The Little School That Could 

LUMUT, Malaysia: You may not find the Dindings High School, located in
the hinterland of Malaysia’s northern state of Perak, on any map, and
may pass it by without a second thought. 

But located within its wooden walls and under zinc roofs are budding
entrepreneurs of the new dot-com world. 

The 800 students of the school, ranging in ages between 13 and 17, surf
the Internet, learn Web design, digital art, networking, and programming
in C, Visual Basic, Linux and Unix as part of their daily curriculum. 

In their most recent school project, a group of 20 students received
hands-on experience in laying a one-km 10Mbps fiber-optic cable to
inter-link the school with a nearby primary school and kindergarten. The
campus-wide high-band network was probably the first of its kind in the
country that was commissioned and maintained by teenagers. The new
link-up will enable students and teachers to experiment with
classroom-to-classroom video-conferencing and other multimedia
applications. 

"By the time these students leave school, they will have enough
technical know-how and skills to configure and use switches and hubs and
manage networks," said principal Tiong Ting Ming who is the driving
force behind the rural school’s transformation. 

Eight years ago, the radical 48-year-old principal, was assigned to the
Dindings school located near the beachfront town of Lumut, where the
community’s lives are mostly centered around trading, fishing and
agriculture. 

Tiong had come with the belief that the textbook-reliant, exam-oriented
education system the school was governed by was not enough to equip his
students to participate in a globalized economy. Added to that the
less-motivated students were dropping out and he needed to stem the
tide. 

An Apple Macintosh fan, Tiong was switched on by the opportunities that
computing technology could give his young charges. "One of the hardest
things was convincing some of the more skeptical parents and
technophobic teachers that computers are necessary to give the kids
skills they could use in the real world," he said. 

When the Internet came along, it served to reinforce Tiong’s belief that
he needed to arm his students for the future knowledge workplace. "The
Internet is their future. I was convinced educating them to be
responsible Net citizens and giving them the right skill sets had to
start in school," he said. 

Persistence pays 

A chemistry graduate, Tiong set about teaching himself to repair and
upgrade old PCs and cajoled teachers and students to embrace the
Internet. Only partially supported by government and without the
cash-rich opportunities of urban schools, Tiong knocked on doors of
corporations and benefactors to win them over. 

"I visited one company in Kuala Lumpur seven times before they finally
relented and gave me the first set of PCs and Macs to get us started,"
said Tiong. 

He also travelled personally on 800-km bus journeys to-and-fro Singapore
to purchase spare parts to refurbish second-hand computers for his
students. "Computer parts are expensive in Malaysia and are much cheaper
from bargain hardware purveyors at Sim Lim Square in downtown
Singapore," he said. 

With the aid of former-students, some generous individual donors,
various companies, and the Ministry of Education, the school has since
raised over 1.8 million ringgit (US$470,000), in cash and kind, to fund
its efforts to build up a networked environment from scratch. 

Wedged between a palm oil estate and a coconut plantation, the school
now boasts a brand new three-storey block that is a hive of computing
activity. Tiong’s office is more akin to a computer retail shop’s
back-office, and is packed with an assortment of PCs, servers,
peripherals, cables and an over-laden shelf filled with phonebook-sized
technical manuals and books. 

His open-door policy, during this interview, saw busy students come in
armed with some component or another, then skitter off spouting
geekspeak. Amid the clutter in the room there is even a bed to get some
shut-eye and a fridge for snacks when his students are working on
late-night "projects." 

One of those projects, administered by Tiong, was the wiring of the
entire school including the classrooms, the library, the staff room, the
administration office and computer labs. 

The school now has over 100 PCs - 486s, Pentium 75s and Pentium MMX 166s
- that give students and teachers instant access to the Internet via a
64Kbps leased line. 

A cadre of trained students upkeep the PCs and administer the Dell
553MHz dual -processor main server, and a self-configured secondary and
backup server. 

The Red Hat Linux 6.1 powered-server houses their mail server, Apache
Web server, proxy server, newsgroups, Internet Relay Chat, and file,
print and backup server. 

‘I chose Linux because the system cost me only 200 ringgit and was
useful for my students to learn and configure," he said. 

Sowing the Net generation 

Early last year, Tiong yanked biology as a subject from the curriculum
for his Form Four (16-year-old) students and replaced it with
information technology. "Better to know the innards of a computer than
human or animal anatomy," he thought. 

He has since extended the subject school-wide, and all students have
their own individual email and attend varied courses ranging from basic
software to hardware troubleshooting and maintenance, programming, local
area networking, and structured cabling and certification. 

Students are also assigned projects by teachers to encourage them to do
research on the Internet to complement their traditional subjects. 

This year, a pioneer batch of 120 students will be taking Information
Technology as an exam subject for the year-end compulsory government
examinations, that is a prerequisite for university entrance. 

Networking giant 3Com Corp adopted Dindings as the first of 11 schools
in the country for its global NetPrep program to provide students with
network management skills. 

The first batch of 20 students are currently undergoing 160-hours of the
intensive program and will be certified by the International Association
of Communication Systems Engineers upon completion. 

Tiong believes the hard work has begun to pay off. "I used to have to
persuade parents to keep their children in school. Now I get queries
from far and wide to have their children sent here," he said. The
student population has grown steadily, in tandem with the school’s
computing firepower, from 320 to the present 800. 

He discloses that school’s passing rate in year-end exams, a government
barometer for a school’s success, is still only around 50 percent. "But
their environment is sheltered. Introducing the Internet to the students
has opened their minds tremendously and given them insights and the
motivation to be discerning and analyze information," he said. 

Tiong said his ultimate goal is to provide an environment where the "Net
culture" can thrive. He hopes students can be imprinted with a self -
and life-long learning trait that they could retain beyond school walls.

He added that teachers in the country need to bone up to adapt to the
rapidly shifting educational needs of students. "Teachers are at risk of
becoming obsolete if they do not understand nor accept that they no
longer hold a monopoly over the input their students receive. They must
become as Net-savvy as their students. You can ignore the technology,
but not the information," he said. 

Tiong is convinced the information technology skills his students
acquire will equip them for life in the real working environment and to
be more responsible with the use of the technology. It may even inspire
some to become entrepreneurs. As Tiong puts it: "You can either be a
paddy planter or rice eater. I am teaching my kids to be planters
because that’s their future ricebowls." 

By Anita Devasahayam. Published in ZDNet Asia, June 29, 2000