Tuesday, January 18, 2011

11th Day in India: A Book in 8 Minutes


The workshop was supposed to begin at 11:00. However, only a few students were present at that time; more started to trickle in, as they were commuting and came back from the holidays. It reminded me of my lectures that I gave this semester at LeedsMet each Thursday morning - many students usually also started then to trickle in a bit late. In this area there is definitely some room for improvement on the students' attitude... although I must say that our taxi pick-ups and all the travel arrangements during our stay had been spot-on in time.

When finally the last students come to the lecture lab around 11:20, Brian begins the lecture. The first part is about the students writing in Gujarati language on paper a short paragraph about "My Place is Gujarat", which would be intended to be a textbook for Gujarati children. Each of them has to do this within 8 Minutes, and then they read aloud and translate this paragraph into English.

Then comes my bit: Each of the students should now put down their story/paragraph online, to share it with the world. I show them how to use the page I have set up and how to get pictures from
my Flickr archive, then the start typing. In the end we have collected 23 pages, which automatically were collected on the web page: www.theriversmovement.org.uk/bi8m/ViewBook.php.

In the evening we have invited all our friends to the restaurant "Flavours", and we have a great farewell dinner.

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