1998
In October, 1994, while my application for a Fulbright Research/Lecturing grant ("Bringing the Networked Future to Morocco") was pending, I addressed the Rabat conference "The First Days of the Internet in Morocco." Speaking in colloquial Moroccan Arabic, I spun a fantasy (cast as a dream) of visiting Sidi Kacem Zaouia, the town where Susan Schaefer Davis and I conducted our study of adolescence in the early 1980s, in the year 2001. Here are two brief excerpts from that talk:
Last night I tried to think of what I should say to you in just a few minutes about the Internet and the new world of computers, and I fell asleep and dreamed I was back in Sidi Kacem in the year 2001.
I found myself at the taxi stand at the lower end of town, and I walked up the main street and found the house of my friend Hamid. He's a teacher at the elementary school, where he is responsible for the fifth grade class. He is working on a lesson for his class today, writing in Arabic with a stylus on his Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). He finishes, puts the PDA in his pocket, and heads off to school to download the lesson to his desktop system connected to the school LAN.
. . .Then I was in the elementary school. There too I found the pupils all using computers. One group of three--Mjid, Suad, and Rashida--are in one corner of the room using a CD-ROM multimedia encyclopedia and linked World Wide Web connection. They use an Arabic interface and see the results in color on their screen. Now they're looking at color photographs from the manuscript museum in Cairo, Egypt. They have been studying miniature paintings done over 500 years ago in Herat, Iran, by the painter Behzad; and they are comparing his technique with that of El-Greco in a collection of paintings from the Prado, in Madrid.
Off in one corner by himself is Sa`id, who's just turning eleven. He's finished his lessons and is using the school's laptop computer, like this (holds up Mac Powerbook). He's been thinking about the coming month of Ramadan -- maybe it's time to try fasting. He's running a HyperCard application that allows him to read the Chapter of Power in Arabic on the screen and to hear it chanted on headphones.
I ended my talk* with some comments about both the extraordinary potential of locally- accessible, multi-lingual resources on the Internet for leveling the playing-field for the children of the next generation, and the unlikelihood that these new technologies will actually reach the Sidi Kacems of this world without extraordinary efforts. I propose here such an extraordinary effort, cast as a case study of personal information system and Internet use by the Moroccan elementary-school teacher mentioned in my fantasy.
This semi-rural town of 18000 people is located in an agricultural area of central Morocco, near a larger marketing town it serves as a lower-class bedroom community. It has rudimentary facilities -- an elementary and a middle school, post office, police outpost -- but retains the appearance of a crowded semi-rural town. Many residents now have running water and sewer hookups, and both television and satellite dishes have become common. Young people are therefore routinely exposed both to public education at least at the elementary level (with secondary students taking courses in literary Arabic, French, and English) and to a variety of "modern" media from the Middle East, Europe, the US (cf. Davis & Davis, 1995). Many families have relatives in larger Moroccan cities (Morocco has shifted from an 80% rural to a 50% urban society in the past 30 years) and in Europe, and young people now have heard about a new world of computers and the Internet.
The Province of Sidi Kacem, but not the town of Zaouia, is one of five included in a large US Agency for International Development project, "Moroccan Education for Girls" (MEG), designed to identify and address factors accounting for high continued female illiteracy and low school attendance in rural Morocco. I hope to assess the impact of my one teacher's use of computer technology in light of the more general findings of MEG as these become available.
Hamid
Hamid E., 40 years of age, is a life-long resident of Zaouia, the community in which Susan Schaefer Davis and I have done most of our Moroccan ethnographic work. He served as our research assistant in 1982, just prior to taking his first teaching job. Since 1982 he has taught in the local elementary school. He has taught grades 2, 4, and 5. He is married and has three children. He has had use of an MS-DOS computer since 1995. During this time he has become proficient, teaching himself to navigate DOS, running a variety of programs, and performing minor repairs. On his own initiative and expense he completed a night-school course in electronics and elementary computing. He has a very good command of basic written and spoken English.
Hamid is an energetic and ambitious teacher, and we have talked often and at length over the years about the difficulties and rewards of teaching in semi-rural Morocco. He develops detailed lesson plans, collects and displays examples of student work, and has just initiated a school "newsletter" project with samples of student work from each of his classes. He would do all of this on computer if he had a system capable of supporting Arabic word-processing, graphics, and printing. Three classes of children will benefit from the placement of this one computing system with their teacher. On my recent visit to Morocco, I spent several hours showing Hamid Windows 95 and a hypermedia Qur'an on CD. He immediately saw both the potential of such a tool for his teaching and for the development of his own children's understanding -- even as he recognized the impossibility of affording such a system on his teacher's salary.
Hamid's family situation provides a powerful additional stimulus to his interest in computing, and a compelling reason for undertaking this study now. All three of his children will become proficient with the computer and Net over the next several years. The oldest is already a proficient Tetris player, loves problem-solving games, and is fascinated by word-processing. Hamid's wife is a high-school-educated woman with a strong commitment to the education of her children. She will become proficient in the Arabic Windows operating system -- especially given the motivation of her children's interest and the availability of the Qur'an software. I expect to follow the whole family's progress via email.
After an initial setup period (Spring, 1998 ) I expect to work intensively with Hamid (via email and telephone) throughout the one-year period of the supported Internet access to aid his efforts to become proficient with the new equipment and software, to instruct the other members of his family, and to design and complete projects for his students.
I will record my email correspondence with Hamid Elasri during this project, and I expect to maintain a Web page in which the progress of the study is recorded and discussed in a collaborative way by the two of us. After a year I hope to write up the results for a journal concerned with technology and education, and to present my findings at professional meetings.
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Toshiba Satellite Pro 440CDT Laptop Computer |
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33/56 kbps PCMCIA modem |
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HP 672C Color Deskjet Printer |
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Arabic Office 97 Upgrade |
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Internet Service (one-year subscription) |
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Sakhr CD Hypermedia Qur'an |
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Total |
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Revised May 25, 2006: links updated.