Papua, Indonesia

... Papua ... Irian Jaya ... West Irian Jaya ... West Papua ...

An annotated guide to 18 Papua related websites or webpages with the general themes of:

PAPUA EDUCATION AND RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS

Education in Papua and West Papua provinces is largely the responsibility of the Provincial Department of Education and Teaching (see http://www.dikjarpapua.org for Papua province). Distance and internet education are centrally coordinated through an initiative intended to provide fast and free internet connections for educational institutions across Indonesia (http://www.jardiknas.org) although the program has met with mixed results in Papua. The Indonesian Department of Education also has a digitisation project which provides textbooks from the state curriculum to registered members (see http://bse.depdiknas.go.id).

By late 2002 the State University of Papua (Universitas Negeri Papua, Unipa) in Manokwari and the Cenderawasih State University (Universitas Negeri Cenderawasih, Uncen) in Abepura/Jayapura both had a modest web-presence. Unipa’s website still provides useful information about the university and its programs but the site has changed little over the years (see http://www.unipa.ac.id/index.php). Unipa's website does host an online forum but many academics at the university rely on a closed university newsgroup (email list) for information exchange. Today the situation at Uncen is dire. Uncen's website had a reasonable start but various later attempts to revamp the site have failed and it has been defunct for several years (see http://www.uncen.ac.id and track the website's spasmodic changes at http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.uncen.ac.id). Web searches for Uncen yield only fragmentary pages or blogs written by lone Uncen academics (such as http://uncen.wordpress.com). The situation is little better for most other tertiary institutions in Papua although the Institute of Science and Technology in Jayapura has an impressive new web-presence (http://www.ustj.ac.id). For smaller colleges collaborations, such as the one between STIMIK 10 November Jayapura and Gunadharma University, suggest cost-effective alternatives to address this problem (see http://www.stimiksepnop.ac.id). The only way to get information about most other tertiary institutions in Papua is to search the web by institution (see list below) or academic staff:

List of Higher Education institutions in Papua

By contrast, several high schools in Papua lead the tertiary sector with their websites:
        SMK Negeri 1 Sentani (http://118.98.214.35/situssmkn1)
        SMK Negeri 1 Nabire (http://www.smkn1nabire.com)
        SMK Negeri 2 Jayapura (http://smkn2jayapura.org).
Hillcrest International School in Sentani, which caters for many of the children of missionaries working in the province, also has a web-presence (see www.hismk.org).

Research on Papua is being conducted all the time by Papua-based researchers working in all areas of the physical and social sciences. Yet despite the prolific work of some researchers in Papua, little of their work may be found on the web. The most important single resource for research related to Papua on the web is Papuaweb.org (You're using it !! at www.papuaweb.org) which hosts a substantial collection of published and unpublished works on Papua, including many theses by students in Papua (see www.papuaweb.org/unipa/dlib-s123/index.html). Papuaweb also hosts many images and maps (see www.papuaweb.org/gb/peta/index.html). The Papuaweb site also recognises the importance of research in neighbouring Papua New Guinea and the region for researchers working on Papua. This regional importance is also apparent elsewhere on the web, including sites on Papuan Insects (www.papua-insects.nl) and orchids in Papua New Guinea (www.orchidspng.com).

[Links for Scientific and Social research in Papua have yet to be added to this virtual library].