The Long Uphill Battle
For my previous article about the roll out of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007, I tried googling for the agreement between the Higher Education Ministry and Microsoft.
What I found instead was the Education Home site for Microsoft. At the bottom of the page was a link to “Download the latest Malaysia Partners in Learning Report“. Well curiosity got the better of me, so I downloaded it and the statistics scared me.
| 76,000 | — No. of teachers/leaders trained |
| 2,280,000 | — No. of students trained/reached |
| 10,000 | — No. of schools participating in the PiL program |
Just to put some things in perspective, Malaysia’s population is 26 million. So that would put about 9.06% of the population of Malaysia participated in this.
Sure it may just be a battle of numbers (and marketing), but those are some HUGE numbers.
For example, the teachers/leaders may just be ‘trained’ but who knows how many actually passed, or are good. Unless they publicized statistics on those and scare the pants off of me.
Its nice to see that Microsoft is helping Education in Malaysia, but at the same time it is scary to see how much proliferation they have.
Let’s see, how many people did I reach out to last year? At least 200+ at PC Fair alone. Other times during the year, say maybe even an optimistic number is 300. Looks like I have a long way to go…
