School: Hualien Mlips Elementary School
    Hualien, Taiwan, Taiwan

13 students, ages 11-13 worked together to complete this CyberFair project on February 10, 2003. They have participated in CyberFair in the following year(s): 2002

Classes and Teachers: Wan-Nan Lin; Chune-Fang Chang, Zhen-Lan Liu

E-Mail contact:

Our School's Web Site: http:// http://www.mlips.hlc.edu.tw/

1. Description of Our Community

Hualien, the place that we live, is the county with the highest proportion of the aboriginals in Taiwan, and is surrounded by the circumstance full of art and culture flavor. Our school located in the downtown of the city still has many students from indigenous families. However, not many students know well the meaning and content of aboriginal culture. In fact, the aboriginals have showed many their special talents and their achievements in art and music fields. With the impacts from civilization, these glorious parts in their culture had been forgotten gradually and even lost in our society. Therefore, this project will introduce the Atayal weaving to discover the beauty of weaving art in our aboriginal history.

2. Summary of Our Project

As coming to Hualien, many tourists were attracted by the weaving works. Weaving is one of the earliest art in the indigenous history. Among the ten tribes of Taiwan aborigines, Atayal tribe is famous for the weaving art. Atayal weaving and plaiting techniques can be distinctly classified into male and female working. The male working includes bamboo and rattan plaiting. The female working means cloth weaving. For a long time, these techniques, especially as for cloth weaving, had played the important roles in the Atayal art history. Under the impacts of civilization, this weaving art is facing the crisis of fadeout. This project plans to let people find out the Atayal history of cloth weaving, the material, the processes of leaning, and the culture inheritance, by exploring the cloth weaving in the Atayal art. In addition, with the high unemployment among the aboriginals in Taiwan, the project may become a way to know this weaving culture, and let the aboriginals, who want to have the weaving technique as the second skill, gain their opportunities to learn.

3. Our Computer and Internet Access

A. Percentage of students using the Internet at home:21-50%

B. Number of workstations with Internet access in the classroom:1

C. Connection speed used in the classroom:dedicated connection

D. Number of years our classroom has been connected to the Internet:4-6

E. Additional comments concerning your computer and/or Internet access (Optional):

Our school uses one line of ADSL system as the current access to the internet, with the upload speed at 512K and the download at 3MB. One LINUX sever is in use. As for using computer at home, the students and teachers often use ADSL and dialer setting to deliver the data in the network.

4. Problems We Had To Overcome

Meeting time: This is the second year that we participated in CyberFair. As recalling the rush schedule last year, we began to discuss and study before this winter vacation. At the beginning, we can not make the whole group to meet and book meeting time together. A few people always could not show up for some personal business. This frustration made us almost give up our team until the winter vacation began. The way for solving this was that the teacher started to allocate the jobs. As one of team members finished his assignment, he had to ask for the teacher to get another one. Since timing is our major problem, we figured out some solutions: asking more students to join and passing the information for the student missing. After these steps, the things went well and our team started to go out for interview. This winter we had done our assignments, such as drawing, scanning, and writing. Because we worked on our own and cooperated in the team, all problems had been overcome.

Language problem: The interviewees were often the Atayal aged grandmas. This generated some miscommunication during the interviews. We solved this problem by having one Atayal student. Her mother was our language translator. This made our interviews more fluent.

Transportation problem: The sites for studying and interviewing are nearby the Pulowan Park and far away from our school. The car was too old and too small to climb the hill with so many students. Another car borrowed from a volunteer was our solution. With this help from the owner, we went out successfully for these interviews. Through this project, we had gone through so much and overcome all. Our cooperation made this project achieved. We believe these experiences will become the wonderful recollection in our hearts.

5. Our Project Sound Bite

Though the weaving is not a profitable job, this art has made its own countless contribution to our society. None of us is aboriginal, but we hope to see the aboriginal weaving may regain its glory; none of us is journalist or official from the Office of Aboriginal Administration, but we want to show the Atayal weaving to people on earth, to show how beautiful it is. Though we are a group of kids in the sixth grade, we are full of curiosity to the weaving of Atayal.

In so many interviews, we had met many people who are interested in weaving, such as the Atayal grandmothers, the aunts, the weaving teachers, or the staffs in the Office of Aboriginal Administration. All of them were very kind and willing to tell us the information about weaving. We appreciate their helps deeply and sincerely.

6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?

Our webpage for CyberFair 2003 is going to be the material of our folk education. The students can share our learning achievement in computer lab anytime. All of us consider that the application of the Internet is a great method for learning and teaching.

The content of education is heading to the goal of multi-development in this modern society. Our school had promoted the integrating education for a period of time. Participating the CyberFair project is the best way for us to develop the self-discovering and self-solving abilities as encountering challenges. Through this project, we learned to communicate and cooperate together, to interview politely, to translate and organize data by tape recorder, to design webpage by computer graphing software, to cite the bibliography, and to utilize art concepts.

We had tried every kind of methods to collect the data, such as by combining human resource in the community, use the references, and having the interviews, etc. After organizing and integrating our study about the Atayal weaving art, we shared the outcome to all students and teachers of our school. Also, through the Internet, we want to share this losing art to everyone.

The aboriginals in Taiwan are suffering the serious unemployment. In addition, with the impacts from civilization, the aboriginal culture is going to fade away. We hope to find the weaving specialist from the community and ask him about weaving history, teaching processes and culture inheritance. Just as saying in the CyberFair goal, sharing the education in the community, we hope to help the aboriginals to develop the second skill, to let everyone know more about Atayal and to reappear the Atayoal weaving.

1) What information tools & technologies did you used to complete your CyberFair project?

The tools we had used: The telephone, blank tape, digital camera, scanner, tape recorder, computer software, libraries, books, advertising magazine, oral interview, cars, and stereo set, etc.

1. Phone：to contact interviews and meetings at home and in school. 2. Digital Camera: to photograph, offered by the school and teacher. 3. Scanner: to turn the picture or graphs into digital picture. 4. Magazine and Brochure: to organize the data, from the staffs working on site. 5. Software: to get on the Internet, to deal with pictures and to make web pages, sponsored by the parents. 6. Car: supported by the teacher and parents for going out for interviewing and searching data. 7. Library: the libraries in our school and Hualien Education College for searching data. 8. Books: the related books from the school or friends for studying. 9. Blank Tape: for recording the interview, bought from the supermarket。 10.Oral Interview: to gain the information and knowledge from the specialists in this field. 11.Portable Stereo: for taping in the interviews, supported by our own. 12.Stereo: for translating or organizing data.

2) In what ways did you act as "ambassadors" and spokespersons for your CyberFair project both on-line and in person.

We gained the first hand data by talking on phone and interviewing on site. All of this success should be counted in the helps from the staffs in the Bureau of Aboriginal Administration, Grandma Lan-mei Huang, Aunt Jin-xiu Tian, Teacher Xiu-lan Hu, Teacher Mei-li Lian and the Jiamin Elementary School. We appreciate their time on understanding our introduction of the project and their patient explanation to make us realize well the weaving.

We found that people in Hualien understand the local culture basically. The old generation still has the good memory to the history or oral stories in the past. As someone is interested in these stories, old people would be enthusiastic to introduce and even to show the way to explore. On the other hand, the younger generation has less connection to the past. As inquiring the historic topics, young people would generate a series of questions. The fortune thing is that they had curiosity to know more with us. We consider this is the general case among young people in Taiwan. We shall have the basic understanding and the consents to our own environment.

The site that we were studying was not around our school. We visited the places and the persons by car usually. That was why we could take the photographs by our own. As studying in school before, the teachers would prepare everything for us to learn. The only thing we needed to do was memorizing the knowledge to gain good grade. This project was much different. From the beginning to the end, we prepared the material, contacted by phone and did everything by our own. The teachers were only being as “walking dictionary” for consulting only.

3) What has been the impact of your project on your community?

Respecting to Multi-culture: Our school has been founded over one hundred years. Multi-culture issue has been discussed and emphasized much for a long time. Our school has the certain proportion of the aboriginal students, just as the case that two aboriginal students are in our team. However, they only had a few ideas about their tribes. Through studying and exploring the Atayal weaving, this project had made us learn more and made the aboriginal students know more about the culture of their own.

Learning and growing: Through making the web pages, we had learned more computer knowledge; through going out for interviews, we had learned the oral methods to gain and inquire data; by searching in the libraries, we had gained the knowledge out of textbooks; by taking photographs, we had learned how to use digital camera; as taping the interviews, we realized this smart way to collect data. So many methods could help us learn some techniques and knowledge which we would never learn in the classroom. These methods made our web pages more complete.

Because some students in our team had attended the 2002 CyberFair, their experiences had been shared and led the others to work together. With our cooperation and the opinions shared in the team, the assignment of web pages had been going smoothly.

To young people today, the traditional weaving is too troublesome. But, the oldest and most traditional parts should be the most valuable ones. If we turned the traditional art working into the modern style, we would lose our ancient culture forever. Therefore, some people consider that the primal and traditional stuffs are better.

Working together is stronger: We were not always lucky during this project. Because of cooperation, we passed everything smoothly and successfully. After all, working together is stronger.

4) How did your project involve other members of your community as helpers and volunteers?

This project is mainly conducted to introduce the weaving art of Atayal. All data for content was almost collected from the Atayal art studios. Even though the internet is a great source for data supporting, the information about Atayal weaving is limited and not enough. With the helps from the local studios, we can not have this abundant data. Several brochures and publications, such as “The Introduction to Living Art of Huanlien Aboriginals”, “The Introduction of the Aboriginal Folk Culture”, “The Introduction of Pulowan”…etc., made us have the general picture of the Atayal weaving immediately.

5) Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises (Optional)

We started from not knowing anything about weaving at all and became to introduce the weaving to others. The processes made us learn a lot and enjoy very much.

Lessons: At the beginning, we thought it was an easy project since the information system would help us everything in computer lab. We even expected to have rest time to play the game on computer. At the end, instead of playing the game on computer game, we almost could not finish our project. All of us got this lesson and reorganized a tough schedule to complete this project.

Discoveries： After touching so many things about weaving, we definitely had many discoveries. For example, we never thought that there are so many taboos in weaving. We also learned that the weaving had its totems and these represented different meanings.

Surprises: We were surprised as conducting the interviews. Every time we would meet the persons who were completely different from the former interviews. Sometimes we interviewed with the grandma. The feelings in such experience was friendly and grandfatherly; sometimes with the weaving teachers, the image became professional and smart; sometimes with the vice director in the Bureau of Aboriginal Administration, the image was unexpectedly funny and interesting. These different experiences made the interviews become a happy and interesting job.