Community Electronic and Media Library (Online or Offline)

COMMUNITY ELECTRONIC AND MEDIA LIBRARY

I salute the dedication of our EDUCATORS (in San Remigio, Antique) for their personal sacrifices in exchange for a survival pay. However they are inhibited by the lack of resources and they can only do so much with chalk and black board and the national curriculum that fall so short of the international standards.

Here is the opportunity to increase the exposure of the students to what is happening in the

field of education in the developed countries and somehow increase general knowledge.

Using simple technology, the advantages are enormous provided the community contributes in little ways to start and implement this project.

Raspberry pi

Raspberry pi is a computer module that runs on gnu/LINUX – an open-source free software as operating system (same as windows and mac). Simple to set up with basic computing skills required. This can be configured as a fully functional COMPUTER or customized as a MEDIA CENTER which can be used specifically as a presentation device. This can be scaled up to be part of a network to be used in classroom or library to do simple task as browsing the internet, word processor and spread sheets.

The significance of this setup to the project is it can be installed anywhere where it is needed such as barangay hall, community center or at home where electricity is available.

MECHANICS

There should be an organizer to lead the group in the locality and may provide assistance such as interpretation from english or technical terms. Media presentations/ topic will be determined by the organizer based on the learning needs of the group at a particular time.

With the assumption that there is no internet connection available, contents will be loaded though USB stick. Contents will be provided by volunteers/partners who have internet connection to secure the media (video instructional) from the internet. Contents can also created by volunteers as part of a community project or a school project.

  
If the internet connection is available, this project will be scaled up to access the Khan Academy: a free world-class education for anyone anywhere. That means inside the classroom or outside of class room.

Other important uses would be to provide video tutorials about anything to raise awareness about technology that happens outside the confines of our barangay or town. It could be about agricultural technology that happen in other countries, video tutorial about certain electronic project, arts and crafts, home industry – possibilities are endless.

A more advanced electronic and media library can be implemented using a traditional computer system running  on linux  and can be accessed using laptop, tablet and smart phones.

Again, as I highlighted before that the educational system that is available in our community is not good enough to teach us to be internationally competitive, this is the only way we could help our people elevate their knowledge base to keep up with the changing world around us.