The RCEF Blog 博客

Classes at Guozhuang have actually finished now and I’m now back in the safe confines of Guan Ai School in Shanxi. I do miss the students at Guozhuang though, as they really were a great bunch. Throughout the course and, I dare say, wherever and whenever I teach I try to teach students how to [...]

I’m coming to the end of my time teaching here in Guozhuang village and have taught the students many different things, including net browsing, word processing and email. But more than these specific skills I would like to think that I have also taught them how to learn for themselves, which is surely the skill [...]

Computer classes have been going on for a few days here at Guozhuang and things are going quite smoothly. We have ten students of varying ability, though none of which are very experienced. The plan is that this first class will go on to teach other villagers how to use computers, thereby increasing uptake (purchases) [...]

I’m currently in former Summer Volunteer Program 2007 site Guozhuang in Shandong delivering computer literacy training to the villagers here. The weather now is most definitely not Summery, but the eagerness of the students to learn warms my heart. A lot of the groundwork has been laid by new RCEF intern Guibin Fan (a former [...]

Recently many of you on our mailing lists will have got invitations seemingly from RCEF personnel inviting you to join social networking site Goodreads. Whilst the site does offer a legitimate service, their methods of finding new users can only be classified as spam. Allow me to explain. One of our core members within RCEF [...]

Don’t you hate it when you forget to check the blog for a while and then come back and find you’re completely out of the RCEF loop? Well, no need to fret! From now on you can get the RCEF blog delivered right to your inbox! Check it out: How did we do this magic [...]

Last week, I talked to an 8th-grade social science teacher from Staten Island, New York. She had been teaching for 25 years, but when I asked her whether she still enjoyed it, the answer was a curt no. Why not, I asked. “Because teachers are not allowed to teach anymore. I am not allowed to [...]

From January 31 to February 7 a new computer class was held for lower middle school students in the village of Yinjialin, teaching students how to use Adobe Flash. Flash is a software that allows users to create simple (or very sophisticated) animations by using traditional animation concepts such as timelines and keyframes whilst using [...]

Recently we here at IT have been putting in a lot of time “RCEF-itizing” various aspects of our web presence, bringing each separate part into the RCEF whole by dressing them up in RCEF’s distinctive colours (if matte blue and grey can be termed distinctive…). Here’s what the new gallery looks like (with new Volunteer [...]

We here at IT have implemented a new subdomain to make it just that little bit easier to get to this blog. The new URL is blog.ruralchina.org. The old URL of www.ruralchina.org/blog will still work, but it’s an extra four keystrokes! Why would you want to do that?! With all the extra time you’ve now [...]