March 28 - Interviews about the Project

A few days ago Wayne and I received email from Isabel Neto and Colin McClay of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. They are developing an online discussion series on Internet & Development. They are working on the module of the discussion series that deals with learning. They want to use our project as one of their case studies, so they asked us to perform some brief interviews of people close to our project here in Kingston. They sent us a few questions to use as guidelines in our interviewing. We tried to follow the general idea of the questions but we were concerned about posing them exactly as they were given to us. It seemed that the questions led toward positive answers quite a bit. Given the tendency of the students and teachers here (and probably everywhere) to tell us what we want to hear, we were worried that we wouldn't get a truthful look at their experience with the questions. You can evaluate for yourself how we did.

First we had Wayne interview me on a couple of topics on which our answers would be relevant, particularly evaluation and the suitability of this project for Jamaica as opposed to other countries. We also added a question about the challenges that our project has faced. In fact, Isabel has asked that we ask a Jamaican administrator about the suitability of the project for Jamaica. You'll see from Wayne's interview of me that we've had quite a lot of difficulty involving people at the administrator level, so we don't actually have an administrator to ask. Listen to Wayne inteviewing me: part 1, part 2.

Howard Campbell, the head of IT at St. Andrew High School for Girls, picked us up at 9:45am to take us to school. We thought we'd interview him on the ride home but just in the course of other discussion on the way to school, he volunteered opinions on a few of the topics that Isabel and Colin has asked about. After feeling unsure about the quality of answers our interviews might elicit, it was nice to have Howard volunteer related opinions without even being asked--in particular, the ability of the program to engage non-traditional learners, and the strong interest of the student population in music. Listen to Howard's comments.

When class began, we had to wait a few minutes for the computer speakers to arrive. We had been planning on pulling a couple of students out for a minute or two for a 1-on-1 interview during the class time, but since we had a few minutes, we did a group discussion with the class. It is hard to get criticism out of them, but it is worth noting that although all of them were quite enthusiastic in the discussion, there were about 3 girls who just never settled down to work after we got the speakers. Here is what the St. Andrew students had to say about the program.

When our program started at St. Andrew, Mr. Campbell allowed the students in his IT class to choose whether to remain in the regular class on Fridays or whether to do the digital music program. After class today we got a chance to ask a couple of students about their choice to remain in the regular IT class rather than to do the music program. Here are their responses.

Finally, on the way home we got to ask Howard a few more questions. Here is our conversation with him.

Back at home again, Arthur McKenley of the Denham Town Community Center came over for another lesson on how to edit the Denham Town website. We got him to answer a couple of questions too. Here is our conversation with him.