IOWA CITY – Iowa City resident and retired teacher David Quegg could be taking it easy, but instead he’s reaching out to assist the Dalai Lama Institute for Higher Education – a new college in Bangalore, India. The institution trains teachers for Tibetan Children’s Village, an organization responsible for the care and education of 16,000 orphans and refugee children from Tibet. Quegg, 69, taught for 12 years at the American Embassy in New Delhi, India, where he became the liaison to the Tibetan Children’s Village in Dharamsala, home of the exiled Tibetan government.
An advocate for displaced Tibetans, Quegg is raising money to fund computers and networking for the four-year-old institution.
“The teachers need to be exposed to these technologies while they are in school so they can teach these technologies to the kids,” Quegg said. “These Tibetans kids need to be able to compete alongside Indian kids to get into colleges and good jobs. They need to know computers.”
Quegg recently took a step out of his own technology comfort zone to start an online campaign using the newly-popular fundraising web site IndieGoGo. The site uses “crowd sourcing” to raise money for all kinds of causes. The campaign URL is: http://www.indiegogo.com/eGranaryDalaiLamaInstitute2012
As a part of the package, Quegg is including an eGranary Digital Library – an offline library of 30 million resources developed at the University of Iowa’s WiderNet Project. Now he’s focused on providing the equipment to set up a local network that would enable all the students on the campus to access to the eGranary’s many resources, which includes copies of valuable websites such as Wikipedia, Khan Academy and MIT OpenCourseWare.
The campaign offers ‘perks’ for donors who are especially generous. These include prayer flags, children’s books and authentic Tibetan door hangings Quegg collected while in India. The perks are limited and can be claimed when a donation is made. So far $1,700 dollars has been raised, with a goal of $4,800 by the beginning of December.
Quegg is excited for the effort to assist the new school, founded in 2009. “Funding for library resource materials are very thin and the region’s Internet fees are expensive,” he said. “The eGranary will provide much-needed educational resources and students can bring laptops or mobile devices to access the new wireless system.”
