[tlug] Corona and schools in Japan

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull.stephen.fw@example.com>]

Christian Horn writes:

 > The cram school I mentioned is likely to simply try out all video
 > software which exists, and will stick with the first one which
 > works reasonably well.  There is no awareness of having to pay for
 > the service with ones own data, in watching ads and so on.

That's fine for the cram schools.  The big ones will work out a way to
get kickbacks for the ad-watching, I'll bet. :-þ

 > Anybody having a deeper insight into how schools in Japan are
 > doing?

Insight, not particularly.  Here a rundown on what I know about my
city and university, though.

In Tsukuba, elementary and secondary schools opened for like two days
in the beginning of April, then closed.  They're going to stay closed
until end of May at least.  They're talking about reopening and
staying open through the summer.  I think it's a pipe dream.  At least
in my old neighborhood (where I was told that 90% of households had at
least one professor/doctor/lawyer etc!) and my new neighborhood
(eki-mae, so you can guess the income distribution) kids all have
Internet-capable devices (at least a handheld game, by junior
highschool a phone, and at home a PC or six).  I suspect that in the
more rural areas near Tsukuba-mountain and away from the train
stations that's not so true, though.  I haven't heard what, if
anything, the schools are doing besides being closed for the worst of
it (as I mentioned elsewhere, Tsukuba is a hotspot by Ibaraki
standards).

Tsukuba-dai was totally unprepared.  We've been a member of a
consortium of universities and think tanks that have had video
conferencing as long as I can remember (at least back to say 1995),
but nobody really used it in the past that I know of (forms to fill
and no beer allowed around the expensive hardware, you know).  We have
a few Nobel-class researchers (though I don't think anybody has gotten
it for work done here); folks like that might very well use it for
international conversations, but it's not a thing that ordinary profs
(let alone students or tech staff) use that I know of.

I've been having videos of one of my lecture classes recorded for
three years, but it's considered hazard duty (not that I get extra
pay, but I'm the only person on our faculty that has ever volunteered
for it, and the university was not banging on the chair's door
demanding more).  Apparently one gaijin who typically gets 5 to sign
up (!) because he lectures in English is more than enough. :-|

We postponed start of classes from 4/9 (undergrad) and 4/13 (grad) to
4/27 (both).  We got a contract with Microsoft to use Teams and Stream
for lectures by video.  I haven't figured out how to use either
properly yet; there are (as you would expect) some bizarre
interactions with Mac and I don't currently have a Linux workstation,
but I bet that's as bad.  I realized after giving up that (1) there
was an issue with window-modal popup dialogs and (2) some of the
operations that appeared to fail silently actually opened tabs in my
browser but did not raise the window containing the tabs.  Oy!

So I just uploaded PDFs of my slides and audio to my laboratory server
on Monday evening (my first class was scheduled 15:15-18:00 before
they moved to online).  I do have (low-quality) video of the lecture
as well.  I'm not sure if we're supposed to meet next Monday (probably
not, as it's a national holiday) but I'm going to shoot for an upload
of video of classes 1 and 2 by then.  I hope I'll be able to tune the
camera better for lecture 2. :-)

 > Would also others be willing to contribute time into such things?

Once I have my own responsibilities covered and actually know what I'm
doing as a practical matter ;-), yes.

Steve