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Ghana's Windows Blackboard Teacher And His Students Have a Rewarding Outcome (qz.com)
Quartz: A lot has changed in the life of Richard Appiah Akoto in the fortnight since he posted photos of himself on Facebook drawing a Microsoft Word processing window on a blackboard with multi-colored chalk, to teach his students about computers -- which the school did not have. The photos went viral on social media and media stories like Quartz's went all around the world. Akoto, 33, is the information and communication technology (ICT) teacher at Betenase M/A Junior High School in the town of Sekyedomase, about two and half hours drive north of Ghana's second city, Kumasi. The school had no computers even though since 2011, 14 and 15-year-olds in Ghana are expected to write and pass a national exam (without which students cannot progress to high school) with ICT being one of the subjects.
The story of the school and Twitter pressure from prominent players in the African tech space drew a promise from Microsoft to "equip [Akoto] with a device from one of our partners, and access to our MCE program & free professional development resources on." To fulfill this promise, the technology giant flew Akoto to Singapore this week where he is participating in the annual Microsoft Education Exchange.
The story of the school and Twitter pressure from prominent players in the African tech space drew a promise from Microsoft to "equip [Akoto] with a device from one of our partners, and access to our MCE program & free professional development resources on." To fulfill this promise, the technology giant flew Akoto to Singapore this week where he is participating in the annual Microsoft Education Exchange.
... and I want to give you $10000!!!
Please rewrite.
Microsoft wins even in countries where you can't find a computer.
In before the racist ACs show up for this thread. It's probably already too late, except for the fact that it's Sunday morning so most of the racist ACs are probably in church right now.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Ghana our next off-shoring tech hub! All the billions of poor people to exploit around the world. And with folks giving computers to those people, we'll have ultra cheap engineering for a century.
his chalkboard diagrams looked pretty amazing. That's some serious dedication to his students. Glad they got computers. There's so many old PCs getting trashed that often just need a new drive or a few caps replaced.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Thank goodness we've swung into action and comprehensively resolved this problem! See, Trump was entirely right that foreign aid and a functioning State Department are vestigial in this day and age.
They'd be better off sending him one of these, although I'm not sure why this particular kit costs as much as it does and not $45.
https://www.adafruit.com/produ...
Is the OLPC project still active? Haven't heard anything about them in ages.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Have gnu, will travel.
Only help where you can get cred.
Teaching rote MSFT junk. Like in India, where it is some supposed "benefit" to receive free licenses and materials, it's an attempt to undermine the efforts of a society under the guise of assistance as benevolent market leader. Garbage.
If you going to bother being a racist, at least post with your ID. You fucking coward. Typical racist though. Will only say something when they are sure no one can figure out it was them. What a little bitch.
This story reeks of it.
That's nice, but donating one laptop seems...stingy? Very "thoughts and prayers"? A reasonable laptop is like $300, less for corporations, especially for a $90 billion dollar company.
...or the law of unintended consequences will take effect #TheGodsMustBeCrazy
no, most of the racist ACs are on CNN telling you right-think and right-speak.
This is the perfect story for our brave new world of microsecond attention span and viral feel-bad/tweet/feel-good mindset:
-- see touching photo
-- do something trivial and symbolic about it
-- tweet and market that symbolic action
-- extra points for a "thoughts and prayers" tweet, as those are particularly transparent (= "please think of me as a caring person" [not caring enough to actually do anything other than tweet, of course])
-- go home feeling good.
There are some very smart folks at Microsoft; I wonder how they feel about this particular charade?
Somebody just got out of church, apparently. We've been expecting you.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You're expecting? Let's hope the little brat is nothing like his father.
The drawing with chalk was actually an attempt to real-time emulate Word starting up.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I tried reading the linked article with scripting disabled because - why would you need JavaScript just to read a story on a random website? Turns out qz is one of those sites which, bizarrely, puts up an extremely blurry version of its stories’ photographs by default and then afterward replaces them with the real photos with a JavaScript call. So if you use NoScript or a similar tool, you might as well read the story using Lynx.
What on earth is qz.com trying to do with its visitors’ computers that requires JavaScript, I wonder?
#DeleteChrome
At work we throw out perfectly good laptops because they are out of warranty
I tend to keep a laptop longer than that. I replace the battery once it no longer holds a charge, but once the replacement battery no longer holds a charge, I have considered that the time to replace the laptop with one that probably has longer runtime out of the box. Is it practical to expect every PC user to, say, learn how to replace lithium ion cells in a laptop battery pack?
Including a low-resolution image directly in the HTML using a data: URI has two purposes.
Respecting viewers on capped plans If a server sends an image that the user never scrolls to, the data transmission is wasted. If a server sends an image whose resolution exceeds that of the viewer's display device, the data transmission is wasted. When viewers are on cellular or satellite Internet connections with a usage allowance of 10 GB per month or less, wasted data transmission costs these viewers real money. Making the site respond faster First meaningful paint is when all the layout and text are in place above the fold, and things won't move around as more resources load. A site with an earlier first meaningful paint feels faster to viewers. So a site might optimize for an earlier first meaningful paint up by loading basic styles and fonts before images.The blurry cover photo in question is not high res; it is 50 by 38 pixels and 1.5 kB, compared to the full-size cover photo that is 640 by 480 pixels and 72.3 kB. I admit I was wrong about it being an inline data: URI; I had remembered that technique from a faster paint tutorial and assumed it was being applied here as well. But even blurred photos compress fairly well in JPEG because most of their energy is concentrated in low-order DCT terms.
This is fantastic! I can't wait to get emails from these new princes of Ghana about the funds they are eagerly awaiting to deposit into my account after the untimely passing of my poor Uncle Francis, who died suddenly in Ghana with no heir. All they need is a few details and the deposit is on the way. Thanks Microsoft, and thank you Obama!
Anybody? Any answers? Why isn't Africa manufacturing computer components like the rest of the world is?
back when i was younger, this was exactly how we learned coding as well.
computers were way too expensive, so we got all the theory and made our programs on paper (guarding and keeping them, until, one day, perhaps, you actually got the chance of typing them into the real thing).
the thing that is different here, is that we didn't have any gui's, so it was far easier for the teacher to explain things on the black board if everything is cli based.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.