February 27 - The Way Things Work (C&W and Tivoli Gardens)

As usual, Wayne is skipping the business parts of the day and blogging about the fun stuff: Tivoli Gardens High School. As a nod to our readers who are trying to follow the big picture progress of the project (and because it was the part of the day where I was most useful), I'm going to start with the morning activities. This morning we went to Cable & Wireless (the corporate building, not the phone office) to meet again with Camille Facey and others. We brought our skyServer with us to turn over to them. The meeting further encouraged me to believe that they are really on board with the project. Wayne Cross, their webmaster, attended the meeting along with his superior David McBean, whose exact position I'm not sure of. Wayne was, unsurprisingly, very knowledgeable about what would be necessary to host the server and eager to get going on it quickly. We discussed all the possible roadblocks and Jesse, skyBuilders's IT person, will help sort out the details that I couldn't answer for. Although they were happy to take the server and get it up and running, it was clear that the server was not top of the line. (This was no surprise, as it was a refurbished machine put together for donation by skyBuilders.) Giving us a little taste of how smoothly things can run at the top, David called up a friend at Dell here in Jamaica and left a message on his machine ending with something like "Oh, by the way, we need a server donated for a good schools project." Alveta, the C&W lawyer assigned to manage this project on their end asked me to give them a wish list of what we would possibly imagine wanting (from a technical perspective) from C&W for the project. It is great to have the big guys on your side sometimes.

During the meeting my phone rang and I didn't answer. When we got outside I listened to the message and found that it was C&W (the phone office, not the corporate office) calling because they were at our apartment to install our DSL. Of course we weren't there. He left an incomprehensible call-back number which was different from the number my phone showed me, so I called the number on the phone. I got Craig, the installation guy who had left the message earlier. I explained what had happened and he told me the other number to call and the name of the person I would speak to. This other person, he explained, would schedule the time when Craig would come back to our apartment. I asked Craig if I could schedule directly with him. He paused and then in a sort of surprised voice said yes. We picked a time tomorrow that worked for both of us. Bypassing the system seemed quite a novelty to him. Things work differently at the phone office than at the corporate office.

In the afternoon we made our first work visit to Tivoli Gardens High School. With a little bit of struggle we managed to get FruityLoops installed on the computers in their very nice and well-staffed computer lab. Wayne got his demo up on the their projector. We were supposed to have about 10 students starting at 1pm. The beginning of the actual class seemed quite disorganized with so many students from different classes in the lab. After a bit, Wayne just started playing some music on FruityLoops using a pretty good set of speakers they'd set up in the lab. Within minutes all but a few of the many kids in the lab had crowded around to watch and participate. They were full of questions and very excited to hear Wayne rap a little bit. They rushed the computers when they got their chance. Predictably, various things didn't work. Some computers didn't have any sound. On others it was hard to hear through the headphones they had. But quite a few students, either in a group with speakers or alone with headsets, really got into making some music. At 2:30 school was over, but they didn't move from their computers.

At around 2:45, while they were working and Wayne was helping them, I gave a workshop to Maxine on how to manage websites in skyBuilders. She runs the Tivoli Gardens computer lab as well as the lab at the Denham Town community center and will be the main contact at each place. She was a quick study and I was able to show her many of the most important features of skyBuilders in the 45 minutes we had to go over it. I expect that both the Tivoli Gardens site (which will be coming online soon at tivoli-gardens.org) and the Denham Town site (which was online at denham-town.org until a recent skyServer crash at InfoChannel and will be coming back up on another server soon) will soon have quite a bit of good content on them.

If you do the math you'll realize that we were there until 3:30. At that point Maxine had to go to a class she is taking, so she told the students to close up their work in FruityLoops. Almost all of them were still going strong at that point and who knows how much longer they would have liked to stay. Tivoli Gardens High School is a huge high school in one of the toughest and poorest parts of the city. For the most part these are tough kids who are anything but disposed to trust or listen to someone like Wayne coming into their classroom. As we were leaving they all wanted to talk to him, to know when he was coming back, to find out where they could get his music, to ask questions about FruityLoops, to remind us there was no school next Thursday so we couldn't come then, or just to say goodbye. It continues to awe me to see Wayne get through to them in a way they can understand and respect. He makes it look easy, but he assures me it took a lot of work to get to where he is. I can believe it. Just when you think you know how things work, you find someone who can show you it doesn't have to be that way at all.

Home again and I'm tired. With meetings and teaching and housework and webwork and preparation for meetings it seems like there is always work to do. It's good that the work itself is good and that can be so fulfilling. Sometimes we have to remind each other to take a break.