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Trending today–
Lakoff: How to Rescue the American Dream from the GOP's Nightmare
Trending today–
Lakoff: How to Rescue the American Dream from the GOP's Nightmare
Leadership
What’s Involved In Reinventing Education?
Steve Denning
Forbes ASAP 4 August 2011
The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
Albert Einstein
The US education system is in crisis, putting the long-term future of the economy in question. The evidence is well-known. A root cause of the crisis is the application of the factory model of management to education, where everything is arranged for the scalability and efficiency of “the system”, to which the students, the teachers and the parents have to adjust. “The system” grinds forward, at ever increasing cost and declining efficiency, dispiriting students, teachers and parents alike.
Startup Aims to Get the Poor Online With Phone Numbers
U.K. startup Movirtu plans to help 3 million or more people in poor countries use mobile services by giving them personal phone numbers, not phones.
Working with a U.N.-affiliated initiative called Business Call to Action (BCtA), Movirtu will offer the numbers, which it calls mobile identities, through commercial carriers in developing countries in Africa and South Asia. People in those countries who typically borrow phones from others will be able to log into the carrier's network and use their own prepaid minutes and bits of data.
The service is called Cloud Phone, though it operates within a carrier's own infrastructure rather than on the Internet as a classic cloud service would. Having a personal mobile identity can save users money in two ways, according to Ramona Liberoff, executive vice president of marketing, strategy and planning at Movirtu. First, they can use mobile services without buying a phone, which is a luxury even at US$15 or $20 for people making $1 or $2 per day.
Second, the cost of prepaid service from a carrier typically is less than what consumers in those countries pay someone to borrow a phone, she said. Though it's customary in many of these countries to lend a phone to someone in need, the borrower is also expected to pay the lender for the usage. The average savings from using regular prepaid service instead is estimated at about $60 per year, Liberoff said.
The service will help people to use mobile banking, insurance and farming assistance services as well as make phone calls, Liberoff said. Some of these services currently can only be delivered to individuals and not to someone sharing a phone. Personal mobile identities could be a boon to NGOs (non-governmental organizations) that want to use mobile technology.
See Also:
Continue reading “UN + Start-Up Seek to Get Poor Online with Cell Numbers”
This is interesting!
EXTRACT (12 Literacies)
01 Play: the capacity to experiment with one's surroundings as a form of problem-solving. Having a strong sense of play can be helpful when you pick up a new piece of technology that you've never used before, when you're trying to write an essay and your outline isn't functioning as you'd hoped, and when you're designing anything at all, from a dress to a web page to a concert's program.
02 Performance: the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery. Being able to move fluidly and effectively between roles can help you when you're exploring online communities, when you're trying to decide what actions are ethical, and when you're shuffling between home, work and school.
03 Simulation: the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes. Being able to interpret, manipulate and create simulations can help you understand innumerable complex systems, like ecologies and computer networks – and make you better at playing video games!
Continue reading “Pierre Levy: New Media Literacies (12 of Them)”
What does this tell us about the intelligence and cultural literacy of the FBI training “leaders?”
FBI Recommended ‘Complete Idiot's Guide,' Anti-Muslim Books To New Agents
The FBI was telling new bureau recruits as recently as Jan. 2009 that Islam “transforms [a] country's culture into 7th Century Arabian ways” and recommending a book written by one of Norwegian terrorism suspect Anders Behring Breivik's favorite authors as well as the Complete Idiot's Guide To Understanding Islam.
. . . . . . .
It's been well established that anti-Muslim self-proclaimed counterterrorism experts — often times funded by federal grants — have been giving advice to state and local law enforcement officers for years. But the fact that the nation's top law enforcement agency was pointing new federal agents to bigoted material as recently as 2009 came as a surprise to those who have seen this stuff before.
Dear friends,
Every now and then potentially game changing innovations show up. Wikileaks is one of them, something that shifts the relationship between centralized power and broader national and international populations. We don't know what exactly will happen with it, but we do know that we're on a different playing field now.
I want to highlight two other potential game changers.
1. THE KHAN ACADEMY
2. CREWFUND
Details below the line…