Dine College Trip Report

1
Dine College Trip Report

• Richard Anderson

2
Dine College

• 2 year Tribal College
• Established 1968 as Navajo Community College
• 7 sites,
• Main campuses
• Tsaile, AZ
• Shiprock, NM
• Current enrollment 1,830 students

3
(No Transcript)
4
Navajo Nation

• 26,000 square miles
• Population (2000), 175,000
• Long walk, 1863
• Indian Removal Act

5
Navajo Nation
6
Tsaile, AZ
7
Canyon de Chelly
8
Spider Rock
9
Computer Science Program

• One Computer Science Instructor
• BA Math, MS CS, PhD Philosophy
• Lots of experience teaching at Tribal Colleges
• Courses
• CS1, CS2
• Reges and Stepp text
• Hardware
• Networking
• Operating Systems
• Web Design
• Discrete Math

10
Hardware Course
11
MIT Summer Course

• 5-week course on refurbishing computers
• Rebuilt computers and made them available to the
  community
• Visiting instructor from MIT

12
Dine Multimedia Project
13
Talking books
14
UW ICTD Pitch

• Met with students from CS courses
• Presented a short overview of UW Developing World
  Projects
• Used CAM as an example
• Showed the CAM video from website
• Mentioned medical protocols and digital study hall

15
Senior Capstone Model (CSE 477)

• Previous years intensive quarter long project
  course
• This year Developing World Technology
• Three quarter sequence
• Background seminar
• Design studio
• Intensive quarter long project course
• Goal partner with student project groups at
  Heritage University

16
Project Ideas (from students)

• Animal identification and tracing
• Erosion control
• Plant identification
• Artisan
• Provenance
• Connection of supplier to consumer
• Recycling
• Land records
• Diet monitoring

17
Animal Tracing

• Cows, Horses, Sheep
• Problems of keeping track of ownership
• Identification of brands
• Reporting of locations
• Determining ownership of unbranded locations

18
Erosion

• Water is the critical resource
• Student comment on fence in the air

19
Recycling

• Student comment on the need for the reservation
  to set up recycling
• Issue identified of illegal dumping
• Identifying
• Recording
• Publicizing

20
Land records

• Everyone is involved in a land dispute
• Mention of existing services based on GPS

21
Artists

• Traditional arts
• High value
• High mark up
• Competition with Mexican, Thai, Belgian,
  Pakistani imports
• Opportunities
• Connect consumers/producers
• Support authenticity
• Establish value
• Issues
• Artists often traditional, Navajo speaking
• Cultural concerns
• Business instructor found lack of interests in
  using eBay for marketing

22
Plant identification

• One student had worked on a summer project doing
  a census of invasive species
• Data recording/identification done by hand

23
Diet monitoring

• Diabetes problem mentioned

24
Indian cultural/language projects

• These did not come up from the students
• Very sensitive area

25
Engineering Deployment Kits

• Computing technologies widely applicable in
  developing world
• Successful deployment requires deep understanding
  of local context
• Basic technologies applicable in many different
  contexts
• Design technology to support local modification /
  deployment

26
Potential EDKs

• CAM
• Digital StudyHall
• DigitalStar
• PDA support for decision trees

27
Partnerships with Tribal Colleges

• Strong interest in having technology applied
• We are a developing nation
• Problem areas are highly relevant to ICTD
• Likely benefits to UW and TCs
• But not likely to yield a large number of
  transfer students to UW
• Partnerships
• Need administrative support and faculty / student
  connections
• Possible approach to work with AIHEC

28
Possible next steps with Dine

• Link to student project groups
• Teach an Introductory Programming Class over the
  summer (aimed at transfer students)
• Teach a Developing World Technology seminar at
  Dine over the summer