Media.Knet.Ca

Thursday morning (Nov 20), Carl Seibel (FedNor's Telecom Officer) brought Jacques Hains, the FedNor Liaison Officer from Ottawa over to Keewaytinook Okimakanak's Thunder Bay office for meetings with different members of the KO Smart team from across Northwestern Ontario. Brian Walmark, KO's SchoolNet Special Projects Coordinator hosted the meeting from his office on the fourth floor at 135 N. Syndicate Avenue that he shares with Conduit Technologies and Northern Nishnawbe Education Council.

First stop on the virtual tour was the KO office in Sioux Lookout, where Carl and Jacques met with K-Net staff to discuss the work that has been completed to date as well as the socio-economic opportunities that the FedNor investments bring to the region and especially the remote First Nations in the far north. Then Dan used the video conferencing bridge to bring in the Fort Severn Smart team at their e-Centre in their community. Later Dan dropped in on the North Spirit Lake e-Centre and Darlene joined the discussions about the impact they are witnessing that these communication tools are having on their communities.

Check out the story that Brian Walmark posted on the http://firstnationschools.ca portal

Raising The Children - A Training Program for Aboriginal Parents is now on-line at http://raisingthechildren.knet.ca

The development of this web site was made possible through a partnership between the Sunset Women's Aboriginal Circle (SWAC), K-Net and Lorraine Kenny. Funding support for this project came from the Federal Economic Development Initiative for Northern Ontario (FedNor) project that is supporting K-Net to create a variety of on-line training resources for First Nations.

All the material included on this web site comes directly from the Raising The Children Parenting Manual for Aboriginal parents. The entire first topics from each of the training sessions in now available on-line for parents to review.

An on-line Aboriginal Parenting support group is being facilitated utilizing Keewaytinook Okimakanak's On-line Training Centre located at http://training.knet.ca. All interested parents wishing to join this on-line support group are invited to send Lorraine Kenny an e-mail requesting to become a member of the group.

Six members of the NORTH Network team traveled to Balmertown on Tuesday, November 4 for two days of meetings with Keewaytinook Okimakanak staff members. Discussions addressed the issues around the partnership and work that has taken place over the past three years in the development of telehealth and related services. As well, time was spent examining how the new regional telehealth development project that will include all the First Nations in the Sioux Lookout Health Zone can best be supported by our partnership.

Click here to view the pictures.

On November 5, representatives from across the country met to discuss current issues involving the First Nations SchoolNet program. The monthly meeting is facilitated by the Ottawa office and uses the bridging resources available at K-Net. We reached the maximum capacity of the bridge with the number of video conferencing and audio sites involved in this meeting.

On November 2-4, 2003, HRDC's Learning Policy Directorate hosted a small gathering of invited guests to discuss their "lifelong learning policy framework". Participants were provided with a number of documents before the sessions and asked to discuss a set of questions at the session. These questions included:

• What do we mean by Learning Communities?
• What are the emerging Learning Community models and do any hold particular relevance for the Canadian context?
• What are the critical enabling factors for learning at the community level?
• What happens when you introduce learning as an organizing principle in the community?
• How does learning need to be positioned to ensure sustainable economic and social development?
• What are the elements of a national framework to enable the development of learning communities?

The event was held in Cranbrook BC and participants stayed at the Delta St Eugene Mission School, a completely renovated and modern hotel complex owned by the Ktunaxa/Kinbasket Tribal Council. From Chief Sophie Pierre we learned that this former residential school was opened 9 months ago by the people from Ktunaxa/Kinbasket Tribal Council. Nestled in the Rocky Mountain Valley surrounded by the mountains this very special site hosts a world famous golf course, a casino, meeting rooms and the interpretative centre. Click here to visit the interpretative centre web site and meet Isaac Birdstone for a tour of the old mission school and learn about the heritage of the people from this region.

Click here to check out the pictures from this trip.

Personal web pages at MyKnet.org continue to be the most popular on-line space for the Nishnawbe Aski to browse. In October there were over 13 millions hits on this K-Net server (an additional 2 million hits from the previous month)!

All together there were over 20 MILLION hits occurring on the six most popular monitored K-Net servers throughout October. Specifically, on these six servers with traffic graphs, there were a total of 20,619,828 hits made to these on-line services provided by Keewaytinook Okimakanak. The six servers include myknet.org, knet.ca, webmail.knet.ca, hosting.knet.ca, highschool.knet.ca and photos.knet.ca.

Most of the K-Net servers that are being monitored for hits, visits and usage statistics using the webalizer program again showed an increase during the month. But http://myknet.org rose by another 2 million hits to demonstrate the rapid take up of these communication tools among users across the north.

Please note:

• other on-line K-Net services, such as K-Net chat and the video streamer are not included in these numbers;
• the numbers for myknet.org are located on two charts (http://myknet.org/webalizer/old and http://myknet.org/webalizer);
• server traffic monitoring information is located at http://tech.knet.ca/~tech/monitoring.