re-inventing the wheel

I browse around universities websites and find all universities have e-learning features in their web. Most of them are created by in-house University’s IT team.

Hopefully, those universities share the same vision and standards on how to deliver best computer mediated learning system to their students; or even extends it to anybody who join the programs. Because I remember my programming concept lecturer said “don’t reinventing the wheel”.

If e-learning developed by every universities built by their own standards, there will be a good chance to have same functionality in many standards, many algorithms in many programming languages. It will be such a waste of ‘intelectual’ time .

Why don’t universities gather and create a forum (doesn’t need to be a physical forum, can be virtual forum – try google project ) to share, create, and develop a standard to deliver the best computer mediated learning system in Indonesia. Or building an the best e-learning system is ‘unofficial’ way to show my university is more andvanced than yours?

Let’s imagine that all Universities are working together to build a standard for e-learning system focus on high-school graduates, it will be such an efficient way because no one research, build, and solve the same issues; and Universities can do their individual effort by customize e-learning system for people in rural areas around Universities’ city. There will be more challenges for universities and good impact for communities development.

Look at Google, their commitment on solving problem and their openness become their unique value that lead them to be the most respected .com company. They engage more talents to achieve one goal: create the best search engine that works for everybody.

Having a working e-learning system for IT literate people especially Universities students for me (IMHO) is useless. Because there are facility like Google, Wikis, Specific interest groups, scientific articles, and other technologies can be easily accessed and used by Universities’ students.

But creating an e-learning applications for non IT or English or Bahasa literate community will be a challenge that need to be conquer. They are actually communities that really need technology to accelerate their learning processes. They really need a technology that work for them, not the other way around.

‘nrimo’ – javanese concept of life

nrimo, is suppose to be a great concept of life that teach us to accept everything we deserve as a compensation of what we’ve done.

An elementary school teacher in Indonesia will not be able to afford a Harley Davidson just count on their salary every month; but they will get other non-material appreciation because of their service to produce Indonesia’s next generations. If someone choose to be an elementary school teacher, they should realize this and commit to this path without compromise.

Unfortunately this concept of life become a weapon to irresponsible people to continue their economic colonialism to people in rural areas. People in rural areas are brainwashed so they will receive their destiny to be poor. Somehow, ‘nrimo’ is perceived as blindly rely your life to the destiny. If God wants you to be poor, then what ever you do, you will always be poor.People in rural villages are made to believe that being poor was their destiny by neo-colonialist people, so they can take maximum benefit out of it. These low educated people are brainwashed so they don’t have any desire to develop themselves and easily satisfied by minimum material appreciation.

It’s been happening so long that they believe that there is no other way to life their live but being poor. During Soeharto’s era, this situation was strengthened by subsidizing on every life-critical needs so these poor people didn’t see negative impact of this misdefined ‘nrimo‘.

In contrast in most cities, invasion of consumerism that lead to corruptive behavior is caused by the absent of ‘nrimo’. Many people want more than what they can afford, try to find a shortcut to get what they want, and do anything to achieve what they want.

mind my english… :) (thank you my friend)

I got a message from a good friend. He commented my writings in groups and blogs that have grammatical errors (I don’t know whether ‘minor’ mean ‘little mistakes’ or it actually ‘big mistakes’ but he had no heart to hurt me thank you Ga!).

Through this post, I want to apology for my grammar limitations. But one thing for sure, it won’t stop me to write and produce awareness among my blog readers and off course I will do my best to fix my grammar.

I’m fool, hungry, and ready to learn from every mistakes I’ve made.