Nandasiri Wanninayaka — Horizon Lanka Foundation
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navigation, contact, access: click ►▼, link & ••• — October 19, 2018
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how to contact us
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Leif Smith
303-778-0880
Explorers Foundation, Inc.
PO Box 9100
Denver, CO 80209
USA
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leifsmith@gmail.com — Important: If we are not already in email communication, please put “*****” at the beginning of the Subject: line of your email. This will assure that we don’t miss the first email you send to us.
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Investment History
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2004: Cobden-Bright Award of $3,000 to help build a tower in Horizon Lanka’s remote rural area to allow 24/7 internet access.
 
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2018, October 19: Horizon Academy Model Supplementary Educational Institutes
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We Are Franchising Horizon Academy Model Supplementary Educational Institutes
http://www.horizonlanka.org/en/blog/2018/10/17/we-are-franchising-horizon-academy-model-supplementary-educational-institutes/
The Horizon Lanka Foundation www.horizonlanka.org (HLF) operates 5 Horizon Academies by now in Anuradhapura, Nuwara Eliya and Jaffna Districts. By the end of the year it will have two more Academies in Puttalam and Batticaloa districts. This will allow the HLF to serve all three communities in Sri Lanka namely, Sinhala, Tamil and Muslims. To replicate the Horizon Academy model, the HLF offers three different options.
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2018, October 8: Nanda sent a draft of a new paper ••• being written to define Horizon Virtual Academy - authors Nandasiri Wanninayaka, Nalaka Gunawardene, and Mark Frazier.
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First paragraph: “This concept paper developed by Horizon Lanka Foundation (www.horizonlanka.org) is aimed at creating a web-based repository of instructional and educational videos initially for free access to anyone, anywhere through a virtual academy. The project will also livestream both indoor and outdoor classrooms through the project’s website for anyone during its first year (2018) and for a nominal fee from 2019 for its subscribers. We propose to do this in the local languages of Sri Lanka – English, Sinhala and Tamil at the beginning and later add more languages using the 100+ foreign volunteer teachers who volunteered at Horizon Lanka Foundation since 2004.”
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http://www.horizonlanka.org/en/blog/2018/05/16/horizon-virtual-academy-draft/
 
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2004: Explorers Foundation invested $3,000 in Horizon Lanka Foundation, Sri Lanka, to support the work of founder, Nandasiri Wanninayaka, and to help build a radio tower to provide Horizon Lanka Academy with continuous high-speed access to the internet.
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Nandasiri Wanninayaka (Nanda) decided that the children of his rural village needed good education. He began with a few students, using a single bench as a classroom. After a few years the school had come to the point where it could make good use of full-time high-speed connection to the internet. The village is far from such a connection. A radio tower needed to be built. We helped fund it.
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We know Nanda through Mark Frazier, of Openworld Institute. Shannon Ewing has visited the school and taught English there.
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Horizon Lanka Academy is located at Mahavilachchiya, a remote village in the dry zone of Sri Lanka, nearly 240 kms away from Colombo. We embarked on a project to teach English language and computer skills to a group of rural children. When we started in 1998, we had few students and a few wooden benches as our classroom furniture. Our classes were conducted in the open, under the shade of trees. -Nanda
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This story relates the realization of a dream of a dedicated virtual community of globally dispersed volunteer Sri Lankan academics, who mobilized Sri Lankan Diaspora for funding; and then formed horizontal partnerships with local and international agencies to set up a computer center in rural Sri Lanka.  It also relates the metamorphosis of an out of work teacher to be the Digital Ambassador for Sri Lanka through training and empowerment.  It is the story of two communities coming together; one virtual in cyberspace, the other a land based poor rural community; one the haves, and the other the have nots; - the empowered, empowering and bridging the digital divide. -Nanda
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Nanda with students (photo)
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October 13, 2007: Videos (YouTube) on Mahavilachchiya's mesh Internet project.
 
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English •••
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Sinhala •••
 
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Village with a mesh network, but not a single telephone
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This article, was published by samarajiva November 6th, 2006 in General.
Sri Lanka’s first outdoor wireless computer network is now up and running.
 
Surprisingly, it is not in Colombo. It is not even in any of the other key places. It was installed in Mahavilachchiya, a little known village, 40 km from the nearest town Anuradhapura, and surrounded three sides by the Vilpattu jungle.
 
Most of the villagers are either farmers or labourers with a monthly income of about Rs. 5,000 -  10,000 (US$ 50 - 100). Though there is electricity, it is not yet covered by any of the terrestrial or mobile phone networks. This means there is not a single telephone in this village.
 
On the other hand, Mahavilachchiya has more than 50 PCs and a sophisticated multimedia lab. Majority of the computers are at the houses of the children, who in addition to use them for their studies, design web sites of some of the foreign companies. These PCs are now connected by using the “Mesh Wireless technology” which gives them direct Internet and E-mail facilities.
 
Wireless was the only approach that could be used, as there were no telephone lines the distribution of the houses makes a wired network set up too expensive.
.oOo.