One click at a time

ODILE NELSON

It’s a late May morning and the last stop for this year’s traveling computer course. The sun is out, the wind is warm and there are only four students in Gilles Beliveau’s morning class.

“It’s too nice outside to be teaching a course,” Beliveau says, his handlebar moustache rising slightly as he smiles.

His own back is turned squarely away from the classroom window.

Beliveau doesn’t take the small turnout to heart. Today there may be less than a handful of students but just after Christmas, he taught the course in Kangiqsujuaq and 28 students showed up — not bad for a community of 500. During his last session in Kuujjuaq, he taught 50 students.

The Kativik School Board began the itinerant adult computer course in 2000 and for Beliveau, who has been with the program since it began, the course’s goal is clear.

“What I like is that people can open themselves up to what a computer can do for them, the tools they can find and the jobs they can find, or it can help them in the jobs they have right now,” he says.

Each year, Beliveau and his colleague, Jocelyn Gagnon, divide Nunavik’s communities into two regions and then spend about two weeks in each village, teaching such basics as how computer equipment works, software programs like Microsoft Office, and, of course, how to use the Internet.

If participants share the same knowledge level, instructors teach the course using an overhead projector, but otherwise a CD-ROM program allows students to learn at their own pace.

The four students here today are all at their own skill levels. They also all have their own reasons for being here.

Kitty Annanack, a co-ordinator with the Kangiqsualujjuaq social services centre, is attending her fourth class with Beliveau to improve her computer skills at work.

She readily admits that she used to be very skeptical of what computers could add to her community.

“At first, I was against computers when they first introduced them here, but I realize now how important it is and how helpful,” she says.

For Joe Etok, the course may improve his chance to land a job.

Before taking the course he had some knowledge of Microsoft Word and how to use the Internet. He is now learning office management programs.

“I was laid off as a mechanic for the CNV. Sometimes, in my job I have to order parts,” he said. “This is going to improve my job [prospects].”

Beliveau is obviously proud when he hears his students speak positively about what they are learning and he hopes to have even more students register with their local employment officers next year.

He admits, however, that the course has one unavoidable shortcoming — most computer programs and the Internet are not in Inuttitut.

And this, he says, limits his students to those who have some understanding of French or English.

“I have tried sometimes to teach students who don’t speak much English or French, but they quit because the computer speaks English. Whatever you see is in English or French. There is a program to type in Inuttitut, but to use e-mail, Hotmail, Yahoo or whatever, you have to use fonts that they have. You could type an Inuttitut message in an attachment and send it but that’s about it. It’s unfortunate,” he says.

The Inuit population is simply too small for large computer companies to develop programs in Inuttitut, he says.

But ultimately, Beliveau thinks the course could help many Nunavimmiut — given the need for trained computer technicians in Nunavik’s many communities.

“I have one guy, a former student from Wakeham Bay,” he says, “He registered with one of the schools in Montreal. He finished in March this year and two weeks after, the Kativik Regional Government hired him. For me, that’s my best story.”

A story that, for Believeau, may even be worth missing a day or two of fine spring weather.