After a busy week I left the US through the Bradley Airport in Hartford, Connecticut on Friday morning, May 30, at 7:00 am. I caught up with Linnea in the Tan Son Nhat International Airport in Ho Chi Minh City at midnight on Saturday. Her flight was an hour later than mine, and we met at the baggage claim. A taxi took us to Liberty 4 for the evening and then we were picked up in the morning to go Can Tho by van. Ho Chi Minh City is separated from Can Tho by the many branches of the Mekong River. Phuong Huynh, a recent GSLIS alumna, accompanied us for the four hour drive. Once in Can Tho, we went to the LRC and surveyed the 30 plus workstation computer lab where we would teach, and uploaded various software clients into a shared space. We then went out for a wonderful dinner hosted by Mrs. Huynh Trang.
This project is at the invitation of Mrs. Huynh Trang and Ms. Duyen Lam at the Can Tho Learning Resource Center. We are contracted to teach two weeks of IT classes to a group of IT staff and librarians working in the LRCs at the four Universities involved with the original Atlantic Philanthropies grant, that is, Can Tho, Hue, Da Nang and Thai Nguyen. Also at the workshop are IT staff and librarians from other academic libraries and from several public libraries in the central Mekong. The workshop covers many topics of interest to working librarians in Vietnam, including workstation management, the organization and design of Moodle, proxy servers, linux, VMWare, Greenstone, Drupal, Eprints, metadata, the productino of audio and visual curriculum materials, and assessment. It is an eclectic mix of topics but all by request. The 25 participants this week are enthusiastic, although with widely varying levels of IT experience. Some are working in the Can Tho LRC IT group and some have no technology training at all. The agenda taught by Linnea and me is not the way to begin one?s technology training. Next week it appears that 35 staff and librarians have signed up.
Already we are learning new technologies from the Vietnamese. Instead of Moodle, the University of Can Tho is going with Dokeos for the University learning management system (http://www.dokeos.com). Another competing system which at least one university in Vietnam has adopted is Claroline, http://www.claroline.com. The over-riding criteria for choosing one system over another for many of the universities in Vietnam is response time, and Claroline is very fast.
We are emphasizing activities and experiential approaches in our teaching, so XAMPP and localhost installations are playing a large role in the computer lab. Unfortunately, we have installed so many applications that the workstations no longer function very well. We hope that they can be revived before Monday.
The network is a struggle. There are rules set by the University of Can Tho IT group that there shall be no downloading or uploading from roughly 8:00 am to 5:00 pm, when we are attempting to run IT workshops. At our hotel, the Ninh Kieu 4, the five wireless access points are misconfigured so they constantly knock each other off the network, and any device attached to them. It is hard to work in the hotel, and one cannot download at the LRC. We are becoming analog.
The workshops have begun and the classes are taking on some momentum. There is a wiki site for the participants. Cindy brought up six practice Moodle courses which we used today. It is wonderful to see the many Simmons GSLIS alumni in Vietnam, and some are enrolled in the two week IT seminar, which makes the teaching doubly rewarding.