Year 2007-08

Computer Education

Programme for School Teachers

Given the imperative of using our scarce resource in the most efficient way to meet our objective of capacity-building in today’s knowledge society, we decided in favour of a school teacher training programme in computer literacy which would in turn benefit the under privileged students of the state run primary and secondary schools. Some letter writers for hire helped us with creating the schedule and general outcomes of this programme.

Sanjay Dutta, one of our volunteers, has developed the programme to initiate the primary teachers into the world of digital literacy. He has conducted the first residential 1 week intensive training workshop starting 12th November 2007 with the participation of 2 teachers viz., Shri Imnawati and Smt. Imnasangta from Govt. Middle School and Christian School, respectively situated in a small Nagaland village of Yimjenkimong. Each trainee was given to work on a latest Linux laptop during the week long programme. The workshop was a great success and the two teachers were highly satisfied with what they achieved during the week. The Nagaland school was also donated 2 desktop PC that run on the latest version of a Linux distro with bundles of software suitable for primary school education plus open-source office package.

The second intensive week long workshop was carried out with participation of one teachers from Dimoria School from 18th February, 2008. Dimoria School was donated 2 desk top Linux PC.

We already have access to 5 laptops and a projector to conduct workshops and hope to increase the capacity of the programme in terms of quality and increased frequency. We very much believe this programme will contribute significantly to our objectives.

Information Literacy and ICT

Workshop on ‘Information Access’

Information literacy is just not digital literacy. Our programme on ‘Information Literacy’, again aimed at capacity-building in today’s knowledge society, is targeted at the teachers and students of higher education institutions.

The first of this series of workshops was held on 30th November 2007 with participation of 58 teachers and students of higher education institutions from in and around Guwahati city at Academic Staff College of Guwahati University. The workshop was organised in association with the Council for Teacher Education, Assam Chapter.

The focus of the workshop was on how to access academic and scholarly information from the world-wide-web. Introduction to ‘Open Access’ movement which now boasts of 100s of free academic journals offering instant and free access to peer reviewed scholarly articles in various academic disciplines was received with great appreciation by the participants.

The workshop also covered the diversity of search engines and how to use different engines effectively for accessing specific scholarly information which again was an eye opener to the participants in regards to the need for effective search strategy to derive maximum but relevant information form the web.

Finally, the need and methods of critical appraisal of the web content was discussed given the web is unregulated and full of information which are not necessarily of high quality and may even be one sided representation of an issue or even frank propaganda.

We plan to build on the success of this first workshop on this theme and extend the programme to reach the maximum number of our target audience in 2008.

Click here to view the list of Seminar Participants

Open-Source Northeast

The first issue of ‘Open-Source Northeast’, our quarterly free magazine focusing on ‘Information Literacy’ and ‘Free and Open Source Software’ (FOSS), was published on 15th December 2007, India’s 60th Independence Day. The purpose of the publication is again to propagate the importance of Information Literacy and Information communication Technology (ICT). The focus on FOSS is to help readers to open up to the myriads of quality software that can help to build ICT) capacity thus facilitating information access at an affordable cost both at individual and institutional level.

Linux LPI Cerification Support Programme

We are running an ongoing support programme for young and budding ICT professional to encourage them to take Linux certification examination run by Linux Professional Institute (LPI), a vendor independent quality certification programme. We pledge to reimburse the full exam fee of the 2nd part of the LPI certification exam of any successful trainee from the Northeast India with preference to those who are from a socially disadvantaged background. In addition, we offer training material and books which can be borrowed by the trainee. We are aiming to make available a few laptops for trainee to borrow for a reasonable period for exam prepartion if they have not got their own computer to practice intensively.

Distribution of FOSS

We continually access the new versions of Linux OS of popular distros and various other FOSS applications mainly for home and office computing and educational purpose. Anybody, who need latest version of any FOSS application can approach us and we will be happy to provide the required application at no cost to the individual.

Other Initiatives

Supporting Voluntary Sector

This yet another of our ongoing programmes which assists the voluntary sector to build ICT capacity, efficiency and promote ‘good governance’ within the voluntary sector working in Northeast India. Please see the details of the programme here at www.ngo.net.in.

So far we have built quite a few websites for NGOs. In addition, we provide advice and support of the queries that we receive through the website each day.

We have planned to organise workshops in 2008 for the voluntary sector to help understand the need for ICT capacity building and promote good governance including more support activities.

North East Clinical Excellence Foundation (NECEF)

This is one of our other planned initiatives primarily to build capacity of the medical professionals of the region. The NECEF was formed on 22nd November 2007 and the details are available at www.necef.in. This new initiative is at a nascent state at the moment but we hope that the NECEF will be self sufficient and start delivering with our active facilitation.

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