Hieronder de reactie van COMET over de cursus!

Hello Jamuna, Fleur and Saskia!

Just thought I’d give you a brief account of the workshop at the Blind Persons’ Association in Ahmedabad where I attended the last two of the ten days. It was a great success to say the least, beyond the expectations of any of us!

The class consisted of 10 visually impaired students, 9 orthopaedically disabled, 1 hearing impaired. While they were familiar with the keyboard and word processing, most had never been on the Internet before.

The thrilling thing was that the same people uploaded their own websites on the net by the last day! You can see the websites at: http://www.webwala5.cfusion.nl/ They are still in process and not 100% complete, yet they are remarkable for a 10 day workshop.

The students took up subjects dear to them, like:

·         an imaginary “Disabled Women’s Association” help site for women with disabilities (Bharat and Hansa)

·         a site for those who have acquired disabilities, not congenital ones (Firoz and Padma)

·         a promotional site for an existing institute, Prerna Institute for Disabled Girls that could advocate their cause and raise funds (Kiran and Janki)

·         “Challenged People” (Rakesh and Reema) offers advice on all sort of services that the average disabled person may not know of—laws and government policies that apply to them, certain reservations and concessions made for disabled persons in medical and educational services, including a downloadable railway concession form for orthopaedically challenged travellers.

·         Jayendra, Ibrahim and Ramesh started producing “My Village” but they argued and split midway and Jayendra (the sole deaf student) worked on the same content to produce a second “My Village”, more to his taste. However they asked for joint authorship for both versions when uploading.

Do have a look. When you see the sites, remember, these are hand-coded directly by disabled students, 50 % of them blind, mostly with no prior knowledge of the Internet in a workshop of 10 days. Please ignore the English, it is not their first language. Marsha & Stephan were keen to give them the competence and confidence and to see their sites through to upload stage. Text and concept refinements can always be done later, after getting critical comments and with the added help of people outside the class.

Marsha & Stephan became the most popular figures on the campus and everyone was eager to be with them and to speak with them. Considering that everything was done through translation—they thought in Dutch, spoke in English, Lajpat or Swati of Comet translated this into Hindi and some students needed further translation into Gujarati (done by Swati or some other students) and the queries travelled back a similar way, this was quite a feat. They were able to cope because they were systematic and strictly so.

The lesson planning was superb, the students were at so many levels—some were at the basic level of programming, others had only used the computer as a typewriter. Yet they could engage them all and sustain their interest, creating separate tasks for the visually impaired and the others, so neatly, without anyone feeling excluded. What they had set out to do in a day, they would complete without compromising, but they would not entertain any straying. If the class had been given a certain amount of time to do the buttons on their site, and if they were now going to the next topic, but someone persisted with the art work, they would very firmly stop it and make them move on, whether their buttons were done or not.

Throughout the 10 days, Marsha & Stephan stayed focussed like this on the process of learning and applying and they could keep the students’ attention on the challenges set for them. Even their questions would be answered only if they pertained to the topic of the day. All other questions were set aside to be answered if there was time available later or personally, but not on class time. All this was done very good-humouredly, without hurting anyone’s feelings.

It must have been very tough for them and the students, but Marsha & Stephan were able to keep everyone’s spirits up. The students were always keen for more and each day the class had to be ended very deliberately and people were made to leave. I will share the feedback from the students later, once we type it up.

Physically, the Ahmedabad heat and the school food must have been very trying for Marsha & Stephan, but they kept their cool and ventured out to see the city in the evenings and even managed a trip to Udaipur over the weekend. The blind school authorities cooperated in every way, the principal himself being a trained programmer despite being visually impaired. When Marsha and Stephan were leaving, everyone in the hostel turned up to wish them goodbye, aware that they had had a unique experience, perhaps not to be repeated again.

They have left now for their travels around India, Marsha to the south and Stephan to the north. Thanks all of you for making this experiment possible! What can we do beyond this? Is it possible to take this further and how? I look forward to meeting Fleur and Saskia next week to talk about this and more.

Here attached is a report from the Gujarati newspaper Divya Bhaskar in their city section. Marsha is in the picture. The headline says “Web design course for students with multiple disabilities”. It lauds the workshop but makes a typical error—Holland has turned into Poland! Probably the editor thought that the reporter had made a mistake and changed the H to P!

Best wishes and see you soon!

Chandita