Teaching Begins at University of Can Tho LRC
After a delicious buffet breakfast, consisting of fresh fruit (small bananas, melon, & other local Can Tho varieties) vermicelli noodles with veggies, chilled soya milk with ice, and a petite gyoza dumpling, at the hotel on our first morning in Can Tho, we were picked up by a taxi to head to the university. We arrived at 7:30am and even at that early time, there was a massive line of students waiting to get into the library right when it opens. This is not something I have ever seen back in the States and just really emphasizes how heavily the library, and especially the Learning Resource Center, are used. This was wonderful. They were many signs welcoming people to our Emerging Technologies in Libraries Workshop in the LRC, which was very neat to see.
The class has 30 participants from a variety of public and academic libraries across Viet Nam as well as IT and LRC staff from Can Tho, so it is a great mix of people. Some have robust IT setups while others are just getting started. We have 4 translators from the university and their level of english proficiency is just astounding. It was not much of an adjustment to adapt to this new way of teaching that involves stopping after a few sentences in order for the material to be relayed to the students by the translators.
We covered the goals and outcomes for the two weeks, the structure of the class involving lectures and hands-on activities, and then I talked about workstation security and management using the Tech Lab as a real-life example, which worked quite well. Students were engaged and their introductions told us that they were coming from a lot of smaller public workstation spaces (under 40 computers) and some that did not have a space to call their own so the Tech Lab made sense to talk about. I brought up the future plans including the dual and tri-boot summer upgrades and it generated a 45-minute discussion with lots of very relevant and thoughtful questions from the participants. The structure of the course involves a 2.5 hour lunch break at 11am where the participants go home to eat with their families and nap, while Terry and I eat lunch and prep for the afternoon sessions. I told my mother about the daily lunch with family and she promptly replied, laced with italian guilt, “that must be nice.”
We headed into the computer lab after lunch for some hands-on activities involving installing and configuring imaging, antivirus, and anti-spyware software. We ended the day with a group activity where the participants were separated into public, academic, and Can Tho (since they have the largest contingency of attendees) libraries and they worked out designing an ideal pubic workstation space for their individual audiences. It turned into a very interesting discussion and was a nice end to the day.
We headed back to the hotel and then to the Mekong restaurant which came highly recommended by the gentleman at our hotel’s front desk, and I can understand why. It is traditional Vietnamese cuisine and is slightly geared to foreigners but is not a tourist trap in the least. We got fresh spring rolls with shrimp and fried vegetarian spring rolls to start and then shared river fish in a clay pot and tofu with veggies, everything was excellent.
We got back to the hotel to do a little prep for the next day of teaching, but quickly discovered the trying nature of the wireless network. It is deceiving since it will look like it is a very strong signal, you will join, and within a minute or so, you are booted off. I had hoped to be able to use the evenings to finalize materials for the next day of teaching but this little snag made that a bit tricky. There is a slightly better signal in the hotel lobby but not by much. We set up shop literally a few feet from the wireless access point and the booting offline continued but slightly less frequently. This was a bit of an unexpected wrench in the plan but we deal with that all the time in the world of IT, so we just shifted gears a bit and worked things out.
A quick funny story, there is a wicker basket in my hotel room and I was using it to store laundry with the plan to take care of the clothes later in the week. When I got back to my room from the first day of teaching, everything from the basket had vanished. For some reason, I assumed it had all been thrown out and called the front desk to verify my fears. They sent someone upstairs who opened my closet and there was everything neatly hanging-up and freshly laundered, all for a whopping bill of $54,000 dong (~$3 US). I want to take the wicker basket back to Boston and try it out in my apartment.
More soon.
June 6th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Sounds like things are going really well! And all that food is making me hungry. Good thing it’s snack time here anyway.
Glad to see you are having such a great time! Yay!