satellites, which are handled by the firm's Shin Satellite subsidiary, have focused on known and predictable commercial enterprises. In particular, Thaicom 1, 2 and 3 have carried television and other broadcasts. The growth and needs of broadcasters is uncontroversial, and the satellites have made money from carrying programmes of stations and networks.

Thaicom 4 delves into riskier territory. Indeed, as the satellite was built and readied for launch, contracts were negotiated, agreed, discarded and launched, often in ways unforeseen. Indian companies bid against each other for satellite time; a major Australian company backed out at the last minute. Burma, as many know, has signed on as a major customer. But 80% of the bandwidth is still available.

The new satellite is a commercial venture by the public company Shin Corporation, which is responsible to its shareholders. But Shin Corp is also a Thai corporate citizen, with the duties that go along with that status. In fact, Shin Corp is one of Thailand's most closely watched firms. Its name is derived directly from the family of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra who founded the firm, and whose wife and children are major stockholders and voices in the company's operations today.

Not a few political opponents have speculated about this arrangement; Shin Corp is suing one such commentator in a high-profile case in the Criminal Court.

Allegations aside, Shin Corp is one of Thailand's biggest and most successful firms, and thus has obligations to its country. Of course, prospering, paying its taxes and providing employment for many thousands of Thai workers is important.

But, as Thailand's biggest, most prosperous technology company, Shin Corp could consider other steps. Most Thais, for example, still live outside areas where affordable high-speed internet connections are available. iPSTAR has the bandwidth and the national coverage to allow an internet connection in every outlying village.

This is not to suggest that Shin Satellite is the only Thai company with obligations to its citizens. CAT Telecom and the TOT Corporation have both been freed recently from the restrictions of being state monopolies. They have been remarkably unimaginative in meeting the demands of the public for reliable computing service at realistic prices.

Instead, they have spent inordinate time trying to hold on to unearned and unmerited pieces of companies like Shin Corp. Telecom firms are still required to charge huge amounts from consumers to give to TOT and CAT Telecom in return for so-called concessions.

CAT maintains a monopoly on internet services with a choke-hold on land and submarine links to the country. iPSTAR effectively ends that monopoly _ but only if the owners of the satellite share the wealth of the internet channels from space.

Big companies can afford big payments to Shin Satellite for the use of enormous amounts of internet bandwidth needed to share and process commercial information. Shin could consider setting aside links for consumers who have little or no avenue to other internet access.

In the near future, children in the remote areas of Thailand will be bridging the digital divide with the chance of equal access to information in digital form.

The E-Book/E-Learning Sharing Project, initiated by the Software Industry Promotion Agency (Sipa), aims to enable children throughout the country to have the same chance as children in the cities to access knowledge through the Internet.

Manoo Ordeedolchest, president of Sipa, said the project’s concept is to build infrastructure to allow children to easily learn. This includes work to encourage teachers to develop electronic books and also to assist schools to integrate and share their electronic-book resources, allowing children access across servers as well as client devices such as laptops, PCs, personal digital assistants and mobile phones.

Content developed by teachers will be stored in schools’ distributed servers across the nation. The distributed servers will probably be linked, similar to peer-to-peer networks.

Once children access the network from anywhere in the country by signing on with their unique user name and password, the software management system will automatically know who they are and then the system will offer information appropriate to them, instead of them wasting time looking for the information they want from everything available over the network.

“To manage the delivery of a particular child’s requirements, the server hub is essential to manage traffic through the networks, similar to Web services’ UDDI,” Manoo said.

Sipa’s role includes software management for server hubs, training teachers to develop digital content with animation, multimedia and graphics, and providing platform tools for teachers.

“Sipa will also invite publishers to convert their books into electronic platforms for children at lower prices. With this model, children in remote areas of the country will have a better chance to access knowledge,” Manoo said.

This project is scheduled to start next year. Sipa has proposed Bt10 million as an initial budget for this project.

Meanwhile, to access the network, children must have appropriate client devices. For proof of concept, Sipa has worked with a local company, Basic Concept Development Technology, to develop an engine for client devices across platforms including Windows, Windows CE, J2ME, Symbian, and Linux. Clients will be enabled to receive any format such as text-based, animation, graphics, and PowerPoint.

“A local company has already converted 1,700 pages of ‘Sam Kok’ into a one-megabyte electronic version, compressed from 3 MB, and installed in a pocket PC,” Manoo said.

This initial project is part of the government’s decision to consider the adoption of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project after Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and co-founder, approached Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra earlier this month. OLPC was announced in January by Negroponte at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

OLPC is the MIT Media Lab’s new research initiative to develop a US$100 (Bt4,100) laptop to revolutionise the education of the world’s children, to be used for work and play, drawing, writing and mathematics. The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, full-colour, full-screen laptop that will use innovative power such as wind-up generators, and will be able to do almost everything except store huge amounts of data. These rugged laptops will be WiFi- and cell phone-enabled, and have USB ports galore. Its current specifications are 500MHz, 1GB, and 1 megapixel.

The idea is to distribute the machines through the ministries of education of countries willing to adopt a policy of “one laptop per child”. Initial discussions have been held with China and Brazil.

Under the plan, the government will order around 600,00 of the $100 laptops per year to distribute to children in remote areas to access the world of knowledge.

The government’s adoption of OLPC, together with Sipa’s “E-Book/E-Learning Sharing Project”, is expected to help bridge the digital divide as well as to encourage children to carry their own library around with them.

I use EverNote to gather information for my Sabbatical, it is great and free. The problem is that it is a computer file and I can not share it unless I put the information into a web page or create a blog entry. EverNote is especially good at gathering information from web sites that require subscriptions, two examples being the Wall Street Journal and the Bangkok Post.

Highly recommended.

EverNote Organizes Your Endless Stuff Onto an Endless Tape
August 11, 2005; Page B1

Computer users are drowning in information. Between Web sites and email, and the pictures and documents you download from them, a flood of material pours into our personal computers each day. Organizing it all is a major challenge.

Many people make do with the crude tools the PC provides. They stuff all those documents and messages into folders in the computer's file system or inside their email programs -- until they get lazy. They overload the bookmark features of their Web browsers and cram saved Web pages into their imperfect folder system.

Others just give up and save everything in the Windows "My Documents" folder, where finding the data later can be a scavenger hunt.

Macintosh users with the new Tiger operating system have a leg up in solving the mess. The system's Spotlight feature finds almost any document or email in seconds, and you can create "Smart folders" that automatically accumulate files based on search criteria you specify. Similar capabilities are promised for the next version of Windows, called Vista, in the fall of 2006.

There is another way to tackle the information overload. For years, some folks have turned to an obscure type of software called information organizers. These are programs designed to collect and organize your notes, as well as snippets of information copied from elsewhere. Users of these are addicted to them.

Among these products are Info Select for Windows, $250 from Micro Logic; and StickyBrain for the Mac, $40 from Chronos. Microsoft entered the field a couple of years ago with a Windows organizer called OneNote, which is $50 after rebate.

A new contender has now entered this field, and it boasts an unusual design. It's called EverNote, and is for Windows computers only. EverNote is being offered as a free download from its maker, EverNote Corp., at www.evernote.com. A paid version, the $35 EverNote Plus, adds handwriting and shape recognition for people who use tablet computers.

I have been testing EverNote and it works well. It is fast and logical and a good way to round up random thoughts and resources.

Like many other information organizers, EverNote is designed as a bottomless storage locker for your notes and clippings. So, it dispenses with the regular Windows system of creating a new file each time you want to do something and then saving it. Instead, EverNote lets you quickly create notes in one central place and saves the material automatically.

It doesn't use the interface of a word processor or a virtual notebook. EverNote appears on the screen as an endless tape, with notes falling one after the other down the length of the tape. Unlike tape in the real world, this virtual tape isn't narrow. It can be whatever width you like, up to the full width of your screen. But it is long.

You see only a portion of the tape at any one time -- the portion containing the note you are creating or reading.

EverNote allows you to create notes in several ways. You can just type them in; a new, empty note frame is always ready at the bottom of the tape. Or, you can select and drag text or graphics into an empty note from a document, email or Web page. Or, you can use the standard Windows copy-and-paste system to get content from elsewhere. Finally, you can install a special EverNote icon into your Web browser that will automatically create a note from selected text on a Web page, or even the whole Web page.

In most cases, when you create notes from copied content, EverNote adds a reference line to the note saying where it came from. If you double-click on this reference line while holding down the Control key, EverNote will send you back to the source: a Web page, a document or an email on your computer.

You can assign one or more category labels to each note. Some are automatically assigned based on the form of the note, such as "Web clips" or "Word clips." Others can be created and assigned by the user, such as "Clips about David Ortiz."

There are three main ways to navigate the virtual tape and to find notes quickly. On the right side of the tape, EverNote presents a "Time Band," a single-column calendar with dates and hours, so you can get a note whose creation date you recall by clicking on that date.

On the left is a list of the categories. When you click on a category, the tape shows only the notes that fit that category. Finally, there is a search system that rapidly locates any word or phrase you type and highlights it in yellow in every note in which it appears.

EverNote has too may other features to list here. It saves a history of each version of notes you revise. It has templates for common kinds of notes, like shopping lists and phone messages. It automatically backs up, and can restore, your notes. The company also is working on such things as a version for cellphones and a way to synchronize with multiple devices.

So, if you are lost in a sea of files and data, give EverNote a try. It may be just what you need.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com

Please note: these laptops are not in production. They are not—and will not—be available for purchase by individuals.

PRESS INQUIRIES:
Alexandra Kahn
Media Lab Press Liaison
617.253.0365
email via our contact us page

OTHER INQUIRIES:
Nia Lewis
niav@media.mit.edu

Why is it important for each child to have a computer? What's wrong with community-access centers?
One does not think of community pencils—kids have their own. They are tools to think with, sufficiently inexpensive to be used for work and play, drawing, writing, and mathematics. A computer can be the same, but far more powerful. Furthermore, there are many reasons it is important for a child to "own" something—like a football, doll, or book—not the least of which being that these belongings will be well-maintained through love and care.

What about connectivity? Aren't telecommunications services expensive in the developing world?
When these machines pop out of the box, they will make a mesh network of their own, peer-to-peer. This is something initially developed at MIT and the Media Lab. We are also exploring ways to connect them to the backbone of the Internet at very low cost.

What can a $1000 laptop do that the $100 version can't?
Not much. The plan is for the $100 Laptop to do almost everything. What it will not do is store a massive amount of data.

How will these be marketed?
The idea is to distribute the machines through those ministries of education willing to adopt a policy of "one laptop per child." Initial discussions have been held with China and Brazil. In addition, smaller countries will be selected for beta testing. Initial orders will be limited to a minimum of one million units (with appropriate financing).

When do you anticipate these laptops reaching the market? What do you see as the biggest hurdles?
Our preliminary schedule is to have units ready for shipment by the end of 2006 or early 2007.

The biggest hurdle will be manufacturing 100 million of anything. This is not just a supply-chain problem, but also a design problem. The scale is daunting, but I find myself amazed at what some companies are proposing to us. It feels as though at least half the problems are being solved by mere resolve.

How will this initiative be structured?
The three principals at MIT are faculty members at the Media Lab: Nicholas Negroponte (a founder of the Lab), Joe Jacobson (serial entrepreneur, co-founder and director of E Ink), and Seymour Papert (one of the world's leading theorists on child learning).

Additional researchers include: Mike Bove, Mary Lou Jepsen, Alan Kay, Tod Machover, Mitchel Resnick, and Ted Selker.

Organizationally, MIT will work with a small number of companies of complementary skills to develop a fully working and manufactured laptop (50,000 to 100,000 units) in fewer than 12 months, with an eye on building about 100 million to 200 million units by the following year. Five initial companies who have committed to this project are AMD, Brightstar, Google, News Corp, and Red Hat. MIT will also work with the not-for-profit company One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), as well as with the 2B1 Foundation.

August 2, 2005

The government plans to allocate a budget of around 3.2-3.5 billion baht for the first 500,000 personal computers to be given free of charge to schoolchildren, said the new government spokesman, Surapong Suebwonglee.

Mr Surapong said laptop computers, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at a cost of less than US$100 (4,183 baht), would be distributed to try to change the way primary and secondary students learn.

He said Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra had ordered the Education and the Information and Communication Technology ministries to come up with the details and speed up e-textbook software development to complement the One Laptop Per Child scheme.

Mr Thaksin told a seminar for 101 administrators of Thai Rath Wittaya Schools on Tuesday that specialists from the US had said they could produce a personal computer costing $100.

According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, the full-colour, full-screen laptops will be Linux-based and able to use alternative power (including wind-up).

The specifications include a 500MHz central processing unit, a 1GB hard disk and a 1-megapixel display screen.

The computers will be WiFi- and cell-phone-enabled, with USB ports, but will not be able to store huge amounts of data. The prototype is expected to be available by year-end.

Thailand will join countries such as China and Brazil that earlier held initial discussions with Media Lab.

The Ministry of Education will this year conduct a feasibility study on the demand from Thai schoolchildren before beta-testing in selected lower-secondary schools, said Education Minister Chaturon Chaisaeng.

Minister of Science and Technology Pravich Rattanapian said that the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec) could provide free Thai-language open-source applications to laptops in the scheme.

If implemented, the project will be Thailand's first large-scale effort to provide free laptop computers to schoolchildren. The Thaksin government's previous low-cost computer project sold desktop and laptop computers to general users for less than Bt20,000.

'If you are not already mobile-enabling your business today, you're already behind'

When a customer of Prudential Life Assurance in Malaysia asks a sales agent what exactly his policy coverage is, the answer comes quickly and authoritatively _ from the company's database in Kuala Lumpur to the policyholder from the agent's smartphone.

In all, some 3,800 of Prudential's field agents are now equipped with Palm Treo 650 or 600 smartphones in one of the region's biggest sales force automation exercises _ one that Alex Tan, the project manager at Prudential, said was also saving the company the equivalent of six million baht a year in printing costs.

Using a combination of GPRS and SMS messaging and Palm smartphones, members of Prudential Malaysia's mobile-enabled sales force are more productive, making less than half the number of telephone enquiries they used to make and earning more commission than before.

Mr Tan also says that the Palm Treos enhance Prudential sales agents' image, in line with the company slogan "only the best carry the best."

He explained this the other day to delegates at a Palm Mobile Solutions event in Singapore where he was one of several speakers demonstrating business benefits derived from having a mobile-enabled workforce.

Today, most mobile applications are focussed around email and salesforce automation, but as awareness grows of the productivity gains that can be tapped, so companies are increasingly making smartphones available to employees, turning these "data centric converged devices" into one of the fastest-growing categories in computing today.

IDC figures project a 37 percent compound annual growth rate for smartphones for the period beginning last year through to 2008, whereas, by contrast, PDA sales are forecast to remain flat over this period.

"If you're not mobile-enabling your business today, you're already behind," warns PalmSource's director for carrier services, Hugh Fletcher. "It's now mainstream and the enterprise infrastructure was there," he says, adding that market research showed that almost 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies were now planning mobile deployments.

"Once you have real-time access to mobile email, you will never go back," Fletcher said. Palm calls it "the initial killer application" for smartphones.

Again, market research would appear to support this, and predictions are that enterprise wireless email users will grow from 3 million in 2004 to 4 million this year, soaring to six million next year, 14 million in 2007 and 39 million in 2008.

The benefits of a connected mobile workforce can be wide-ranging. Tom Garrison, general manager of Intel's APAC solutions group, said that Intel had gained two hours a week from each employee by mobile-enabling 80 percent of its workforce with notebooks.

Palm, which has now reverted to its original name after flirting with the moniker PalmOne following the acquisition of Handspring _ when it spun off the software arm into a separate company called PalmSource _ speaks of the concept of "found time."

Palm's Asia Pacific vice president Paul Blinkhorn said "the intersection of time, opportunity and inspiration will drive competitive advantage. All of us are looking for this in products or services."

Palm was looking at turning downtime into "found time," he said, giving examples of how time is wasted waiting for a meeting to start, at lunch or that which is spent standing in queues or waiting for a flight at airports.

But using a Treo 650, an employee can use this time productively, possibly to check email messages and tap out a response or to access a company web site and keep abreast of assignments.

Blinkhorn observed that 10 minutes gained each day by a worker earning a US$50,000 annual salary would save an employer $1,000 a year.

There are several choices of platform when it comes to mobile enablement: Pocket PC, RIM's Blackberry, Palm and Symbian-based smartphones are some of the major ones.

Palm executives cited market surveys that indicate that in the United States the mobile operating system most sanctioned by IT departments is the PalmOS, and PalmSource's Fletcher said that Palm's operating system presented an opportunity for an organisation to exert its own choices.

The PalmOS also connected to key enterprise solutions and there was middleware for many platforms and applications, with 34 percent of developers for the Palm platform now working on enterprise applications, he added.

Fletcher also said that IT departments needed to be proactive by providing smartphones to the workforce, as opposed to allowing users to go out and "mobile-enable themselves."

If they allowed that to happen, they would be responsible for all the security problems that this might introduce, including responsibility for confidential data should the CEO lose his phone.

Blinkhorn said that many organisations were now realising better efficiencies or were gaining competitive advantage by deploying smartphones.

Palm's customers in the region included Cisco, Starbucks, WalMart, Pfizer, IBM and Jurong Shipyards, with Prudential Malaysia's sales force automation being just one example of how the future of personal computing is becoming mobile computing.

Bangkok has been chosen as the venue for Worlddidac Asia 2005, the Asian region's showcase for educational innovation and technology.

Chainarong Limkittisin, director of Reed Tradex Co's industrial business division, the joint organiser, said the Oct 19-21 show is expected to attract a large number of people from education circles worldwide.

A similar event was held in Bangkok in 1995.

Worlddidac and BESA, the educational media association of England, considered Bangkok the most suitable venue for 2005 because education-related businesses in Asia, especially in Thailand, had grown in leaps and bounds, Mr Chainarong said.

Education media business operators in England were keen to take part.

The show will be a regional forum for executives and educators of all levels from all over Asia to see educational innovations for curriculum and educational institute management improvement.

Worlddidac Asia 2005 will be held at the Sirikit National Convention Centre.

City-run schools, normally considered second-grade, are set to undergo a face-lift intended to put them on a par with prestigious international schools.

In a pilot project, Bangkok Governor Apirak Kosayodhin plans to turn three of 433 city-run schools into bilingual education institutes.

Wat Benchamabophit School and Wat Mahannop School have been selected to provide English while Samphanthawong School will offer Chinese lessons.

The governor said Spanish is next on the BMA's bilingual programme list.

``This is to reduce the large gap in foreign language skills among students at city-run schools,'' he said.

The city administration also plans to seek cooperation from Beijing in introducing a scholarship scheme _ similar in kind to AFS scholarship _ for both students and teachers.

Besides bilingual programmes, the city administration also plans to develop information technology and instal more computer units at 433 schools under its jurisdiction and hook them up to high-speed internet access.

``Our schools are usually viewed as prachabal [rural] schools to which well-to-do families won't send their kids,'' Mr Apirak said.

The agency is working with universities, international organisations and the private sector in developing basic education curriculum and training programmes, he said.

The governor will hold a meeting with school executives via broadband internet on May 17, the day the new academic year begins.

BMA schools can accommodate 83,000 students at all levels.

Mr Apirak said the city administration will this year continue to distribute free items _ uniforms, textbooks, stationery, lunch and milk _ to all students.

The Software Industry Promotion Agency (Sipa) plans to introduce 25 Windows-based, open-source, free computer software programs to the public in July, a move that is expected to save the country more than a billion baht annually.

Chairwoman Kruawan Samana said Sipa, which is a public organisation under the Information and Communications Technology Ministry, has initially developed 25 free software programs. They feature office, internet, graphics, multimedia, utility, web development and entertainment applications and will be ready for the public to download in July.

Mrs Kruawan said the open-source software programs to be introduced would benefit the government's project to provide schools nationwide with 250,000 computers and internet connections next year. These schools would be able to use free programs from Sipa and save a lot of budget money, which would otherwise be spent on purchasing software from foreign suppliers.

Sipa's free software project should help the schools save about a billion baht a year, she said.

Sipa would also help train university instructors from across the country to use its open-source software. They would later help train schoolteachers.

Mrs Kruawan said Sipa's open-source software project was part of the agency's attempts to promote Thailand's software industry, give people wider access to information, and increase their chances to become computer-literate. The attempts would eventually bring about e-government systems.

``Sipa has triggered the idea among Thai people that it is unnecessary to spend large sums of money on foreign programs every year. We allow the general public to further develop our programs, and this will help support our people, both young and old, who are software geniuses,'' she said.

``Our programs are public property and bear no copyrights. They can be developed into new applications for sale. This will expand our software industry. It is a win-win situation for everyone,'' she said.

The Education Ministry plans to increase the length of time that Thais spend in school from an average of 8.1 years to 9.5 years in four years by intensifying online learning.

Deputy Minister Rung Kaewdaeng said yesterday that the 9.5-year goal of his ministry could not be achieved by 2009 as earlier planned if it adhered to the old method of increasing the time spent in education by just raising teacher numbers.

He said a teacher could handle only 40 students at a time, so simply increasing the number of teachers would not realise the goal. The answer was e-learning that could teach millions of students at a time.

Mr Rung instructed non-formal education staff to study the number of people reached by existing online educational programmes, the quality of remote educational services, ways to expand the services without compromising on quality and the amount of investment needed.

In another development, the ministry has selected 20 kindergartens and primary schools in Bangkok to pioneer brain-based learning in the upcoming school term.

Academics from Mahidol University and the National Institute for Brain-based Learning are training executives and teachers of the selected schools the techniques of this learning approach. Kasama Voravan, permanent secretary for the ministry, said brain-based learning applied music to stimulate development of children's bodies and brains simultaneously.

Santhad Sinthuphanprathum, educators' development director, said the pilot project would be evaluated initially in August. If the project is successful, nationwide curricula will change and revolutionise Thailand's education system.

Sao Paulo, Brazil _ Microsoft Corp launched a scaled-back version of its Windows operating system in Brazil on Wednesday, hoping to get more people using computers in Latin America's largest country while cutting down on rampant software piracy.

Brazil becomes the first country in the western hemisphere to get the low-cost XP Starter Edition, which lets users run just three programs concurrently and has lower-resolution graphics.

The announcement came only weeks before Brazil's government is expected to decide whether the version will be included in a program aimed at helping millions of poor Brazilians buy their first computers.

Designed for first-time users, the stripped-down Portuguese operating system also lacks capabilities for home networking and multiple user accounts.

The stripped-down Windows is already being sold or will be soon in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Russia and India. At a press conference in Sao Paulo to launch the Brazilian version, executives did not say whether Microsoft would start selling the system in other Latin American countries.

While Brazil has a population of 182 million, only about 12% of the country's households have computers and a mere 10% have Internet connections _ and many experts say the numbers must be increased for Brazil to emerge from the ranks of developing nations and vault itself into the information age.

``We're determined to decrease digital exclusion and Windows XP Starter Edition is precisely what we need to help us in this effort,'' said Emilio Umeoka, chief executive of Microsoft's Brazilian division.

Umeoka said the timing of the announcement wasn't linked to the government's impending decision on whether to let Microsoft participate in the PC Conectado (Connected PC in Portuguese) effort to make computers available for about 1,400 reals ($538), payable in 24 monthly instalments of about 58 reals ($22) each.

That would make them more affordable for many working class families in a country where the monthly minimum wage is 260 reals ($100).

While Microsoft has been fighting hard to be included in the program, a big push by open-source software advocates is under way to keep the company from participating. AP

Nakhon Si Thammarat Rajabhat University is inviting farmers to work their land and ``study'' for a degree at the same time.

Farmers who own at least three rai of land can apply for a bachelor's degree in local wisdom _ but they will not have to attend any lectures or sit any tests.

The four-year course starts in June and at least 20 farmers are expected to take part. Most learning will take place in the field.

Jaturat Kiratiwuttipong, vice-rector of the faculty of humanities and social sciences and initiator of the degree, said the course would be the first four-year university degree offered only to practising farmers who learn from hands-on experience on their own land.

Farmers must be aged 20 or above, and own at least three rai, which they will use for research, farming and development. They will get help from academics, community leaders and farmers practising in different fields, such as rice, rubber and fruit growers.

The course was inspired by the thinking of Mai Raeng community leader Prayong Ronarong, a Ramon Magsaysay Award winner for Community Leadership, who wants farmers to become self-sufficient and self-reliant. Its aim is to turn out self-reliant farmers, who would form the basis of a future self-sufficient community. It is also designed to keep competent farmers in their home provinces, people who could stand on their own feet and earn a living without moving to Bangkok or other big cities, Mr Jaturat said. He hoped that by the end of the course, farmers would be equipped with new farming techniques which combined local wisdom and modern technology in a practical way.

At least 20 local community leaders and experts in the province including Mr Prayong would act as advisers and help assess students.

Mr Prayong said the local wisdom degree would serve as good preparation for a future self-sufficient community because young people would learn from real-life experience.

The Software Industry Promotion Agency (Sipa) and the Office of the Basic Education Commission will work together to train 1000 teachers in animation and multimedia.

Sipa will host a training camp _ TAM Camp 2005: Training the Trainer _ and encourage teachers in the arts and related fields to add animation and multimedia skills. Participants would be required to produce e-curriculums for the teaching of students in the future.

Each school can send up to five teachers for the training camp.

Sipa will run the TAM Camp in four provinces: Phuket on March 21-25, Chiang Mai on April 4-8, Khon Kaen on April 25-29 and in Bangkok on May 9-13.

For further details contact Sipa at training@sipa.or.th or 02-554-0452.

Mention ``classroom'', and what comes to mind?

Usually not trees, rivers, forests or the sky. When it comes to classrooms, most of us think of a room filled with rows of desks and chairs. But the College of Social Management (CSM) and the Alternative Education Network are finding alternatives to the traditional classroom.

The college is promoting the ``community school'' project where villagers, both young and old, can learn from each other.

``Communities in Thailand are so diverse. Hill top villages live differently from those along river banks. Each community has a wealth of knowledge and wisdom that it has accumulated as it has evolved and adapted through the ages,'' said Chatchawan Thongdeelert, director of the CSM.

``So the community can function like a classroom, where students learn about life and wisdom from community life. It's a living classroom. It should be the best way to reform the country's education system.''

To show how a community-based school works, the CSM is holding a ``Community School Fair'' at the Office of Museum and Agricultural Culture, Kasetsart University from April 1 to 3. The fair will introduce seven communities who are forerunners in the project and show how a student's knowledge can develop in their own community.

``Now students get well-educated but not well-versed in their community's ways. The education system has taught them to alienate themselves from their community, making them turn their backs on their roots,'' said Prapat Apaimul, a community leader of Mae Ta River basin, in Mae On sub-district, Chiang Mai.

``Those educated are taught to be employed. That's all right. But they must know their roots so they can return home to farming if they are layed-off,'' agreed Promma Suwansri of the Mae Pern Mae Wong Conversation Network.

``The elderly have been aware of the problems arising from various developments. So they came up with the idea of creating activities with their children so that they [the children] can learn about the community's traditional wisdom, otherwise, the knowledge can be lost,'' said Promma. ``The community school project aims to teach community wisdom to the young through the learning camps,'' he added.

The lively learning environment will be showcased at the fair, and on show will be activities such as organic farming, compost making, testing produce for toxic substances, clay house building and other traditional skills. The fair will demonstrate alternative ways of learning, and all the students in the project will participate, sharing their knowledge and opinions among the group.

``The activities will help the students develop their interpersonal and social skills,'' said Sririwan Sripen, the project coordinator.

For those interested, admission to the event is free of charge, and here's the schedule:

Colleges that offer course materials online

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

When the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced an ambitious plan
to give away online materials for every course, officials wondered whether
other colleges and universities would follow suit.

The answer? Sort of.

Nearly four years after the start of MIT's OpenCourseWare project, several
colleges met to unveil their own plans to publish extensive sets of course
materials -- such as syllabi, lecture notes, and quizzes -- and encourage
anyone to use them freely. There is one major difference: No one other than
MIT is pledging to give away every course. And most of the newcomers expect
to convert only a handful of courses per year to an open format.

The main reason is money. MIT officials are spending $6-million per year on
the project, much of which is coming from grants from the William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project, which
has already published more than 900 of MIT's 1,800 courses, is being touted
as a success, as it has drawn downloaders from around the world who are
using the materials as models for their own teaching or to learn on their
own.

Proponents say the main beneficiaries are in the developing world, where
students cannot afford textbooks and universities are looking for help
setting up courses. MIT officials say that the materials are also inspiring
more people to apply to the institute, as well as helping students at MIT
decide which courses to sign up for.

Though many professors at other colleges already create course Web sites,
the majority do so haphazardly, or in a way that is designed to be used only
by their students. Open courseware seeks to make sure each course's
materials are far more complete, and are presented in a way that makes them
easy for others to use.

The growth of these giveaways marks a major philosophical shift from the
mid-1990s, when many colleges and professors thought they could rake in
profits selling course materials online.

Colleges that have bought into the open-courseware concept say they would
like to give away everything, but that they cannot afford to put all that
material online and keep it up to date. Besides, one set of free materials
may be enough, so other colleges and universities are focusing on making
available only their signature programs or courses that are not taught by
MIT. Many of the new projects also have grant support.

"I'm not surprised right away that it's a little slow to take off," says
Frank Mayadas, program director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
"Regardless of the motivation and desire, it just isn't going to take off
like wildfire" because of the cost.

But Anne H. Margulies, executive director of MIT's OpenCourseWare project,
says that while MIT always hoped other colleges would follow its lead, it
did not expect many to give everything away.

"What we aspire to," she says, "is to work with other schools so we can
create a collective body of high-quality course materials."

Trading Tips

Representatives from MIT and six other U.S. universities that are starting
open-courseware projects met at MIT in February to trade tips on how to
manage their projects. Representatives from Chinese universities attended as
well, as did officials from Universia.net, a coalition of universities in
Portugal, Spain, and several South American countries that is working to
translate MIT's course materials into Spanish and Portuguese.

The U.S. institutions represented were the Harvard University Law School's
Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the Johns Hopkins University's
Bloomberg School of Public Health, Tufts University, the University of
Michigan at Ann Arbor's School of Information, the University of Notre Dame,
and Utah State University. Ms. Margulies stressed that the meeting was
informal, and that no consortium had been created, though one may form in
the future.

Several of the colleges unveiled their first open courses at the meeting.
Among them was the Johns Hopkins University, which has two courses online so
far, and hopes to have eight more by April.

Sukon Kanchanaraksa, director of the public-health school's center for
teaching and learning with technology, says that many of the school's alumni
living in other countries already use the materials from Hopkins's courses
when they start teaching. "We're just going to make it one more step easier
for them to use our content in their teaching," he says. Officials hope to
make available 50 to 75 courses over the next several years.

James D. Yager, senior associate dean for academic affairs at the school and
professor of toxicology in the department of environmental health sciences,
says he thinks alumni and professors will support the project.

"People who come to public health are committed to really making a
difference in the lives of people," he says. "By and large academics,
especially in public health, realize that the availability of the content is
going to have a beneficial effect."

One focus of the meeting at MIT was developing strategies to keep the costs
of creating such course Web sites as low as possible.

Utah State talked about software it is building to automatically grab
material from existing university course Web sites and turn it into a form
that is more user-friendly to users outside the university. The university
has made the software open source, meaning it is free for anyone to download
and use for noncommercial purposes. Utah State won a $915,000 grant from the
Hewlett Foundation to support the software, and to assist other universities
that want to use the software.

"The idea is to make it as cheap and easy as possible" for universities to
start open-courseware projects, says David A. Wiley, assistant professor of
instructional technology at the university, which has six courses in an open
format. "We're trying to find a way to do this that can be sustained over
time without tens of millions of dollars of external funding."

Mr. Wiley's team has also built free chat-room software for open-courseware
sites that MIT now uses in some of its course sites. The software is
designed to highlight the most useful comments in an online discussion
without the use of a human moderator -- since universities do not actively
teach or support those who want to use the free materials. The software lets
anyone make a comment, and then allows users to rate how helpful each
comments is. The software then displays the most highly rated comments
first.

"It's a way for the community to reward good behavior and positive
contributions made by the group," says Mr. Wiley. "But that rewarding is
done by the group."

Getting Permission

Copyright is another challenge in running open-courseware projects, the
meeting's participants say.

Many professors regularly use charts, graphs, or other illustrations they've
culled from textbooks or other copyrighted works in slide presentations or
handouts. Although using those illustrations in a classroom is allowed under
fair-use provisions of copyright law, universities must get permission
before putting the same materials online where anyone can see them. That can
take time and money because officials must track down who owns the copyright
and often must pay a fee to post the materials. One college decided not to
convert a popular course to an open format because it included so many
copyrighted items that it would have been unmanageable.

Another issue discussed at the meeting was how to make it easy for
professors to participate in open-courseware projects.

"If a faculty member perceives that he's going to have to be hitched to a
wagon that's going to run for a long time, he's not going to do it," says
Alexander J. Hahn, a professor of mathematics at Notre Dame and director of
the university's John A. Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning. "You have
to lower the threshold of time and energy required of faculty."

Representatives from the Hewlett Foundation have worked to get a diverse
group of institutions to participate in open-courseware efforts.

Last year foundation officials approached Vivian Sinou, dean of distance and
mediated learning at Foothill College, to encourage the district to join in.
So the district proposed creating an open-courseware project that any
community college in California could participate in, and it won a $124,000
grant from the foundation for the effort.

After months of development, the college unveiled its first eight courses in
January. Ms. Sinou says her staff tried to pick the best examples in the
college district's most popular subject areas -- "the ones that the majority
of community-college students go through."

Barbara S. Illowsky, a professor of mathematics and statistics at De Anza
College, teaches one of the courses, Elementary Statistics.

She says she has already received positive feedback, both from students who
want to brush up on concepts, and from professors who want to adopt some of
the materials for their own teaching. "I've had two faculty from different
community colleges ask me about it," she says.

Did she consider trying to sell the materials to a publisher or company
instead of working with the free-courseware project? No, she says, in part
because she says she was only able to create the online materials with help
from technical-support staff at the college.

"I really felt that this course was a really combined effort of a lot of
different people from our district." And, she says, "why not educate people
everywhere?"

Eric C. Carson, a geology professor at San Jacinto College North, has
already made use of one of Foothill College's open-courseware sites in his
teaching.

He says he prefers material on open-courseware sites over that found on
professors' Web sites. "There's some level of quality control and general
oversight associated" with open courseware, he says. "If I'm just strolling
around on the Internet and come across some random professor's Web site," he
adds, "it just kind of dilutes my confidence in it, and it makes me spend a
lot more time really sitting down and looking for what I like."

Many of the proponents of open courseware argue that making materials free
online is an important way to fulfill their institutions' public-service or
outreach missions.

Mary Y. Lee, an associate provost at Tufts University and dean of
educational affairs at the university's medical school, says the university
has a tradition of being involved in free-software efforts. Tufts is working
to put 11 courses, mainly from the medical school, online. "It's a natural
extension of work we've already been doing," Ms. Lee says.

Though officials hope the materials will have educational benefit, they
stress that they are not a substitute for taking courses at the
institutions.

"We're not offering a correspondence course to become a doctor, no," says
Ms. Lee. She likened the materials to textbooks, noting that there is more
to an education than simply reading textbooks. "Most of the training in