Kochi, India – The fishing nets along the shore of this small coastal village look like catapults, except that instead of hurling stones into the air, they slowly dip a large net into the water and back out (hopefully weighed heavily with fish).

Locals call them “Chinese” fishing nets, since that’s apparently where the design came from, and they have been used here for hundreds of years. Each net is fixed to a dock, and the system is fashioned with rope, logs, and stones–old technology that still does the job. The only upgrades are that some of them are reinforced with steel rods and capped with a motorcycle tire at one end to help cushion the impact when the net is raised.

I read in the newspaper last week that India is now considered the third most powerful country, on the rise. And some of what I saw in the past few days confirms that–fancy new shopping malls in New Delhi, an almost-completed rapid-transit system in Bangalore, and the world’s largest corporate training center, run by the software giant Infosys, in Mysore. But there are vast stretches of India that technology has done little to change. Despite the booming tech sector here, for instance, only about 7 percent of the country’s population is online at all. As it does for the fishermen here, life goes on much the same as before.

Higher education appears similarly diverse. India is home to some of the world’s best universities, and also to what are arguably the worst. There are far more qualified students than there are slots in accredited universities, leading to fierce competition. As one newly hired Infosys employee told me, “at school even a 90 percent is a substandard grade.”

It’s impossible to generalize about India, because there are many Indias, as one person here told me this week.

That seemed true as I stood on one of these docks helping to raise the fishing net. Tourists are often invited on board and shown, well, the ropes (in hopes of a small tip). I was little help, though, and we caught only one fish. If there are many Indias, it’s a slow time of year in this one.

It’s difficult to sum up this month reporting on education technology in Singapore, China, South Korea, and now India, except to say it’s complicated, and there are many more stories to tell. In some ways I’ve been struck by the similarities of how technology is used in classrooms–-Blackboard and Moodle course-management systems are common everywhere, and a small number of early adopters are experimenting with social networking or blogs in the classroom everywhere I went. Yet there are differences, sometimes subtly influenced by culture, sometimes by the quality of the surrounding infrastructure.

I’ve tried to capture some larger themes in my weekly columns this month–-on Web 2.0 in Singapore, high-tech incubators in China, distance education in South Korea, and the role of corporate-training centers in India. There’s plenty more to say, and I plan to file more stories from the trip in our Global Edition in the coming weeks.

I won’t be adding new posts here, though, as I’m soon heading home to the D.C. office. First, a few acknowledgments:

This blog and trip could not have happened without the guidance and help of The Chronicle’s correspondents in Asia–Mary Hennock, in China; David McNeill, who is based in Japan but met me in South Korea; and Shailaja Neelakantan, in India.

Also, thanks to a few kind people in the U.S. who connected me with key folks in Asia–too many for a complete list here, but they include Curtis J. Bonk, a professor of instructional systems technology at Indiana University; Yong Zhao, a professor of educational technology at Michigan State University; and Philip Tan, executive director for the U.S. operations of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Thanks also to Smita Polite, at India’s EDU magazine (which has a partnership with The Chronicle).

And thanks to everyone who sent ideas, commented, and read along. I’m off to go fishing for a few days (well, to take a short break, anyway) before heading home.

Delhi – Getting to Indira Gandhi National Open University, a series of cinderblock studios and satellite dishes set in a neighborhood where goats and dogs pick at trash piles and cows stroll through traffic, took about 200 honks of the cab horn.

This is arguably the world’s largest university, with 3.2 million students and counting. It has its own satellite in orbit to connect the campus with hundreds of TV stations across the country that broadcast its lectures. In the past few years it has moved online, which has brought the university’s content to an even broader audience – the world.

The university now claims about 45,000 students abroad through its Web-based courses, and last week it held a meeting here for virtual institutions in other countries that serve as partners in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nepal, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and other countries.

I sat down with V.N. Rajasekharan Pillai, vice-chancellor of the university, who said that the institution has built up its foreign student base without even trying, spending no money on advertising and working with virtual universities that approached it seeking help designing their curricula.  “We permit them to contextualize our courses to suit the requirements of the learners over there, and of course we arrive at a fee-sharing model,” he said, explaining the partnerships.

For most of its 25 years of operations, IGNOU, as it is known here, has delivered courses mainly via radio and television. About four years ago the university began putting full courses online, in a system called Flexilearn. Though all the course materials are free online, he said, students must pay if they want to take a test on the material and get credit for the course if they pass.

Students are diverse in age as well as nationality. Mr. Pillai showed me a newspaper article about a six-year-old who took a pottery class from the university, and described students in their 90s taking courses as well.

I asked whether he worries that the courses are too easy or are dismissed by potential employers, but he said the goal of the virtual university is to serve those who simply cannot take traditional courses.

“Millions of people work in this country, but only 5 percent have some sort of certification,” he said. “Contrast that to over 90 percent in the so-called developed countries.”

I was visiting the suburban Birla Institute of Management Technology, on a campus here that is only six years old and boasts of state-of-the art classrooms and campuswide Wi-Fi. They can’t fix the country’s iffy power grid, but the computer labs here are equipped with generators to keep students from losing their papers when the lights go out.

This week international news media are focused on whether or not India is prepared for its role as host of the Commonwealth Games, due to start in less than two weeks. Driving around the city this week involved traffic snarls made worse by construction. But many universities face challenges year-round, in terms of things like electricity, which their counterparts in the United States take for granted.

The power failed again as I was waiting to meet with Surendra Prasad, director of the Indian Institute of Technology at Delhi, one of the country’s most prestigious universities.

“I do not know why the power went out just now,” he said. Sometimes the failure is out of the university’s control, he added, but other times the institution’s own systems are to blame. “Sometimes it goes out because we are not able to maintain our infrastructure as well as we should be maintaining it. There’s a lot of room for improvement.”

The university is working to increase its enrollment capacity, trying to help meet the needs of India’s booming college-age population. Mr. Prasad spends more time than he would like, he said, on things like the campus’s water supply—and literally keeping the lights on.

Even so, many of the classrooms have the latest gear, like projectors and Internet access.

Karan Khemka, a partner in the Mumbai office of a consulting firm called Parthenon Group, which tracks education issues, said that institutions like IIT have the best resources, while many other colleges in the country are “in a state of mass disrepair.” They might have computers, but some have fundamental infrastructure needs.

“There are accredited engineering colleges that don’t have windows or tiles on the floors,” Mr. Khemka said. “I tell administrators from American colleges, ‘India sounds great, but before you consider sending your students here, visit the lavatories.’”

Seoul, South Korea—Many textbooks at Osandaewon Elementary School here are digital, and many classrooms feature a laptop on every desk. The school is part of a major e-textbook experiment run by the South Korean government, and it offers lessons for colleges looking to replace printed class materials with electronic ones.

Last week the school invited a small group of participants from the e-Learning Week 2010 conference to see the e-textbooks in action, and I was able to tag along. After a snack of tea and cookies served by mothers dressed in hanbok, we were allowed to briefly watch four different classes of students using the e-textbooks.

The classrooms looked like a TV ad for a technology company—the sixth-grade students happily clicked away on laptops, while their teachers showed video clips and PowerPoint presentations on a large touch-screen computer monitor built into the chalkboard.

In one classroom, students filled out a worksheet onscreen, and no one seemed to have any software glitches or trouble working the computers. The teachers are able to peek at any of their pupils’ screens at a master-control computer at the podium, and they can even send text messages to any student who seems off task or distracted.

Next door, students were doing a group project that blended digital video-editing with old-fashioned arts and crafts. The assignment was to create a TV weather report based on local temperatures they had to find online. Each group decorated a poster board to serve as the backdrop for its broadcast. One student acted as the weatherperson, two held the poster board, and another directed the recording, using the Webcam on the laptop. Then the students edited their video, adding in a title screen, and posted it to the password-protected class Web site so their parents could view them later.

Park Sunyoung (above), a 12-year-old who served as the on-air talent for her group, said she liked the e-textbooks and the many activities they did on the laptops. She said her favorite part was being able to find a wide range of material (from the real world) for class-research projects, rather than just what was in a fixed text.

Jo Seong Woo, her teacher, said in a presentation after class that the biggest challenge of the project has been finding or producing quality content to put in the e-textbooks or class exercises. Doing so takes time or money to secure it from other sources.

Twenty-five schools in South Korea are participating in the pilot project, which began in 2007 with 14 schools and has grown steadily.

Officials at the school said their research showed that students in mathematics classes who used digital textbooks performed better than those with traditional materials, although no numbers were given.

At a session at the e-learning conference later in the week, Jeong-Im Choi of Kwandong University gave a more critical view of the project, in a session titled “Problems and Difficulties in Self-Learning With Mathematics Digital Textbook.”

“The system is not stable yet,” she said, “so students experience many system errors or blank screens.”

Another challenge was logistical. Because the laptops were heavy and valuable, the students were not allowed to carry them home from school. Though the digital textbooks could be accessed from home computers, some students had trouble getting to the materials at home.

Another problem: The e-textbooks made it difficult for students to write out the steps they took in a math problem. And in some cases, the e-textbook’s self-guided quizzes did not give detailed feedback on why a student got a problem right or wrong.

And echoing the teacher who spoke at the demonstration, the study showed that teachers had trouble creating the multimedia content for the textbooks.

While at their best, the e-textbooks provide more interactive and engaging classroom experiences, they seem to be high-maintenance.

It was just one of the over-the-top teaching technologies shown at this week’s eLearning Week 2010 conference and trade show, which drew some 1,000 participants from elementary and secondary schools as well as higher education. The meeting was organized by four government agencies here, and it drew a sizable number of foreign attendees (conference sessions were held primarily in English and simultaneously translated into Korean and Chinese).

The whiteboards are essentially digital chalkboards with Internet access as well as the ability to write and erase. They don’t make that wince-inducing sound when you run fingernails over them, and they let professors annotate PowerPoint slides and then upload the marked-on presentation to students after class.

And just as televisions have been on a growth spurt in recent years, these devices may soon fill entire walls, at least if the tech companies have their way. (The downside, of course, is that these chalkboards can break down or become obsolete, and they’re a bit pricier than a square of green slate.)

A lot of the newest gadgets here promised interactivity—many in the form of something called “augmented reality.” One system projected an animated environment on a large flat-screen television, and—using a built-in camera—captured an image of people watching and projected them into the scene onscreen. When a teacher trying the device moved her hand through the air, an image of her arm moved on the screen, reaching for a giant animated raindrop in the virtual space. “It’s like jumping into a new world,” said a saleswoman explaining the product.

One device did more than just educate—it did windows. Well, cleaned the floors anyway.

An organization called the SY Media Robot Institute demonstrated a short, rolling robot with a screen in its chest, on which lecture videos were displayed. One of the robot’s arms had a claw to pick things up, and the other arm was a working vacuum cleaner. The feature was an afterthought, according to the salesman. But why not clean while you learn?

Seoul—Some video games sold in South Korea come stamped with a health warning: Obsessive use of online games can harm your health.

That’s one thing I learned today from a long interview with Kang-Tak Oh at South Korea’s National Information Society Agency here. Mr. Oh’s full-time job is to combat cyberaddiction, as director of the government agency’s Media Addiction Prevention Department. I don’t know of any other country that has such a government official (though I hope people will share others they know about in the comments).

South Korea has seen a few sensational incidents of Internet overuse. A couple here was arrested in March for letting their real infant starve to death while they tended to a virtual child online at a local Internet cafe.

I wondered if the government was working with colleges to combat cyberaddiction in the wake of such stories, so I came to this office near City Hall to find out.

Mr. Oh argued that the international media has sensationalized a few extreme cases, painting an unfair picture of the nation’s Netizens. People here are enthusiastic gamers, and the country is one of the most wired in the world. But he estimated that only about 1 percent of the population had a serious addiction to digital media, with maybe 8 percent exhibiting some early symptoms of trouble.

That said, the government takes the problem seriously, Mr. Oh said, and it works to keep things from advancing to an extreme level. “We’re trying to contain the flame of the danger before it will become evident,” he said.

Mr. Oh’s department runs a telephone hotline for Internet addiction with about eight counselors, and it employs a couple of others who can handle walk-in consultations. And the agency operates 16 “Internet rest camps” for children deemed to be playing too much online. At the free three-day program for children and their parents, all cellphones, laptops, video-game players, and other gadgets are confiscated.

College and university students have not been the main concern here so far. Most cases involve teenagers who are not yet in college, said Mr. Oh. “Once they go into university, the problem tends to moderate,” he added.

Still, Mr. Oh said his department was considering setting up a network of colleges and businesses to help study and better address the issue, as part of an expected increase in government support for the program.

Some scholars have debated whether the term “addiction” is accurate or helpful in talking about overuse of computers. Mr. Oh said he’s aware of the debate, and stressed that the government looks at more factors than just time spent online in determining who might need help. Among its criteria: whether the person becomes angry or irritated when kept from an online activity.

Meanwhile video-game makers, including several based in South Korea, have taken voluntary steps, like those warnings on the box.

Chronicle photograph by David McNeill

Seoul—Robots may not be that good at teaching—not yet, anyway—but at least you don’t have to do background checks on them.

Mun Sang Kim, director of the Center for Intelligent Robotics at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, knows where his robotic teachers have been. He and a team of more than 300 researchers are designing them from the ground up—attempting to give them realistic facial features, arms that let them gesture, and sensors so they keep their distance from students.

The unusual project aims to create robots that can teach English to schoolchildren here, and it is a huge undertaking. The research is supported by more than $100-million in grants, mostly from the South Korean government, and it involves more than 300 researchers, said Mr. Kim.

As an engineering achievement, they are a feat. These roughly three-foot-tall robots can roll around, recognize speech, and display facial gestures as they broadcast audio (they’re designed to help with pronunciation, among other things). But the task they’re doing is the hardest part, considering how nuanced and personal teaching is at its best.

These robots are designed to teach in one of two ways: either by leading students through preprogrammed exercises or by having a human operate them remotely using the Internet.

The country has a shortage of native-speaking English teachers, Mr. Kim said, so the robots are meant to be an improvement on local teachers who have little English skill. So rather than bring in teachers, the system will allow schools to outsource the teaching to the Phillippines, where fluent English teachers are prevalent.

“It works just like a call center,” said Mr. Kim.

Mr. Kim stressed that the machines are not meant to replace teachers—though in some cases a robot will become the main teacher in a classroom, while an assistant will be on hand to monitor student behavior and help out.

The first prototype costs about $40,000 each to build, but Mr. Kim hopes to get the costs down to $10,000 each for a new model that is now being manufactured.

Forty robots will go into service for a pilot test in December, teaching at 18 elementary schools for three months to see how well they do.

Other than providing a low-cost option in the long run, the robots are also meant to solve what Mr. Kim called a “moral problem.” The country has seen several cases in recent years of foreign teachers and professors of English abusing children.

“There are some problems and some accidents in hiring native speakers at the schools right now,” said the researcher. “For example, the immigration system in Korea is not good enough to examine whether the foreign visitors are clean or not, or they did some crime,” he added. “That’s the reason why the government thinks about such robot systems—they don’t have any such social problems, they don’t do the drugs.”

Researchers at the lab organized a demonstration of the robots with a few schoolchildren. At times the students were involved, but other times they stared off into space or looked distracted as the robot asked them questions or gave them feedback. So as teachers, these robots still need some training. (Mr. Kim insists that the model coming in December corrects some of the flaws of the prototype.)

To see highlights from the demonstration, see our video report above.

Beijing—Fun-Den Wang, an emeritus professor and retired businessman, just wants to give away course materials—specifically, to translate the free courses offered by MIT and other universities in the United States into Chinese, and make them freely available online. But the Chinese-American professor has faced obstacles at every turn, and now the open-education group he started is facing its toughest challenge yet, as it tries to stay afloat once its grant money ends a few months from now.

Mr. Wang has a plan though—but like many things in China, it takes a bit of explaining.

Back in 2003, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced its ambitious project to give away all of its course materials online, Mr. Wang decided he wanted to help bring the lecture recordings to a Chinese audience. At the time, he and his wife were already running a small scholarship program in China, so he used his contacts to help organize a meeting of Chinese university leaders, MIT officials, and representatives of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

“At that time, China was expanding their universities at a very fast rate,” he told me. “This was a window to Western education.”

The meeting led to the creation of China Open Resources for Education, or CORE, which brings together 26 colleges and universities in China that are producing free course materials. CORE also manages a group of students and other volunteers to translate courses from MIT and other Western colleges into Chinese.  

CORE won a grant from Hewlett, which has been its major source of income. But that grant is now coming to an end.

Because Mr Wang lives in America, where he is an emeritus professor at the Colorado School of Mines, he’s considered a foreigner in his native China—and that has made things difficult for the group. The professor says that the Chinese government is reluctant to give licenses to foreign NGO’s, so CORE eventually decided to register as a corporation instead.

So this organization devoted to free educational materials has found itself selling things. CORE is about to offer services around the free lectures, such as newsletters or supplementary materials that it creates. “The open courseware is free, anybody can see it, anybody can use it same as before,” said Mr. Wang, over lunch here last week. “But for the service-added activity, we’ll have to charge.”

The site will also ask visitors to pay an optional membership fee to support the organization. Mr. Wang said that the course materials offered through CORE now get about 10 million page views per year, so if even a small percentage of visitors pitch in, that might be enough to continue to pay the group’s small staff and operating costs.

What if that doesn’t work? Mr. Wang said he has a Plan B in mind. And a Plan C, if that fails. But the professor wouldn’t elaborate.

Over dessert, I asked whether he had any advice for foreign colleges hoping to set up operations in China.

“One thing is to establish long-term relationships and not expect to just come here to set up,” he said. “You need a lot of local help.”

“I had quite a few years relationship before CORE,” he added. “That’s why CORE happened.”

And even those connections are no guarantee, so it’s probably good to have a Plan B.

Beijing — Information does not want to be free. It doesn’t care, really. Despite the famous aphorism that the Internet inevitably drives openness, information might just as well want to be forgotten about — there’s plenty else for people to do in cyberspace that has nothing to do with news, politics, or activism.

That’s what I felt after visiting an Internet cafe near Peking University, a smoky basement where more than 50 people played video games, chatted with friends on instant messenger, or watched videos. None of them seemed to be blogging. Or Tweeting (that’s blocked here). Or trying to search for information on any of the subjects the Chinese government blocks on the nation’s Internet connections.

People I talked with here get it — they know they’re not privy to all the information online. “The Chinese government doesn’t want people to see some stuff,” said Ma Ning, a recent college graduate sitting in the back corner of the cafe chatting online with her friends. And she does see it as a problem. “Because China is not as democratic as you are in the U.S.,” she said. But she said she had never tried the services that let Internet users circumvent the “Great Firewall” of China. She’s too busy.

A new scholarly book on the culture of Internet cafes in China concludes that the country’s content-blocking policies are highly effective — that despite utopian views that the Internet is inherently democratic, it can be subjected to central controls. The book’s author is Helen Sun, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin, who was born in China and has been traveling back here each summer for her research.

She surveyed patrons and owners of Internet cafes in one unnamed Chinese city over a period of several years and found that information can be locked out — or at least made so much of a hassle to get that it is kept from most people’s view.

While Internet cafes are waning in popularity here now that more people have laptops, during the early years of Ms. Sun’s study they were a key access point for many Chinese college students. In an interview last month, she said that she believes hers is the first book on Chinese Internet cafes.

In most of the professor’s surveys, she found that Internet-cafe users, most of them college students, primarily checked e-mail, chatted online, or played video games. Only 19 percent in her most recent survey, conducted last year, said they participated in group discussions online. “This study finds that Internet users in Net bars are more likely to perceive and use the Internet as a means of entertainment and sociability rather than other purposes,” she writes.

Cafe patrons told her that the blocking policies did not really have an effect on them, and many even agreed with the government’s argument that the restrictions help society. “While they claimed to believe the regulations were good for the stability of society,” she writes, “they stated that those same regulations were irrelevant to their situation, perhaps because they did not think they would play any role in public affairs.”

I found the same pattern in the cafe I visited. Wang Leikai, a 24-year-old supermarket employee watching a friend play the video game Dragon Bone, said he did not feel deprived of Twitter, YouTube, or other Western sites because he could visit local versions of those sites in China that offer similar features. “I don’t think people would be interested,” he told me.

Ms. Sun argues that in some ways government officials in China can exert more control over information than when print media dominated the landscape. Officials can not only stop some content; they can also watch what articles are being read, and by whom. In fact, users of Internet cafes here have to sign in and present ID to use the computers, and the log book is handed in to authorities, said Ms. Sun.

Yet Ms. Sun’s nuanced book — which has a deceptively straightforward title, Internet Policy in China (Lexington Books) — does point out that in some cases Chinese do use the Internet for public discussion and dissent. For instance, some discussion forums on the country’s most popular search engine, Baidu, get five million posts a day.

Ms. Ning, whom I talked to in the Internet cafe, said she did regularly visit one site where people post articles from the West that are blocked in China. At least, when she has time.

Finding out how the program works and what might become of it has been a continuing riddle during my week of interviews here. Luckily I wasn’t alone in the quest — most of the week I traveled with The Chronicle’s local correspondent, Mary Hennock.

On Monday we sat down with Mark Zhao, deputy director of the department of educational technology at Peking University, who explained how the program works. Each year since 2003 the Chinese government has designated a set of courses as “excellent quality” courses. In addition to the distinction, the universities running the courses are given about $20,000 per course to put the related materials online, where they are meant to inspire other, less excellent professors. The project’s name sums up its simple goal: National Quality Course Plan.

The plan started soon after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced its OpenCourseWare project, which is working to make materials for every course there free online.

The Chinese project selected about 3,000 excellent courses from some 500 colleges and universities in China — meaning plenty of government money has poured in over the years.

But some officials in the Ministry of Education, which runs the effort, now consider it a failure, Mr. Zhao said, because many professors have refused to make the materials freely available. “In some teachers’ opinion, teaching is a very private thing,” said Mr. Zhao. “They don’t want other people to interfere with the teaching process, that’s mainly involving academic freedom.”

The project is part of a national five-year plan that expires with this calendar year, and Mr. Zhao said he and other professors worry that it will not be renewed, and that the money will no longer be available to the university to put the course materials online. When we asked when he expected a decision or how likely the outcome would be, he simply laughed. “We don’t know exactly,” he said. “Such thing is decided by the high-ranking officials — we can’t get such information.”

Maybe you can find out, he added, knowing that we were headed to a meeting with a ministry official later that day. First we took a group picture with Mr. Zhao and some of his colleagues — a custom repeated at just about every stop we made during the trip.

So in the afternoon we posed the same question to Zhang Yao Xue, director general of the Office of Academic Degrees Committee of the State Council, in his plain but spacious office in the ministry compound. Is the program going to be cut?

He laughed, noting that, although he is not in charge of the project, he is “sure the funds won’t be cut.”

“It’s the worries that the professors have because they don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “It will continue for sure.”

When pressed, he noted that a committee was still discussing the future of the program — focusing on how its policies will be improved. “We had several discussion meetings,” he said, “and we will have another several meetings, and then we will report it to our State Council.”

When will all that happen?, we asked. “Soon,” he said.

Later in the week we were introduced to a professor who is participating in all of those meetings, Han Xibin, an associate professor and vice dean of the Institute of Education at Tsinghua University.

He agreed that the program would continue, but most likely with some drastic changes.

The professor co-wrote an article critical of the National Quality Course Plan in the June issue of the British Journal of Educational Technology. It reports on an analysis of the “quality courses,” which found that more than half of those visited by the researchers were “not accessible at all,” that the resources were rarely updated, and that 57 percent offered no interactive features.

A survey of IT staff members at 88 universities in China found that the main users of the course Web sites were professors planning to apply to get the grants themselves, rather than to reform teaching, the report said.

“Many, many experts say this project is not a success,” he told us. “It’s not for students.”

Among his suggestions, which he is arguing for in the planning committee: Use the grant money that goes to the quality courses to build an IT support group for any professor who wanted help teaching with technology, and set up dedicated servers for their quality courses so they have a stable home in cyberspace.

When will a decision be made? He laughed. Despite his involvement, he is not sure either, but he said the discussions might go on past the end of the year, meaning a delay before the new program begins.

“The problem will be solved,” he concluded. “Because the universities and colleges realize we must use the IT to support the learning and teaching.” At least, that’s the directive of another government report that came out recently.

In the U.S., universities have also been taking a hard look at whether the course giveaways are worth the cost.