Teaching Computer Lit. in Developing Countries?

Pro777 asks: "I am a US Peace Corps volunteer currently teaching 'Computer Studies' at a High School in the Republic of Samoa, in the South Pacific. Anyways, myself and other IT teachers are having a difficult time finding a good digital textbook to teach basic skills such as basic computer architecture, word processing, and using spreadsheets. Real textbooks are cost prohibitive, and a lot of what is found is too high level for our students. Any suggestions?"

Here first.

[Rod Beauvex]

We need to teach computer literacy in America first, then move on to other countries.

Re:Here first.

[srobert]

Perhaps Europe or India have something like a Peace Corps that could come here and teach it to us.

MIT Open Courseware

[DisasterDoctor]

MIT is putting all of its course materials online.

There should be plenty of stuff in there to cull for your introductory courses.

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

Re:MIT Open Courseware

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you kidding? He's asking for a tutorial on how to turn on a computer and open a new Word document. Do you see anything in the MIT EECS curriculum that looks remotely like that? Don't you think that's the sort of thing MIT freshmen are expected to know already?!?

Anyway, to throw in something positive with my empty criticism -- this [fgcu.edu] looks like a potentially helpful site. And if you Lunix weirdos want to complain about the Microsoft focus, well, you have vi so write your own.

Teach concepts and stick with open formats

[SgtChaireBourne]

You mean "how to turn on a computer and open a new word processing document." Teaching the concepts will make the students able to adapt to many computing environments.

Do you see anything in the MIT EECS curriculum that looks remotely like that?

Yes. There is an AbiWord Tutorial [mit.edu] at MIT.

Also, there are several pages of tutorials for OpenOffice.org [openoffice-support.net]

AbiWord and OpenOffice.org both support the OpenDocument (XML) format as well as their own XML-based formats. OpenDocument is being favored by the EU and

Wiki wiki!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], Wikibooks [wikibooks.org], plus various wikis and websites all over the web for more detailed texts, like TLDP [tldp.org], Internet FAQ Archives [faqs.org] etc. Good luck!

Return Question

[FidelCatsro]

An important factor is , What machine are avaliable to you , if any.
A great deal of teaching revolves around commen referance .
You can find the best text in the world , but if it requires you use an IBM PC and your stuck with a bunch of colico computers then it wont be much use to your

An Excellent Text

[flamesrock]

How to think like a computer scientist [ibiblio.org]

Dive into Python [diveintopython.org]

And have you considered illegitimately downloading texts off of filesharing networks? I don't anyone will really care...

Make your own, then

[ChibiOne]

What about writing your own stuff? Seriously, you could pick a couple of good basic documents about what you want to teach as a base for new ones. Yyou could even write from scratchthe one about computer architecture.

Re:Make your own, then

[4of12]

Roll your own is a great idea.

Taken one step further, as long as you have a {black,white}board in front of the class, why not use that to support your lectures and have the students copy down notes?

Young students in developing nations are probably more receptive to personal, face-to-face instruction anyway (as are most of us). I used to avoid textbooks as much as possible when I was younger, relying instead on attention to what the teacher said and some amount of innate intelligence.

Also, your students w

Re:Make your own, then

[Pro777]

Myself and my fellow volunteers have written some of this stuff already, simply out of necessity.I just want to make it thorough as possible (i.e good pictures, diagrams, etc.),= and I'm guessing that there are others out there with the same problem that I have.

Trying to teach computer literacy to high school students is tricky...on ancient computers in a place where both internet access and electricity are ridiculously expensive... Many of my students had never touched a computer before my class.

Many of

Project Gutenberg

[tomarseneault]

They are a free on line book supplier. I did a quick scan of their offerings and did not find very much but their list keeps growing and you might have better luck. http://www.promo.net/pg/

try wikibooks

[reverius]

I think this is the perfect (and intended) use for Wikibooks [wikibooks.org].

One book that might be useful: Windows XP for Beginners [wikibooks.org].

Build a notebook out of published web materials

[xanthan]

There are a lot of web sites that have sections for teaching beginners how to do many of the basics that you speak of. If you're using Microsoft software, be sure to check out the Office section of their web site -- there are a wealth of materials there. Assuming you have a small enough class, collecting articles based on the course outline and putting them into a series of PDFs that can be easily shared and printed amongst your students should provide the beginners level material.

AFAIK, there isn't anything free in the formal courseware world for the kind of content you are looking for. The market for beginners books, guides, and lessons is staggering -- you'll be pressed to find a good quality beginners coursebook that doesn't cost a pretty penny. The short web articles on the other hand are plentiful and should hopefully be enough to get you and your students going.

Best of luck.

Re:Build a notebook out of published web materials

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

AFAIK, there isn't anything free in the formal courseware world for the kind of content you are looking for. The market for beginners books, guides, and lessons is staggering -- you'll be pressed to find a good quality beginners coursebook that doesn't cost a pretty penny.

On the other hand, what is the current state of copyright law in Samoa?
It may be perfectly legal for you to purchase one copy and then make a bunch of xeroxed handouts for your students as course material.

That assumes that you have acce

Re:Build a notebook out of published web materials

[xanthan]

Depends which Samoa the author is referring to. American Samoa (the eastern islands) are a US Territory. The independant state of Samoa has its own government, but given its proximity to the American Samoa and its New Zealand roots, I would guess that it has a similar copyright law.

A more accurate question is whether it is observed and/or enforced. For a small classroom, I doubt either is an issue.

LET'S START ONE

[dj_virto]

I've thought about this too. Here in the US, I teach introduction to computers at the community college level. Textbooks have reached the point that they cost more than the tuition for the class! So, you could more than halve the cost of an introduction to computers class for low income people here, not to memtion the benefits for people in your situation.

Sure, there are many partial haphazard resources out there already, but as far as I've seen, no coherent, organised single source textbook for us to gath

Re:LET'S START ONE

[xanthan]

Updates would be important, so we'd have to organise a way to continually maintain the digital textbook, keeping it current, while keeping in mind the teachability of the text..

Being in the middle of a 4th edition update of my own book on Linux [amazon.com], I can't begin to describe the amount of work needed to maintain a full book. Giving a single chapter sufficient depth to make it useful and interesting is typically about 20-30 hours of work depending on how efficient of a writer you are. Keeping a text up to date

That's easy

[HungWeiLo]

Very first thing - teach the fundamentals of safe pointers. Then right-clicking should come naturally after that.

Seriously, if it's just basic computer skills, you can very easily write your own. Make it in a tutorial/hands-on style which the locals can use in real-life applications (keeping track of hotel revenues from tourists, etc.)

GCF Global Learning's free tutorials

[sohojim]

I work with nonprofit computer training programs in the US, and I've always been impressed by GCF Global Learning's free computing tutorials, at www.gcflearnfree.org [gcflearnfree.org].

Originally funded by the local Goodwill in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, GCF offers instructor-led online classes, as well as free training materials, for all sorts of classes, from "Computer Basics" to "Access 2002." The best part is that they also offer free materials for OpenOffice.org software!

The UN-funded International Open Source Network has an excellent "Intro to Linux Desktop" course at http://www.iosn.net/training/end-user-manual/ [iosn.net]. That page also has links to other free software training materials.

You should totally write up a detailed account of what you're doing and submit it as a Slashdot story -- I'd be interested to hear more. Or do you have a (shudder) blog?

Good luck!

here's some

[zogger]

fix any spaces slashcode inserts

http://www.linux-tutorial.info/modules.php?name = Tu torial&pageid=224

http://www.internet4classrooms.com/on-line2.htm

http://www.w3schools.com/html/

http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/explore/prog ra mming.htm

http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/

http://oooauthors.org/groups/authors/userguide2/ ca lc/

http://spreadsheets.about.com/

Also check out both gnome and kde documentation for running their various applications, should be enough there to get most any ki

Make them learn

[bluGill]

Teach them to learn, not teach them to use one particular program. Sames as the old teach a man to fish thing. Give them a computer, and tell them they must write a paper with it. Mark all the spelling mistakes up and then write a note: next time use the spell checker. They will learn, and in the process learn to find what the rest of the program can do.

Of course it is much easier to teach someone one program than to teach them to think. In the end though thinkers are what the world needs.

Buy in South Asia

[dodobh]

There are specially printed versions of most books for sale in South Asia only (India and neighbouring countries). These are typically for about 1/10th to 1/4th of the cost of the US version.

If you ask the publishers nicely, they may print low priced versions for your region as well.

If you have a specific list of books, let me know in reply to this and I'll quote pricing here for you.
Shipping is about 50 INR/kg (that is just over a dollar) depending on the distance to you.

My Experience

[SmittyT]

For 3.5 years I taught ICT in Mongolia as a VSO then a UNV. In regards to books, check with the Asia Foundation in Samoa. They have a books for Asia program which distributes brand new books. Here in Mongolia they have a lot of IT books available that no one ever takes or uses.
However, these books can be useless depending on the level of English of your students. We had all kinds of books Cisco Press sent us for free however most of the students could not understand them as the english was too advanced.