 I'm Jay Fidel, this is Think Tech and more specifically, this is our Community Matters series. Okay, and we're talking today with Laura Hosman. She is from Arizona State University and she joins us today while she's here in Honolulu for about a week. She's a visiting scholar, I would say, and spending time at the East-West Center, am I right? That's correct. And doing various things. But Laura, can you tell us what you do at Arizona State because I ran out of paper in my printer before I could print it all? Give us a summary. Thanks Jay. I'm an associate professor at Arizona State University. I have a dual position in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society. I had to take a deep breath before saying that one. And the Polytechnic School. So it's a mix of innovation and engineering. And then I also hold a position in the Julianne Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability as a senior sustainability scientist. So when I looked at that, I thought to myself, well, which one is on the top? Which one? Put it this way. Which one do you care about most? I couldn't possibly say that. Wrong. In politic. The one I care about most is Arizona State University. It's a very multi-disciplinary focused place. It's the perfect place to launch an initiative like Solar Spell. Let's get to that. Okay. I'm going to talk about your travels because then we'll get to Solar Spell. So number one is you just came back from Kenya from a, let's see, a refugee camp. That's right. What's the name of the refugee camp? Kakuma. Kakuma. And you know, that really touches me because I'm fresh off watching Human Flow, the iWayWay movie about all these camps and refugees in the world today. There are 65 million people in camps like this and not enough people like you go to see them and engage with them and help them. So you were there in the camp there in Kenya. What were you doing there? Investigating whether this offline solar powered digital library that's a learning tool that can be brought to places that don't have internet connectivity, don't have electricity would be a good fit in this refugee camp. And what did you find? Well, I believe it's going to be a great fit there for primary schools in particular. You know, we've heard about computers that cost $100 or something and big computer companies sometimes make them or maybe small ones as an LMO's in every matter. But this is even, you know, on the far side of that and you have one on the table. That's right. So can we talk for a minute about what that thing is on the table? It looks like a box of sewing equipment, but it is not a box of sewing equipment. No, it's not. So this is what we call solar spell, which is an acronym for solar powered educational learning library. In academia we love acronyms. You can see the solar panel here. That's the trick. You know, when you turn it over it begins to reveal what's going on. The solar panel, the waterproof plastic case, it's important to protect what's inside when you go to places where the elements are an issue, sand, wind, humidity, heat. So we're protecting it even though we're inspiring curiosity because you can see through the plastic. And then the wires come off of the solar panel into a battery. We have an on-off switch. That's a black object as a battery. That's right. This is a battery. It's storing power off of the solar panel. It's also giving power to this micro computer, which is called a raspberry pi in the fine tradition of naming technology after fruit, apple. And we have pre-curated the entire contents of our library onto this micro SD card. So basically we take what we think is some of the best of the internet offline. And we're broadcasting it to places that don't have internet connectivity. And even without the solar that we have, they don't have need of electricity either. So we can go to places where it's been very difficult, if not impossible before, to bring internet-like technology. We're also building internet-ready skills before the internet reaches the 53 percent of the world's population that doesn't yet have internet connectivity. Wow, 53 percent. It's worse than that. 95 percent of schools across the developing world don't have internet connectivity. That's not good. And yet. That's their big tool. But that would, yes, it's the best place to teach safe, right, technology and internet-ready skills is at school. And you learn how to search and you learn how, well, you learn the fact that there's more to the internet than cute cat videos. The world. Yes. You know, I mean, we had talked before about the Congo and Ebola there now. And the people don't know about the value of being vaccinated. So they fight with those who would like to vaccinate them. I mean, really fight as a result that doctors without frontiers closed down in the New York Times this morning. So if they had the internet, they might know more and they wouldn't do that. They might. But we also have a phenomenon called fake news now. Ah, yes. And so if you don't have information literacy, it can be hard to distinguish between what's fake and what's real. Yes, absolutely. So there are skills that also need to be taught in order for people to have that savviness about what's real and what's not. Isn't that the truth? And let me also say that fake news doesn't have to be on a computer. That's right. You can deliver totally fake news without ever having a computer. Very true. Bad rumor. Okay, let me just get my polytechnic head around this. So battery charged by the solar cells. That's right. And the solar has to be in sun or can it be in an ordinary hazy day? It will get a charge on a hazy day, but it charges much faster if it's in the sunlight. How long? So that depends on how direct the sun is, of course. But a battery like this, which is a 10,000 milliamp hour battery, can probably charge in about six hours. Six hours. Okay, then you can use that battery for how long? And that also depends on usage. So if we have a classroom full of kids watching videos all at the same time, streaming them on their tablets or their smartphones, then we're talking about four hours. However, if they're reading a textbook or a PDF file, this could last for days. So it definitely depends on usage and how many people are using it at the same day. Does this connect? Would you like to connect with your phone right now? Sure. Okay. My phone is on. That's right. So we're going to take you offline. So Wi-Fi and the Internet, believe it or not, are two separate things. We use the word Wi-Fi to mean the Internet like we use Kleenex to mean a tissue, right? It's a shortcut word. But Wi-Fi stands for wireless fidelity, so it is wirelessly connecting you to something. And in this case, this computer, yes, it's operating as a server and it's serving up the information. So you're going to use Wi-Fi to connect directly to this little server. Okay. So you're looking for Wi-Fi signal. So you're looking for Wi-Fi signal. Yep. Called Spell. Again, for Solar Powered Educational Learning Library. Wi-Fi. To see all networks turn on Wi-Fi. Okay. Turning on. It's scanning for Wi-Fi networks. Spell. There it is. It's right there. So you seem very confident that this would work and you're right. I've done this before. I imagine so. Okay. Internet may not be available. And that's true because we're not using the Internet. We're just using Wi-Fi to connect to this. Okay. All right. So I now have Spell up. You're now connected. Open your favorite web browser, whether that's Safari, Firefox, Chrome, whichever is your favorite. All right. Here I am. Yeah. And then you'll type in the numbers 10.10.10.10. That's easy to remember 10. That's what we were aiming for. Okay. 10.10.10.10.10.10. And then enter or go. Go. There it is. That's on the Pacific Islands version of our library. Catch this. So those of you following along at home, we have this live online as well under Pacific schoolserver.org. coolserver.org. So we have it offline, we have it online, and we have all this included. You've got a menu of creative arts. I'm clicking creative arts. So the categories that we have information under our creative arts environment. Oh, there's all kinds of information here. Health and safety, yes. There's an old menu system. Yes. There's many levels deep. Right. So everything on here is open access. It can be freely shared. You can download it to your phone and Bluetooth it to your friend in a true spirit of being a library except that you get to keep it actually if you want it. So oh, you can save it to your machine. That's right. So what's the range on the hotspot? If we were outside, it would be a football field. Wow. Once we're inside, the waves have to go through walls and so that cuts it down. So we call this a classroom version because of the size of a classroom. And about 25 people can connect to it at the same time without any degradation. Yes. Okay, that's pretty interesting. And after 25, we just start to see hiccups, but they can still connect. We can still do it. Now you have to have a phone. You have to have some device, yes. So any smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, computer, as long as it has Wi-Fi capability. As long as it finds wireless, that's what you have to do. So we've met a whole lot of people actually across the Pacific who have smartphones but didn't necessarily know how to use them for data or they can't afford data so they don't know how to use Wi-Fi. And as you said before, it's a step, it's a ramp up thing where you learn how to do the internet even without having the worldwide web. Exactly. But you can, you get information just like it was the internet. Right. And you can teach a lot of people quickly. Very much. On the fly. You don't have to bring wires with you. That's right. Right, no. So this was designed to fit into someone's backpack. And in fact, you can fit a tablet. We always put a tablet inside to take advantage of the precious real estate that's in this box. So there's a tablet in there as well to make sure that there's always a device that can access this. But we consider this a bring your own device model because we started seeing smartphones even out to the edges of the earth, even to the most remote islands. And so we're taking advantage of that because maybe eight years ago when I started working in the field of technology and development, we were seeing desktop computers that have fans and moving parts and they would invariably fail after a few months because of the high humidity or the gecko got inside the machine or the dust or the wind. They're not protected in a climate controlled environment the way we take for granted in the United States, for example. So I wanted to have no moving parts. But then people were also afraid to use computers back then because there were so many parts to them. They were so complicated. But once we started seeing smartphones in nearly everyone's hands, we realized, okay, maybe what we need to do exactly, they have their own computer. They're not afraid of it anymore. So let's just bring the content. And so we work to localize the content. So what you were looking at is a Pacific Islands library. We're on version four of that now because we are always improving it, always getting more and better content. But we also have local information for each country where we're working. And to update it, all you have to do is update that chip in there. That's right. That little SDH. We just bring a new envelope of chips every time we go to the, every time we return to the field. Oh, sure. And then you switch the chips. Right. That's right. So, okay, it looks like the box came from, what, Lowe's hardware? Something like that. Hawaii? Where'd it come from? Plastics US, I think. Okay. Or US plastics. And the battery, that probably came from... Everything else came from Amazon. Amazon. And that's on purpose. We wanted to be able to order things off the shelf, assemble them, and make sure, for example, if for whatever reason one of these parts stopped working, you could get another part and make it yourself. Now that doesn't apply outside of the US where Amazon doesn't deliver. But at least for our purposes, we actually assemble these at Arizona State University on a given Saturday once every semester. We have about 45 volunteers and solar-spelled students come together and build 100 of these. So they're, at this moment, they're still student-built. So the Raspberry you can get from Apple. Actually that also comes from Amazon. Amazon? Mm-hmm. The, now you have to have a solar, a solar array there. Where'd you get that? The solar panel comes from Amazon. And the battery as well. And the connection of the solar panel, you need some kind of... Right. So this is the voltage regulator. It takes the voltage from the 12 volts that's coming off of the solar panel down to 5 volts so that we can plug it directly into the, to the battery. And this is your average battery that, you know, you might buy to have a portable way to charge your phone. So it's a phone-charging battery. You could get a bigger battery. We could. But we've actually, it's important to us that you can charge and discharge at the same time so that you could put this in the, in the sun and use it because a school day is usually during the day. So it's important to be able to charge it and use it at the same time. And so there are a select number of batteries that have that capability. The majority of batteries out there you can charge but not use at the same time. And you have the velcro on the back so that it doesn't bounce around. That's right. That's right. Nothing falls out. Ah. Oh, clever, clever, clever. I am so impressed. Do you have degrees in engineering, in electrical engineering? No, I don't. So one of the beautiful things about working in a multidisciplinary setting is that I have a lot of engineering students who have skills that I don't have and I have skills that they don't have. So we work in teams every semester to make improvements, of course. But I truly enjoy having the light bulb moment go, you know, happen for the student when they realize, oh, the history major has skills that I need in order to understand why my perfectly engineered solution may or may not work, right, in the field. So. This is so sophisticated. And yet, it doesn't look sophisticated, right, so it's not scary for people. It reminds me, I have to say, we're going to take a break in a minute, but I just have to tell you. It reminds me of one of our earliest shows here on Think Tech. It was a company called Safe Water Systems. Okay. And it was all about a packed valve. So you run water in a solar system on somebody's roof and this valve allows it somehow to be cleaned, okay, and the hot water burns off the pathogens, okay, and then that's drinking water. And this little system, yay big, $100, went all over the world to developing countries that didn't have water in a given town. It was brilliant. It was this big. It was like a Hawaii company, believe it or not. Wow. Yeah. So same thing. It's elegant in its simplicity. Well, it's great. I know this was a digression, wasn't it, because we still have to get back to what you're doing here. That's Laura Hosman. We're going to talk some more about that when we come back. Hi, I'm Rusty Komori, host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. My show is based on my book, also titled Beyond the Lines, and it's about creating a superior culture of excellence, leadership, and finding greatness. I interview guests who are successful in business, sports, and life, which is sure to inspire you in finding your greatness. Join me every Monday as we go Beyond the Lines at 11 a.m. Aloha. Aloha and mabuhay. My name is Amy Ortega Anderson, inviting you to join us every Tuesday here on Pinoy Power, Hawaii. With Think Tech, Hawaii, we come to your home at 12 noon every Tuesday. We invite you to listen, watch, for our mission of empowerment. We aim to enrich, enlighten, educate, entertain, and we hope to empower. Again, maraming, salamat po, mabuhay, and aloha. Okay, that's Laura Hosman. She's with Arizona State University, and she's got this fabulous gizmo. Before we leave the gizmo, you have 270 deployed right now in Africa and in the Pacific Islands, and you have to go out there and show them how to work it. Am I right? What do you do? So, up to now, our main collaborator in the field has been the U.S. Peace Corps and their volunteers. So, a typical training for us looks like this. I bring ASU students with me to the field, and we bring the solar spells, and we have about a one or a two-day training with a full cohort of, let's say, 30 or 40 Peace Corps volunteers and their local counterpart teachers, who are locals, and they're all from rural areas and they teach in the schools and they know the needs there. We carry out a training on this, but the technology itself is the easy part. We can be trained on that in five minutes or less. We instead spend the rest of our time talking through, this is a disruptive technology. You're going to be bringing it back to your village. First of all, who's the first person that you should be introducing it to and talking to? And second, how are you going to use this as a teaching tool? If you've never had a library before, if you've never had access to an independent source of authoritative information before, this isn't an obvious thing that you would be in need of, right? What do you need a library for if you've never had one before? So, the technology part is always the easy part. This human behavior change, that is the long-term commitment. And you have to get them, you have to get them to be familiar with what's on that chip. That's exactly right. So they can deliver that information somehow. Right. And if you're not used to consulting, let's say even the internet before, then you don't know that you need to go and look for something that you don't know about before you teach it. If you have been a product of the memorize and regurgitate education model your entire life, that can be a big change to make. So one of the reasons that we have been working with Peace Corps is they are facing the opposite challenge, right? They probably have been using Google all their lives and so suddenly they get to these remote rural places where they're serving a mission and they don't have Google anymore. What do they do? So they've also been serving the role of teacher training. So part of Peace Corps mission is to help professionalize those counterparts that they're paired with. So it's been a really great working relationship there. A footnote question is, are there gizmos like this that will charge a cell phone? This does charge a cell phone, actually. If you plugged your cell phone into the other USB port, you could just charge your cell phone. Or the tablet that we include here. Charges from this. That's right. Now, it's not designed for that. You'll get a little bit less life out of the library, but it can be done, absolutely. The other thing that you said before that all you had to do was bring a new chip with more information. That's right. Well, this, I mean, there's a world of information you could put on that chip. Yes. I mean, I'm sure that's in your future story. What is the future story? Yes. Well, in addition, I mean, look at how much room we have here. You could have a library of libraries, right? Chips after chips after chips. So there's plenty of room to expand. So on that note- And the chips are getting higher capacity all the time. They are. They are. We had been using 64 gigabyte SD cards and now we're using 128. The price has come down to almost the same as what the 64s used to be. So that's been a nice development, of course. You could do anything on it. Make your own internet. That's sort of what we're doing. So everything on the library right now is either a PDF file or an MP4 video because we've found that smartphones out to the middle of nowhere can use those or open them without needing any software. And we're presuming a reality of no internet connectivity. So we have the goal of adding much more interactivity. HTML5 games that can be educational learning games for kids. We also have plans to expand to far more locations. So you mentioned refugee camps. And actually, so we're in five Pacific islands, PG, Samoa, Tonga, Micronesia, and Panuatu. And then in East Africa, we have solar spells in South Sudan, Rwanda, and Komoros, another island community. Speaking of islands, islands face unique challenges, especially with the climate change realities that we're all facing. But islands have a unique challenge. So my heart goes out to islands. And I really want to reach those who are really at the forefront of being affected by climate change. And one of the reasons that I'm here in Hawaii this week is because I believe that Hawaii has a whole lot to offer and a whole lot to share with other island nations. They're a front runner in terms of the Aloha plus challenge and knowing what to do about climate change. If you haven't had access to any information about why suddenly the typhoon is coming out of season, it had never hit in March before. And now suddenly it hit in April. And so a lot of information needs to be conveyed in order for people to comprehend what's happening and be able to react or adapt. And we got a special request from Fiji to please bring more actionable climate change information on the libraries. And so we're working very hard to not only localize it but respond to requests from the people that we're working with. So we never presume that we know what people need on the library. You have to look at it through their eyes. That's exactly right. So we always work with our partners to figure out what content it is that they need. Oh, this is huge. Well, I hope so because there are so many people who are not connected or not usefully connected. I mean, if you have connectivity but you can only afford the basics, you're not using that expensive data to surf for educational information that you don't know exists. And there's a whole industry, even assuming that this gets better and better as a device. By the way, what does it cost? One unit. Well, the hardware, and this is with volunteer student labor, the hardware itself comes to about $170. But that doesn't include all of the work that's gone into curating the library. So that's the sweet value about that. So even assuming that this is going to get better and better, I'm sure it will. Although it seems to me it's mature technology right now. It's fabulous for its deployment. But the library is going to change. And I bet you there's a lot of people out there, teachers and educators and academicians who would love to do this as their gift to humanity, don't you think? Yes, I do. So that is the second reason that I've come here is to try to recruit, especially educators, teachers and those who have a heart for this, to help create lesson plans to help the teachers in the schools that will be using this possibly for the first time having access to a library and localizing the content so that Micronesians can see themselves in the content. And Fijians can see themselves in the lesson plans and have hands-on activities that get them outside of their classroom and into the great big world. That's the most challenging thing. I mean, finding the right materials to put on the chips because it's going to have a relatively big effect on people. I also think that when you study the internet on a specific targeted number of subjects the way this offers, it's different than surfing the internet and getting a wash in things you don't need to know about. I get emails every morning, thousands of emails that I don't care about. I delete, delete, delete. But if you have this, then you can have a much more efficient experience learning. Precisely. You hit the nail on the head. So even though I frequently hear the argument that, oh, I have the internet. I don't need this, there are parents even in the United States who come up to me and say, boy, I wish my kid had one of these so that they're not going off and searching in places that they shouldn't be or getting viruses or seeing inappropriate content on the internet. And so I thank you for bringing that up because I think that that's so important. If you have, especially for first-time users of the internet to have a curated, especially for them, library with information on it, then you're not facing this scary monster that can be the internet, right? Because there is so much information online now. If you are just starting to navigate it for the first time, how do you start? So this is supposed to be an entree, a help with starting, and it's all educational information. So teachers aren't scared to let the students surf it and they're not going to get distracted by going off to places that they shouldn't be. But here's a question for you. It's possible to hijack the information highway on this. So I go to some place with a device like this which anybody could make. They could make this in Russia, just the same way. And I put propaganda on those chips instead. Instead of teaching them real educational material, I teach them fake news and propaganda. So that may be a side effect of your invention here. In truth, yes, people could make these, but the reality is that it's such a difficult task to curate information and then figure out how to put it on a chip and how to make it useful. So believe it or not, we're not the first people on earth to realize that we could curate information and take it to places that don't have internet connectivity. Some of the things that make solar spell unique are it's solar powered, it's curated for localities, basically. And we have librarians, we have College of Education teachers and students working on making lesson plans that are relevant. So that is truly the heavy lift. And yes, anyone could build this box, but the amount of work that needs to go into making a quality library is, that's generally a bridge too far for those who have just done it. Yes, right. Right, but that points up the fact that we need people of all skill sets working on this. So even though I say a library is never finished, actually we have students from all majors working on this from across ASU every semester. We have about 50 students and their majors could be computer science, software engineering, but they could also be marketing, nonprofit leadership and management, history, anthropology, because we also have to understand the users. So it's a true multidisciplinary project. It's a move into an area we really haven't addressed before. Right. So one other thing is that if I wanted to help you, if I wanted to be part of this brand new, so promising, this promising adventure into education and delivering information to the developing world, how do I reach you? How do I present myself? How do I volunteer? How do I become part of this movement? I would encourage people to visit our website, which is solarspell.org. We also have a Facebook page under solarspell, so everyone's free to like us and figure out how to come and work with us, Twitter page, et cetera. So we can be followed on social media, but probably the easiest way is to just look for our website solarspell.org and contact us through the email which is team at solarspell.org or there's a contact us page. One last question I would be remiss if I didn't ask you. I know that you're leaving in a few days, but in the meantime you're going to Mao Farms and Wainae. What has this got to do with Mao Farms and Wainae? Okay, so that is our first spin-off, if you will. We will be continuing to use it as a library, but I have software engineering students here in the field at Mao Farms for the first field test. This will now become a data collection hub for solar powered sensors that are in the farmer's field on moisture level and temperature level and phosphate level, and they are going to feed that information to this, which then becomes a data collection hub. There is, of course, computing power in this computer, so it's going to be computing the data, and then that data can be in the same way that you just used this, broadcast out to the farmer's smartphone, and they can find out what's going on in their field, but if they have questions, then there's a whole library that they can also access with, we're working to curate more and more relevant localized information about their agriculture. So, as we always do, we come with version one of what we think would be useful, and then we start working with partners to identify and help curate and create more localized relevant information, so that's exactly what we're doing at Mao Farms. Students are testing in the field the soil, and seeing whether it can, and it worked, feed into this as a data collection hub, and then feedback out to smartphones. I'm so glad I asked. I was blown away when you opened that box, but now when you tell me about what you're doing in the fields, I'm double blown away. I'm going to need to take a nap after this show. Thank you, Laura. Laura, husband, wonderful time to meet you. Thank you, Jay. Thank you so much for having me. Aloha.