My Beauty Best Teacher

• Time to Grow | dotSUB

  Here is the time to grow Keynote that Julie and I did not so long a go. Was listening to it and I think the message is still relevant. It is about change and a willingness to grow.

  tags: education learning inspiration

• ARiSE: HOME

  "A new way of learning
  Augmented Reality in School Environments
  - A European Research Project -
  
  Technological advances in the field of information and communication technologies enable innovative ways to mediate knowledge. Among them, Augmented Reality (AR) becomes increasingly a field of interest.
  
  Integrated in e-learning systems, AR will provide innovative ways to transfer knowledge in education. This is the purpose of the project Augmented Reality in School Environments (ARiSE). The aim is to create an innovative teaching aid, enabling teachers to develop, with a moderate effort, new teaching practices for teaching scientific and cultural content to school classes in an easy to comprehend way. "

  tags: augmentedreality education

• Touch Press - The Waste Land

  T.S. Eliot's masterpiece is now an app. An expensive app, topping at $13.99 but it has literary experts abuzz. It includes the poem, perspectives, sychronized performances from Eliot (at two points in his life) and other readers, the original manuscripts showing the process of editing the document, and lots of resources and readings. Created by Faber digital it is part of "Faber's mission to re-imagine poetry for the digital age."
  
  If you teach literature or are an edtech professor, it is time to get this on your ipad and put in some serious academic reviews as to the quality of content here. Academicians now have a new place: writing reviews on the iTunes store. We may have an app-full textbook-free future.

  tags: education ipad literature literature_teacher

• Wordle - Chapter 7 of the Upcoming Clat Classroom Book

  A wordle I made of the upcoming Flat Classroom book - chapter 7 of student choice. If you want to know when the book comes out (we'll only use your email to let you know the publish date) you can go to www.flatclassroombook.com - if you're into social media or doing book reviews, you can apply to be put on our reviewers list. (Sorry not everyone can be selected, but please apply if this fits you.)

  tags: education flatclassroom

• TakingITGlobal - TIGed - Projects - DeforestACTION

  The DeforestAction project has sstudents create local, national and international entrepreneurial initiatives that protect and regrow endangered forests and create local projects to promote awareness and action.

  tags: education science_teacher globalcollaboration flatclassroom collaboration

• Asia Connections - Collaboration with schools in Asia

  A ning promoting connections with schools in Asia.

  tags: education globalcollaboration flatclassroom

• From Library To Learning Commons.Ny.Slideshare

  Lovely slideshow by Valerie Diigs on her school's transformation from library to learning commons. She's been featured in several books and in school library journal.
  
  I think every librarian should be familiar with the learning commons concept to see if there are elements that will work to make your environment more relevant to learners. It isn't whether you like the concept yourself - for libraries to stay funded they must stay relevant. I think learning commons is just one way to do that. Valerie knows far more than me on this topic, so look at what she's done.

  tags: library education learningcommons librarian

• WinDirStat Portable | PortableApps.com - Portable software for USB, portable and cloud drives

  Why is your hard drive full? Why does it keep filling up? I use this to help me find those pesky video files that keep FILLING UP MY HARD DRIVE.

  tags: education utility

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

A while ago George Soros answered the question "How does one Become a Philanthropist?"with the answer, "Get Rich First".Rising Asia is proving him right the FT reports "As Asia emerges, so do philanthropists":

Asia’s emerging wealthy elite don’t have a wide reputation for giving to charity, but new data shows they have not been getting the credit they deserve.India this week become the first BRIC country to be ranked a major donor by Save the Children, reflecting widening philanthropy in the world’s fastest growing economy after China. It is now on a par with donors like Italy, Germany, Romania and South Korea.International non-governmental organisations are registering the highest growth of donors anywhere in the world among growing Asian economies.

More here

Stephen Thomsen has just published a paper(PDF) on the increasing level of private investment in Africa:
"...Private capital flows to Africa in the form of foreign direct investment (FDI) are growing. While in the past much of this investment was limited to the raw materials sector, the current wave involves firms from more countries and sectors than ever before.
• Foreign investors, including from within Africa itself, invested almost $50 billion in Africa during 2000–03. While this represents only a small share of global flows, the more relevant comparison is with the size of the African economy. By this measure sub-Saharan Africa attracts almost as much FDI as Southeast Asia.
• Although Europe remains the principal source of investment, a rising share is coming both from Asia and from within Africa itself.
• Investors have been influenced by improvements in governance, most notably with respect to the business climate, where the desire to attract foreign investors can provide a strong incentive for African governments to reform their policies and practices. Although much remains to be done, some countries have nevertheless made great progress in areas such as political and economic stabilization, privatization and simplification of cumbersome regulations.
• This foreign investment also has implications for patterns of trade and integration. Many African exports are channelled through multinational enterprises, helping to integrate African countries both with one another and with the global economy.
Via Owen.org

Benard Wasow writes"...It was not access to foreign aid or special access to Northern markets that gave Asia its advantage over Africa...The external conditions facing these two great regions were similar. The North looked out for its own interests in its dealings with Thailand as much as with Kenya...Asian success was not made in Washington — nor in G8 summits. It was made in Asia. Likewise, we have to recognize that African success ultimately will be made in Africa...the burden of stimulating economic development, the burden of allowing economic development to happen without draining it away through corruption and authoritarian regulation, does not lie in Europe or the United States...The leaders of the G8 cannot bring democracy to the Middle East, nor can they bring prosperity to Africa..."

Jonathan Power writes in the IHT:

"We are focusing on merger and acquisition in emerging markets in Asia and Africa because these places enjoy high growth rates and have great potential.",Jiang Jianqing of ICBC...The fact that a top Chinese banker brackets Africa with Asia is one more sign that the Asians themselves see what is happening in Africa as a repeat of what happened to them 20 and 30 years ago.

via PSD Blog

• Blacklooks points us to a Jezebel post on "Charity Porn" a topic we have covered earlier.

• Kim Tan of SpringHill Management argues that “FDI is the key. I’m from Asia, and that’s how Asia has developed, bringing in capital, technology and inspiring young entrepreneurs who build businesses.”-NYTimes
• Mo Ibrahim and others at Zeitgeist discuss technology as an enabler in India and Africa
• Anna Nadgrodkiewicz writes about Senegal's lost "Concrete Generation":

The government seems to be primarily concerned with investing in physical infrastructure of questionable utility to the poor, rather than reforming the country’s institutional infrastructure that would make it easier for the poor to reap the benefits of legal entrepreneurship

• My Wish List for Education in 2012 | Education Is My Life

  TEacher AJ Juliani (a Flat Classroom certified teacher) writes a beautiful and profound blog on his wish list. He understand and gets global collaboration in the classroom. Especially moving is this quote:
  
  "My wish list for Education in 2012 is centered around the belief that it is time to try “new things in new ways”. It is time to look for “Next Practices” instead of “Best Practices”. It’s time to put ideas that are unproven into practice, learn from our failures, and celebrate our successes. Here is my wish list:"
  
  Worth a read.

  tags: education globaled flatclass all_teachers bestpractices

• Educating for Global Competence: Preparing Our Youth to Engage the World

  Educating for Global Competence: Preparing Our Youth to Engage the World. written by Veronica Boix Mansilla and Anthony Jackson is now available for free here. This is a great resource for educators who want to incorporate Global Competence into their classrooms and schools.
  
  This is a PDF download.

  tags: education flatclass globalcompetence

• Global Competence - Submit Student Work Now

  The asia society would like you to submit student work relating to global competence now. Please share. There are also a lot of great links explaining this concept on this page. You can also download their free book: educating for global competence.

  tags: education flatclass globaled

• Defining and assessing global competence in teaching and learning - Harvard Dialogues on Global Education

  Harvard's components of global competence.

  tags: education flatclass globaled

• How High-Performing Nations Teach Global Skills | Asia Society

  How high performing nations teach global skills.

  tags: education flatclass globaled worldonline

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Businessweek reports:

As India's economy grows faster than ever, its newly confident companies are showing their global ambition. And India's moment is evident in the latest BusinessWeek ranking of Asia's top 50 companies. Indian outfits dominate this year's list: There are a dozen in all, ranging from automakers to a mortgage lender to pharmaceutical producers. This diversity is a surprising reversal from just a few years ago, when all the world knew about corporate India was its software shops...Look around Asia and you'll find plenty of chaebol and keiretsu that failed to make the transition from coddled, national champions to agile, profit-driven players on the global stage. In contrast, most of the Indian companies on our list endured decades of socialist rule, which starved them of capital and technology but guaranteed them a captive market. In the early 1990s, they were subjected to the shock of economic liberalization, which opened the door to foreign competition and left much of corporate India in deep trouble. Those companies that hunkered down and restructured became lean and competitive.

India's path to growth despite rickety infrastructure,turbulent politics and a burgeoning youthful population offers lessons for most of the continent. What should not be overlooked is the effect of an unfettered entrepreneurial,educated elite that by default subsumed itself in unabated wealth creation.

Great example of a country turnaround from dictatorship and corruption, Aubrey Belford reports in the NYTimes:

After years of being known for inefficiency, corruption and instability, Indonesia is emerging from the global financial crisis with a surprising new reputation — economic golden child.The country’s economy, the largest in Southeast Asia, grew at an annual rate of 6.2 percent in the second quarter of this year, data released Thursday showed. That is an acceleration from 2009, when gross domestic product expanded 4.5 percent.The stock market hit a record high last week and has been among the best-performing equities markets in Asia this year, rising more than 20 percent since Jan. 1...[continue reading]

Chandran Nair writes in the FT about the need for Asians (ditto Africans) to speak up robustly on matters that directly impact them:

As globalisation changes the world, having a worldview of Asia that is essentially shaped by western outlooks and prejudices is not just narrow-minded, it is also potentially highly dangerous. It is a view that sees economic advances by Asian countries as threats and Asian business practices as inferior. We saw this with Japan in the 1980s. We are seeing it again today with China and India.
Such an outlook alienates Asian leaders, encouraging them to take nationalist positions in response. What is needed is the emergence of a confident body of Asian intellectual leaders. Not ones who speak on behalf of Asia as a whole – that leads to the kind of “Asian values” nonsense that we heard far too much about in the 1990s.

Ory Okolloh in a similar vein states that:

I’m tired of the Bono’s and Sach’s of this world articulating my views as an African. It’s one of the reasons I’m very quick to respond to media requests for interviews, profiles, etc. (I really could be a media slut) - I think it’s important for Africans to get our views out there

She wonders whether:

“Will No One Let Africa Speak for Itself?

Over the last few posts I've been critical of Obama, not because of who he is, but because of the incompetence of his administration. Here is just one more small example of this incompetence, from the Journal of the American Enterprise Institute:

How to evaluate the results of last week’s China-U.S. summit in Washington? Improbably, the key for the entire event may lie in what is usually the least memorable portion of these carefully choreographed occasions: the cultural program at the concluding state banquet.

During the dinner’s musical interlude and following a duet with American jazz musician Herbie Hancock, Chinese pianist Lang Lang treated the assembled dignitaries to a solo of what he described as “a Chinese song: ‘My Motherland.’” (You can watch this on YouTube.)

The Chinese delegation was clearly delighted: Chinese President and Communist Party chief Hu Jintao, stone-faced for many of his other photo ops in Washington, beamed with pleasure upon hearing the melody and embraced Lang Lang at the song’s conclusion (see it on YouTube too). President Obama, for his part, amiably praised Lang Lang for his performance and described the event as "an extraordinary evening."

But what, exactly, is this “gorgeous” and “beautiful” (Hu’s words) tune that so entranced China’s visiting leadership?

“My Motherland” is not a “Chinese song” in any ordinary meaning of the term. Instead, it is a Mao-era propaganda classic: the theme from "Triangle Hill" (Shangganling), a film in which heroic Chinese forces fight, kill, and eventually beat Americans in pitched battle during the Korean War.

“My Motherland” epitomizes the “Resist America, Aid [North] Korea” campaign that Beijing embraced during and after the Korean War. It celebrates Sino-American enmity.

“My Motherland” is still famous in China; indeed, it is well-known to practically every Chinese adult to this very day. Unfortunately, this political anthem and its significance were evidently unknown to the many members of the administration’s China team—the secretary and deputy secretary of State, the assistant secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific, and the National Security Council’s top two Asia experts—who were on hand at the state dinner and heard this serenade. Clueless about the nature of the insult, they did not know to warn the president that he would embarrass himself and his country by not only sitting through the song, but by congratulating Lang Lang for it afterward.

Although Americans are often tone-deaf to cadences of symbolism in international relations, the Chinese are not. And for Chinese audiences, the symbolism of performing “My Motherland” to a host of uncomprehending barbarians in the White House itself hardly required explanation. This was a triumph of sorts for a newly assertive, and more nakedly anti-American, strain in Chinese foreign policy. The episode has reportedly already gone viral over the Chinese Internet, where the buzz on this crude and deliberate snub is overwhelmingly and enthusiastically positive. Hu can thus return home confident his visit to America will widely be regarded as a success domestically— for reasons his American counterparts do not yet seem to comprehend...

...If American policy makers are to avoid unpleasant surprises in their dealings with China in the years ahead, they must pay far more attention to official Chinese pronouncements, commentary, and doctrine. All too often, American security specialists—and even China watchers—are inclined to disregard official Chinese speechifying as so much boring palaver. The problem is that in a controlled society, official words matter. Sometimes, even songs do.

Although I don't blame Obama for not knowing that the song he was so approving of was an anti-US song, I do blame Obama for surrounding himself with people who didn't know it and weren't able to let him know that he was being insulted. America is being played as a fool too much by this administration, and it might be because we have a fool in the White House.

In PoliticalArticles:

At the time of decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s, the level of economic development in most of Asia was comparable with that of Africa. For instance, four decades ago, the per capita income of South Korea was comparable with that of the Sudan in Africa. However, since the 1960s, South Korea has achieved an incredible record of growth to become one of the 26 richest countries in the world and was able to join the trillion dollar club of world economies in 2004 while the Sudan is still one of the 33 Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in sub Saharan Africa (SSA)...[continue reading]

Matthew Lockwood writes on the need for non-standard remedies in Africa, he states "...What Africa needs is to shake off its dependence on primary commodity exports, a problem underlying not only its marginalisation from world trade but also its chronic debt problems. Many countries rely today on as narrow a range of agricultural and mineral products as they did 30 years ago, and suffer the consequences of inex orably declining export earnings. Again, the campaigners' remedy - to improve market access for African exports to Europe and America - is wide of the mark. While imperfect, various preferential schemes already give the poorest African countries excellent market access.To understand how Africa might diversify we must look elsewhere, to the experience of east and south-east Asia. Not only have these countries revolutionised their trade performance in the last four decades to become world leaders in everything from clothing to computers, they have also achieved the holy grail of broad-based growth. The "Asian miracle" has seen countries poorer than their African counterparts in the 1960s virtually eradicate $1-a-day poverty today. If you really want to know how to make poverty history, it is this transformation that you must grasp..."

Based on figures from a 1999 report by the GAO, Bill Clinton's trip to Africa cost $42.8 million dollars. He took 1,300 individuals (not including the Secret Service) and was gone 12 days. That works out to roughly $3.57 million a day. Based on this information, we can take some guesses at how much President Barack Obama's upcoming trip to India is going to cost US taxpayers.

First, Obama will only be traveling around Asia for 10 days (3 days in India, rest in Indonesia where he grew up, South Korea, and Japan), so let's lower the cost down to $35.7M. But he is taking over 3,000 people (including Secret Service), so let's guess on the lower side and just double the cost, to give us a price tag of $71.4M. Let's now adjust for inflation from 1999 to today- that will give us a price tag of about $91.07M.

It is reasonable to assume that the Taj Mahal Hotel, where Obama plans to stay, is considerably more expensive than wherever Clinton stayed in 1999, and it is also reasonable to assume that the cost of moving warships off the coast of India for protection and hiring people to knock down coconuts so they don't fall on the President's head are costs that Clinton did not incur. Plus, we know that President Obama and his wife and retinue have a taste for the finer things (see my post Barack Obama's Wagyu Steaks) that Bubba did not really flaunt. Obama will probably try to get in a round of golf while he is there or maybe take in a cricket match, so add those costs to the total too. I'm not an economist, I think it would be reasonable to put a price tag on this trip of $200 million.

So the White House is correct and the Republicans are wrong. It is not going to cost US taxpayers who are battling a recession $200 million dollars a day that we don't have to send the President on a globe-trotting trip with all his buddies to live it up in 5-star hotels. It will only cost us $200 million overall.

For fun, check out Trillion with a T: How to Spend $1,000,000,000,000.00.

Julius Court and Toru Yanagihara suggest strategy alternatives for African countries in a world of globalisation "...Most countries in Africa are small and poor, making an inward looking strategy unattractive. Significant advances in economic development in Africa in the future will depend in no small part on the success with which countries can exploit the opportunities and avoid the risks presented by globalisation. A viable outward oriented strategy for countries in Africa will have to reflect the structure of the economy and endowments relative to other parts of the world. On the first point, the primary sector dominates most economies in Africa. On the second, Africa has low levels of human capital in comparison to other regions. The familiar proposition seems to hold – for most countries in Africa comparative advantage lies in primary production and unskilled labour-intensive primary processing...Given the long gestation period of investments in human capital, this is likely to remain the situation for many years to come..."

Finance Asia reports:

The overall African economy is expected to grow at 6.2% in 2007, compared with 5.5% in 2006. Countries such as Ghana, Botswana, Uganda, Zambia, Mozambique, Namibia and Nigeria are showing gross domestic product growth rates that are three- to four-times faster than those of the developed economies in the Euro zone. The Ghana Stock Exchange is one of the world’s best performing stock markets, while Botswana boasts one of the highest per capita government savings rates in the world