Arriving in Sao Paulo i trekked over to the Lumiar School to pick up my tickets on to Porto Alegre from a friend. While here i've managed to check out a school i heard was in the making several years ago. It's cool to have heard about it before, and now to have it come back and to be able to see the school in existence.
It's based on some of the same principles which are common among many alternative schools. Letting students work at their own pace and focus their energy to explore what they are interested in. Classes are voluntary in an attempt to create a space where education is something pursued out of love of learning and not edict or fear. Art plays a large role in the educational process and there is plenty of projects to channel student's energy in to engaging in activities. They have two kinds of teachers, general guides and specific subject teachers.
Where Lumiar differs from most alternative education institutions is it's commitment to democratic education. In this way it's quite similar to the Gateway Community School, where I went to elementary school in California. Students got together each week and made the rules, voted, and kept track of them. The youngest ones of course couldn't read the rules posted on the walls, but they could ask another person to read them to them.
Lumiar's in a nice house with a yard just a few blocks from the main Ave Paulista in Sao Paulo. They've not got as many laid out projects as the school i visited outside Quito, who's name is escaping me at the moment. I think that's due to their age, the school's only 2 years old, and that most of the students are young (2 to 8 years old). They got some foundation money and use a sliding scale to allow for some more diversity of class backgrounds of the students. My guess is even then, the majority of the parents probably have university educations.
I wish there were more schools like this. Which though of education as a process of creating a space for kids to explore and learn instead of a place to pour instructions and information in to their heads. They did mention that they've setup a sister school project with another school outside of the city. Kind of a twist on the whole north south sister organization concept but taking in to account the rural / urban divide which exists within the developing world as well.
For anybody reading this, Lumiar's looking for an english speaker, or other non-native Portuguese speaker to come and work for a year as a teacher at the school. They don't have money, but can i believe provide room and some of the board.
I'm on my way down to the OurMedia conference in Porto Alegre, Brazil. I'll be helping with the polimedia lab and i believe talking on a panel about community media, free software, and licenses. As part of what we're going to be printing out, is an expansion of the Recursos para Activistas en el Internet that i put together last September.
Today we got the papercrete mixing machine working. We're going to build a small cabin and agricultural building out of a mix of paper-mache, concrete, sand, and clay. The idea is you mix them together and make blocks which you can build walls out of. We're told you can use them for structural construction, but we're going to use wood to keep the roof up and just papercrete for the walls.
Gaba took some photos of our first load.
According to a story in the Sydney Morning Herald, Dr. Iyad Allawi, the newly appointed Iraqi Prime Minster killed 6 prisoners who were accused of roles in the insurgency.
The surprising thing is not that it happened, but that it got reported and made the news. This kind of thing was common with US imposed 'legitimate' leaders in Latin America, but everybody knew that they weren't to talk. I'm constantly surprised at how much gets out of Iraq. Just like the pictures of torture by US troops, it was the low level folks who didn't know better who took photos. The actual interrogators didn't take photos of the techniques they were using.
I suspect the solution to these problems is not fixing the source of the violence and abuse, but by fixing the leaks. The average american solider in Iraq probably took their lessons from the sentences handed down on the guards who were caught in photos....
Ahh it all gets more interesting....
Our batteries lasted the whole night!!!!
Last night we were downloading some large files but they weren't done when we went to bed. So as an experiment we left the laptops, satellite modem, and router on. We're trying to figure out just how much actual capacity we have in our battery system. It's rated at 460 Amp Hours, which should be more than enough to run everything we have in the house for a week without recharging. We wanted a system which would handle a lot of laptops if we ever could convince a group of techies to come out and do some sprints / coding at the cabin.
The problem was we left the batteries uncharged and disconnected for two years. Everything we've read says that you can have serious problems just by leaving the batteries uncharged for a few months. When we first plugged in the system there wasn't even enough charge to keep the charge controller working and bring in power from the solar panels. We dragged the batteries in to town and charged them some, but even then the inverter would shut off after a few hours of use due to low charge. When we tried to test the charge with a hydrometer it always said the system was completely discharged.
There was barely enough power to use, but anything was better than running the loud gas consuming generator, so we hooked the system up and used it.
A couple of weeks ago we noticed that it wasn't turning off on us anymore. Last night we just tried to push the boundaries a little more and see what we got. Surprise surprise, the power was still on in the morning. The one big question i have is this: How do you measure actual Amp-Hour capacity in a battery system?
This past week, Lenin Cali Nájera , an indymedia activist from Guayaquil, Ecuador was assassinated. I didn't know him well, we met once during the founding meeting of indymedia Guayquil when i was there to help give a training on how the indymedia network works, the activities of a local imc, and how to publish and manage the indymedia ecuador site.
He was killed during the robbery of his bicycle. While this is a common enough occurrence, gaba knows of this happening to people in Uruguay too, what happened to Lenin was sketchy. Apparently he was not near his bike when he was killed, and the robbery appears to be a cover story. Either way, Indymedia has lost an activist and it is a sad day.
Some folks in Brazil have actually put together what folks have been talking about four years, low-cost four headed linux boxes. The idea is each person has their own session, login, keyboard, mouse, and monitor. But the processing time is shared between the four computers. Older (read cheap or free) 14 inch monitors and PS/2 mice / keyboards can be used. The costs are getting a box and the right video cards. Folks are talking about how to make it work with a Mini-ITX. This means the computers can be taking from place to place in a small day pack, while the monitors and other accessories can be found locally.
I know it may not sound amazing to you, but if you've setup a ton of media labs on they fly with computers which need to cross boarders, having a plugable system. When a system is small, it's much less likely to be seized by customs.
Folks are talking about using this for a project between indymedia portland, la paz bolivia, and FreeGeek. This seems like it would be a good demo project to put up for the Polymedia Lab which will be happening at the OurMedia Converence in Porto Alegre, Brazil later this month.
A few days ago when we were driving up the mountain to the cabin we noticed there were a bunch of forest fire fighters and some helicopters taking water out of the river. Apparently there was a fire sparked three days earlier by lighting. We stopped off and asked some of the folks looking down on the fire as we were along the road. They said "it's all under control, it's only been three days and it's almost out." This made me feel better, the fire fighters are one part of the US government i don't mind paying for. Gaba was a little shocked, i guess they don't have forest fires in Uruguay.