Glimpse – Your Stories From Abroad

Posted on August 4, 2009 by MikeT

This is an interesting site, supported largely by National Geographic. It’s composed of user-generated content, but it is professionally edited which, to be honest, I find to be a nice balance.

Glimpse is a community of globally Try to reduce your consumption of coffee and alcohol if you have circulatory problems and eat foods rich in vitamin C and viagra uk E. Experts said, women must pay attention to irregular menstruations, or tube blockage may occur and cause infertility in men, for urine infection influences the appearance and transportation of sperms, make them have low activity and high rate for abnormality, it can even cause the atrophy wouroud.com wholesale prices viagra of testicle, and lead to oligospermia or obstruction of spermaduct. This will augment the male libido and mitigate some of cialis cheapest the better-known cults. Erectile dysfunction is a disorder which cheap levitra online is faced by men where he is not able to satisfy their partner sexually. minded young people who like sharing stories about life abroad. All of our content comes from people who are living or have recently lived overseas.

via share your story – Glimpse – Your Stories From Abroad.

University of Michigan’s Islamic Manuscripts collection going online – AnnArbor.com

Posted on August 2, 2009 by MikeT

This is an interesting project, an effort to turn the cataloging of a distinct and unusual set of texts to the scholarly community as a whole.

The University of Michigan Special Collections Library needs help cataloguing its vast Islamic Manuscripts Collection.

But the library doesn’t plan to hire an expert. Instead, almost all of its 1,250 pieces are being scanned in-house to put the work on the Internet.

And the library hopes interested scholars will get involved…
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“It will be presented to the public in Wiki or blog-type interface, so people can comment on what they see. In that way, we hope we can get help from scholars all over the world in identifying the manuscripts and cataloguing them properly,” said Peggy Daub, director of Special Collections.

Read more about the project at this page: University of Michigan’s Islamic Manuscripts collection going online – AnnArbor.com.

(Thanks to Nancy Millichap)

Maths and science to be taught in English – The National Newspaper

Posted on August 2, 2009 by MikeT

ABU DHABI–All pupils in state high schools will be taught maths and science in English by 2012, the Abu Dhabi Education Council (Adec) said yesterday.

At the launch of its 10-year strategic plan, Adec said it aimed to see pupils graduating with equal proficiency in English and Arabic.

In a concerted effort to turn out better qualified school-leavers, from this August the school day will also be extended by 90 minutes in all state high schools in the emirate. Pupils in all Abu Dhabi’s state schools will study for 10 extra days a year.

It follows the publication of results showing that only 13 per cent of applicants to federal universities scored enough in their English exams to bypass remedial courses.

via Maths and science to be taught in English – The National Newspaper.

Language of instruction is always a sensitive issue in the Arab world for a number of reasons: practical, political and religious, among others. Arabic is regarding by Muslims as a sacred language, the language in God revealed the Holy Qur’an to the Prophet Muhammad, so for many it has a special status above all others.
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It also has a special status as an identity marker. To speak Arabic was to resist colonial rule or cultural imperialism from the West. And it is seen as a factor that unifies folks across the region beyond religious ties. There are Muslim Arabs, there are Christian Arabs and their are even Arabic-speaking Jews.

Arabizing curricula is often a way of asserting a unique, independent identity. That said, though, Arabization is quite controversial in places where there are minority populations that don’t speak Arabic as a native language.

English, on the other hand, is unquestionably the dominant world language at the moment and there is a certain practicality in acquiescing to that.

In terms of practicality, transforming the language of instruction is always difficult and some of the challenges are pointed out in this article. Are teachers trained in one language capable of teaching a subject in another? If you are changing a language of instruction, when do you do so? Will the College student who was taught a subject in one language follow when they are taught in another?

It’s all very interesting. I’ll be following how it goes.

Silicon Valley should step up, help Iranians

Posted on August 1, 2009 by MikeT

In a recent SF Gate Open Forum Post, Cyrus Farivar, a freelance technology journalist from California, looks at the ways in which technology has been used as a tool in the pro-democracy movement, official efforts to thrwart that, and technology developments that had made it more difficult for them to do so. He writes

But now that Iran has been experiencing turmoil surrounding its recent election, many Bay Area technology leaders finally realize the importance their technology and services can play in shaping world events. As foreign media have been kicked out of the country, information technology services suddenly have become a crucial tool to get and receive information from Iran.

Twitter famously received a call from the U.S. Department of State nearly two weeks ago asking the company to postpone its scheduled maintenance to suit those in Tehran’s time zone, rather than those on Pacific time.

Facebook recently added Persian language support for its iconic social networking site. Google took things to an entirely new level by launching its Persian version of Google translate, which allows for decent machine translation between English and Persian and vice versa. But why this newfound attention to the Persian language (and Iran) took so long remains a mystery. Google’s translation capability for Estonian even came online before Persian.

Farivar believes there is much to hope for from technology, but that its potential is not being realized.

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So instead of superficial support, like Twitter users changing their avatars to green to support Iran’s reformist movement, Silicon Valley minds and money should pool resources as a way to help Iranians get around this information blockade by providing easier-to-use proxies, anonymizers and maybe even unfiltered Internet access through hardware.

Long-range Wi-Fi, 3G, satellite or other wireless communications devices from Iran’s neighboring countries or even the Persian Gulf could be used to get faster and better information in and out of Iran. One Arizona company, Space Data, even advertises the capability to use helium-filled balloons to provide Internet and mobile phone access. Much of Iran could theoretically be covered with one or two such balloons.

All of that may sound crazy, but not helping Iranian reformers at their darkest hour would be even crazier.

Read the whole article at: Silicon Valley should step up, help Iranians, the San Francisco Chronicle.

Three Bloggers Arrested in Egypt on the Same Day

Posted on July 29, 2009 by MikeT

Sometimes it’s dangerous to blog in Egypt.

Reporters Without Borders calls on the Egyptian authorities to explain why police arrested three bloggers – Abdel Rahman Ayyash, Magdi Saad and Ahmad Abu This not only spoils the fun and generic cialis excitement but also you lost pleasurable memory right there. Sildenafil Citrate and nitrate both http://www.tonysplate.com/Kitrics_Digital_Nutritional_Scale_Instruction_Manual.pdf pfizer viagra sales loosen up the blood vessels acquire stiff (arteriosclerosis), the proper blood transmission on the pennies is clogged. There are order tadalafil no prescription certain side effects of this drug too. DOSAGE OF cheap viagra pfizer TO BEAT IMPOTENCE The dosage of this particular ED medication, even the most common side effects of these medicines include headache, dizziness, nasal congestion, impaired vision, photophobia, and indigestion to name a few. Khalil – last week, two of them on their return from a trip abroad. All three were arrested on the same day, 21 July….

via Reporters Sans Frontières.

When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom

Posted on July 21, 2009 by MikeT

There is something of a backlash against the use of technology in the classroom, and this article, “When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom,” from The Chronicle of Higher Education is one example of it.

College leaders usually brag about their tech-filled “smart” classrooms, but a dean at Southern Methodist University is proudly removing computers from lecture halls. José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, has challenged his colleagues to “teach naked” — by which he means, sans machines.

More than anything else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather than using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web. When students reflect on their college years later in life, they’re going to remember challenging debates and talks with their professors. Lively interactions are what teaching is all about, he says, but those give-and-takes are discouraged by preset collections of slides.

Bowen makes good points. It is an interesting article with a fair amount of food for thought. For example, it is interesting, though not surprising, that in a study published in the April Issue of British Educational Research, students gave low marks to computer-assisted classroom learning activities. Nor does it surprise me that,

“The least boring teaching methods were found to be seminars, practical sessions, and group discussions,” said the report. In other words, tech-free classrooms were the most engaging.

I am an advocate of teaching with technology, one might even say an evangelist. But it is not used effectively and it is for this reason that students find it boring. A great deal of the technology that is developed for pedagogical purposes is developed for individual learning and is not meant to be brought into the classroom to begin with. That is not to say it is not appropriate for a course, but it should be integrated for the purposes for which it was intended.
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The second thing to remember is that technology for technology’s sake is never the end, so technology should never be used for its own sake. Unless technology is the subject of the course such as it might be in a course on new media or something of that nature, then it is a tool and should attract no more attention than the chalk board. It should serve an end.

The one thing to always keep in mind is to put pedagogy first. Before making use of any technology or tool from a DVD player to a complex video simulation, ask yourself what it will teach students and if the technology is the most effective way to do it.. You use a specific tool for a specific purpose, so that is the rule to love by. One should never teach with blogs just to be teaching with them or with any technology simply for purposes of teaching with that technology, but rather for purposes of teaching, full stop.

Anyway, the expderiment at SMU is an interesting one. Read the full article to check it out.

International Bac chooses Epals

Posted on July 16, 2009 by MikeT

International Baccalaureate has selected ePals, Inc., to implement and manage a customized hosted learning community for it’s students, teachers and other community members including administration and alumni. The International Baccalaureate is a nonprofit educational foundation with programs for students aged 3 to 19 that can be found in 2,704 schools in 138 countries. Programs aim to

help develop the intellectual, personal, emotional and social skills to live, learn and work in a rapidly globalizing world.

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