February 04, 2014

 PANGAEA Newsletter for February Report on webcam in Cambodia

I am Jyoko who is an intern at PANGAEA. It is nice to meet you.
I am in newsletter this month and will be for coming months.
At the beginning of January, Yumi and Toshi went on a business
trip for a Webcam activity between YMC-viet and Cambodia.
It seemed it was quite tough trip but they got great benefit from
it. It is very impressive.Yumi gave us a report on that.

Gattsu also reported us about the interaction with Cambodia at
Kashiwanoha campus. It sounded like he had a hard time there
more than any other countries he had ever had before.
Nevertheless, it turned out that it was a great experience for him.
At the end, I introduce you a little bit about
"Summer school @ Kashiwanoha" which is the event that Yumi declared
at 10th symposium to have by having children from around the world,
which also its preparation is going just on the right track.

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Index
1. Activity Report in Vietnam and Cambodia from Yumi-san
2. Webcam activity of Gatsu@Kashiwanoha Report
3. Summer school @ Kashiwanoha
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1. Activity Report in Vietnam and Cambodia from Yumi-san
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Hello, everyone.
The year of 2014 has started. We visited the site of Vietnam
on January 3rd. Also, the 3rd academic workshop about the support
for rice farm of communication model through children was held
at the ministry of agriculture and rural development in Hanoi.

There were 11 Japanese participants at the workshop.
In addition to PANGAEA staff, the participants gathered from Kyoto
University, The University of Tokyo, Mie University, JST,
and RISTEX. From Vietnamese side, there were 25 participants
from various departments of the ministry.
Besides Riamu-san who head the project of Vinh Long Province,
there were participants from B?c Giang Province
in northern Vietnam. Professor Ishida from Kyoto University
and Director Dr. Chen from informational statistics center,
ministry of agriculture and rural development, co-chaired.
We were happy to hear that Vinh Long Province
applied for the budget by themselves from this April by YMC model
which they implemented for three years.

Last year’s agenda were Sustainability and Scalability.
Local staff started to work for themselves.
They made a good decision based on the past result.
We would like to work harder.Cambodia is situated in the upper
Mekong. There are already 550 primary schools by school
construction project started by Mr. Bernard Krisher there.

When I started to think about PANGAEA at MIT media laboratory
with Toshi, we are advised to visit Robieb, Cambodia. It took
more than 6 hours from Phnom Penh, and the car we ride rattled
along the road. It was 13 years ago that small settlement close
to the school he opened started to emerge. This time, we visited
there again. We did Webcam activity of PANGAEA between there and
UDCK of Chiba. Please click on the
"picture about webcam between Canbodia and Kashiwanoha" for that.

The children who joined the activity had serious eyes.
Also, there were many children outside the classroom who were not
able to attend the activity this time. The greeting in Khmer was
the most difficult compared with any other bases in the past.
It was hard to write their name in Khmer, too. However,
the children in Kashiwanoha wrote in a good hand. They understood
and called their name. They asked many questions as if they are
having free conversation each other, using Language grid or
Webcam tool of PANGAEA. For example, there was a question asking
what they eat. Both Japan and Cambodia answered ‘rice’!
The children in both countries sang songs.

We visited Bright Future Kids (BFK) program
(http://www.cambodiaschools.com/our-programs/bright-future-kids/)
by Krisher-san and an orphanage next to it in Phnom Penh.
Although it was not connected to the internet,
there was a PC Room in the building of BFK. It was the time
to change the internet company over there.
They told us that they used the computer only for making documents
and creating charts. When we heard that, we had to start PANGAEA
there. We automatically came out that we will start PANGAEA
this year over there.

Children in orphanage also can join. In commemoration of
the 10th anniversary, we became more and more active. We would
like to ask for your continuous support in the years to come.


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2.Webcam activity of Gatsu@Kashiwanoha Report
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Hello, everyone. I’m Gatsu from Kashiwanoha village.
We did Webcam activity with Cambodia at Kashiwanoha in January.

Children in Kashiwanoha were getting used to the Webcam activity
a little by little because they did it with Korea, Vietnam,
and Kenya. As we do this Webcam activity for the first time
with Cambodia, we asked children in Kashiwanoha whether they knew
anything about Cambodia during the circle time.
However, no children knew where it is. They didn’t know
Angkor Wat exists there and it is strewn with land mines.

We did matching game during Webcam activity.
But it does not match at all. It is different than before.
When they match red, Kashiwanoha children pick sun and
Cambodian children do Japanese national flag,
or when they match blue, Kashiwanoha children choose sky and
Cambodian children do blue pen.

Furthermore, the children looked bewildered because they found
themselves out of their element. For example,
when they match green, the children in Kashiwanoha select
green leave and Cambodian children do apple.
They used to match a lot more.In this situation, Blue team
miraculously succeeded one matching after another.
The children in other teams were genuinely impressed by that.

Why it was different than before?
I think that it is the most interesting point of Webcam.
Even the children in the same generation,
they have different stuff and feel differently about things.
In this matching game, there were many scenes
that the matching game did not succeed.

In order to deeply understand each other, we should have provided
the opportunity to explain to both of them why they chose
the answer, such as why they chose the blue pen
when they match blue. The end of a fiscal year is coming around.

We would like to make the children play nicely together, making
them recognized and accepted their samenesses and differences.


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3, Summer school @ Kashiwanoha
---------------------------------------------
Last September at a symposium, Yumi presented a concept of
"Summer school" happening at Kashiwanoha that children
from several countries gather in Kashiwanoha to have experiences
in multiple cultures and multiple languages.
At this moment, we are going to have children from Korea, Kenya
and Cambodia in Japan to play with. We can talk to all members
if speaking all languages which are Japanese, Korean, Swahili
and Khmer. However, those are not necessary for having fun
at PANGAEA. That is what PANGAEA is good at.
We had a test for games to play at summer school on February 2nd.
Details will be in The March issue as we didn’t have enough time
for the reports in our newsletter this time.

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