By RONG JIAOJIAO

Students of the Central Primary School of Longbang Township, Jingxi County in Guangxi, gather around the single school computer that goes online.	Tong Jingyan, fifth grader from Jingxi Experimental Primary School of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, having an on-line chat with students at sister schools in Guangdong Province.

“These old Zhuang minority farmers’ houses have three stories – pigs, hens and other farm animals are kept on the first floor, family members live on the second and grain and corn are stored on the third.

“It’s a pretty smart design because it saves space and is very environmentally-friendly,” observes 11-year-old Tang Zijun, fifth-grader at Haizhuzhonglu Elementary School in Guangzhou and one of the provincial capital’s 10 million residents.

Tang is commenting on the PowerPoint photos of Zhuang abodes she has just received from Tong Jingyan, a pupil at Jingxi Experimental Primary School in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region,688 kilometers west of Guangzhou.

Meanwhile, Tong Jingyan is at his home in the county town of Jingxi, whose 580,000 population is 99 percent Zhuang minority, scrutinizing photos of an old Guangdong farmhouse taken by Tang Zijun on a recent school field trip.

“The ceiling is high enough to allow a breeze to blow through, and there are three entrance doors to ensure safety,” says Tang. “I think it must be very comfortable indoors -- cool in summer and warm in winter. No need for an air-conditioner.”

This exchange represents just one small link in the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) distance education project launched last year. It involves 15 poverty-stricken primary schools in Guangxi and Chongqing and seven better equipped, more generously funded counterparts in Guangdong, Shanghai and Anhui Provinces. Groups of students from each school have been doing research on local housing, exchanging ideas and discussing their findings in a chatroom on the project website (www.isnet.org.cn).

Students from both Guangxi and Guangdong have taken weekend field trips out to rural areas, taken photographs of rural dwellings and interviewed local residents. They have found all the information they need on the Internet. Teachers in both places have helped pupils compile the data they have gathered into PowerPoint presentations to show to their online friends.

This housing project has given Tong Jingyan a new outlook on history.

“I think our forefathers worked with the environment in a far more intelligent way than we do today,” says Tong thoughtfully. “This project has been like an online time traveling treasure hunt. Tang has shown me how to use OICQ (an instant messaging program), and how to find information through online search engines like Baidu and Sina. It makes the work much more straightforward.”

The pictures of skyscrapers Tang Zijun has sent to Tong are also a source of amazement to the Zhuang boy, who has never been to a big city.

“They’re like rockets on the road. My head wouldn’t go back far enough to see the top of one. If it did, I might fall over…”.

Besides exchanging information on their homes, students from different schools have worked together on designing the Distance Education Program logo. Zhang Jing of Xinjing Central Elementary School in Guangxi drew the face of a child, but his on-line friends at the Luying Elementary School in Anhui Province weren’t satisfied with it. “We discussed it online and finally decided to make the eyes into computer mice, to stress the importance of computers in our lives,” explains fifth-grader Zhang Jing.

The children then came up with the slogan: Hand in hand for a better world.

Says Annette Nyquist, the UNICEF distance education project official, “It’s impressive how well the children master these information technology skills,” she says, “but most significant is their eagerness to learn and cooperate with one another.”

The project is a cooperative venture between UNICEF and the National Center for Educational Technology (NCET). It is hoped that, with the help of the RMB 1.85 million (US$ 237,000) funding from the US CitiGroup, the great digital divide between eastern and western China may be narrowed.

The number of Chinese with Internet access rose to 111 million at the end of 2005, and 64.3 million have broadband access, according to figures released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) in January 2006. The 19.3 million netizens in rural areas, however, represent only 2.6 percent of the rural population, as compared with the 91.7 million urban netizens that constitute 16.9 percent of China’s urban residents and the 57.8 percent of netizens among inhabitants of China’s eastern coastal areas.

“Impressive statistics emanating from China's information technology sector in recent years make it easy to overlook the people whose lives are unchanged by the information revolution,” says Li He, NCET official in charge of the project, concluding, “Distance education reaches people who would otherwise be deprived of the opportunity to learn.”

Xinjing Center Elementary School in Guangxi contrasts sharply with its 99-year-old sister school of 1,509 students in Guangdong, particularly from the point of view of its having just one computer room of 40 computers, in use since 2002, only half of which go online.

Guangzhou Haizhuzhonglu Elementary school, on the other hand, has had 130 computers in three computer rooms since 1996, and each computer has 24-hour Internet access. In 2004, three of Haizhuzhonglu Elementary students won national computer operating awards.

Says Annette Nyquist: “Online practice helps pupils to develop initiative and rely less on teachers. It cannot fail to raise standards of education.”

Hu Xinhua, a teacher at Haizhuzhonglu, adds: “This project also makes urban kids realize that children of their age in western areas lack the educational resources that they take for granted.”

All too conscious of this gap, by the end of 2003 the Chinese government had taken measures to provide basic computing facilities or internet access to at least 10,000 primary and middle schools in the poorer western provinces.

UNICEF’s distance education project covers 180 schools in 18 counties of 12 provinces. In 2006, the UNICEF-NCET project is expected to expand to include Qinghai and Sichuan provinces, which will increase the number of participating schools from 15 to 50.

Distance education involves more than just the media, insists Annette Nyquist: “Technology is a means, not an end itself. It can be compared to a pair of new shoes. The ‘shoes’ of distance education, we hope, will help students walk along the road to quality education and beyond.”

Yet technology alone does not guarantee joy and enlightenment, according to Wang Fengji, a student at Jingxi Experimental Primary School. “In the old days we had no television at home, my family would sit together and chat as night fell. But nowadays, everybody is glued to the television.”

Tong Jingyan says he prefers tangible to virtual reality.

“I wouldn’t want to sit all day long in front of a computer,” he says. “What I really like is going fishing or making bamboo-flavored rice outdoors with my friends, or doing field research with my classmates and teachers. I want to know the secrets of nature and everything around us. It’s all so amazing, isn’t it?”

Rong Jiaojiao is a staff reporter for China Features.