Schooling is the best way to fight terror & under development

What i stated in the title is no news, but it is always encouraging to see someone really making a difference and putting theory to practice: Enter Greg Mortenson

Greg is a mountaineer who "climbed Pakistan’s K2, the world’s second highest mountain in the Karakoram range.

While recovering from the climb in a village called Korphe, Mortenson met a group of children sitting in the dirt writing with sticks in the sand, and made a promise to help them build a school.

From that rash promise, grew a remarkable humanitarian campaign, in which Mortenson has dedicated his life to promote education, especially for girls, in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

As of 2009, Mortenson has established over 90 schools in rural and often volatile regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, which provide education to over 34,000 children, including 24,000 girls, where few education opportunities existed before."

Chapeau - it is a reminder that we can all really make a difference if we choose to do so!

Greg has written a book about his venture - read about it @ www.threecupsoftea.com

What educators (and other media/) can learn (or Scott McCloud rocks)

when you understand experience as the basis for learning, and when you realized that new social multimedia networks are replacing old text-book / frontal teaching knowledge container transfer methods; then Scott McCloud's TED talk about how human storytelling evolved to the high art of comic books, should be inspiring regarding how we can/should/must design knowledge ecologies that take advantage of the this amazing n-dimensional interactive canvas that is cyberspace.

Best Docu on Kids and the Internet

my sister always asks me what she should allow her kids to do online. It's a difficult question to answer, because she doesn't really understand what's going on so everytime i end up explaining here what this or that service is in the first place.

But as a good uncle i do reflect quite a bit about what my nephews and nice should be doing online and from a professional perspective i am really intrigued to understand how they can exploit the net for learning and "contextual intelligence booster'(checking wikipedia etc.).

Anyways PBS has produced a really good documentary about the reasons why kids love their online lifes and what's good and what's bad about it. I really have to say that this is probably the best docu on the subject i have ever seen!

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/view/main.html

Supercool Philosophy - Learning to be Free

I have recently written some substantial blogposts on the supercoolschool blog:

Supercool Philosophy - Learning to be Free

Is the most profound one as i am sharing the first 1.0 of the educational philosophy of supercool school. It links to the full text (22 pages) and a shortened manifesto (3 pages)

Supercool School will set minds on fire

Is a review of John Seely Brown's Minds on Fire. It elaborates on the multitude of synergies of his text and the supercool philosophy.

Supercool learning = to inquire and to create

Is a review of a 1971 text by Noam Chomsky. The text entitled "Toward a humanistic conception of education" also has several great passages that align perfectly with the educational approach of supercool school.

Entrepreneurship @ Stanford

I just published a post @ entrepreneurship.de listing all the interesting entrepreneurship activities i found here at stanford.

You find it @ labor.entrepreneurship.de/blog/entrepreneurship-stanford/

Kurzweil's Vision for the Furture of Education

Some days ago i wrote a post about the eminent scientist, entrepreneur, and futurologist Ray Kurzweil and his vision of Singularity. Now the book has arrived and i am fascinated, still quite curious and a bit amused about his radical optimism. Enjoy these words about what the next generation of virtual worlds after Second Life will have to offer:

"Because of current bandwidth limitations and the lack of effective three-dimensional displays, the virtual environment provided today through routine Web access does not yet fully compete with 'being there', but that will change. In the early part of the second decade of this century visual-auditory virtual-reality environments will be full immersion, very high resolution, and very convincing. Most colleges will follow MIT's lead, and students will increasingly attend classes virtually. Virtual environments will provide high-quality virtual laboritories where experiments can be conducted in chemistry, nuclear physics, or any other scientific field. Students will be able to interact with a virtual Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Edison, or even to become a virtual Thomas Jefferson. Classes will be available for all grade levels in many languages. The devises needed to enter these high-quality, high-resolution virtual classrooms will be ubiquitous and affordable even in third world countries. Students at any age, from toddlers to adults, will be able to access the best education in the world at any time and from any place" (Kurzweil, R., 2005, The singularity is near, p. 337)

The bright side of the future

[Note: This post was also published in Spanish @ Creamos el Futuro]

Listening to futurologist, inventor and researcher Ray Kurzweil is highly stimulating in the sense that one recharges the battery labeled "the future might turn out really fantastic after all".

Kurzweil holds around 12 doctor titles and seems to have been participating in or leading virtually all important applied AI and human computer interface projects in the last 30 years. I learned about his work following up on the references of futurologist Tom Lombardo, who in his paper "The Pursuit of Wisdom and the Future of Education" puts forward the very support worthy argument for 'deep learning' and aiming to have students understand the 'big picture' rather than narrow vocational techniques.

But let's return to Kurzweil: In 2005 he has published the book The Singularity Is Near, in which he examines "the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our own creations.
That merging is the essence of the Singularity, an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity. " [1]

I just ordered it so i can't review it yet, but what i learned about his take on reality and future creation in the video "The Singularity: A Hard or Soft Takeoff?" taken at the Stanford Singularity Conference, had this very positive forward looking effect I mentioned above.

What's more is that Kurzweil seems to have a distinct entrepreneurial mindset with a stress on knowledge entrepreneurship: One of his latest inventions - a portable camera with integrated text-to-voice making texts and webpages accessible to the blind - illustrate his entrepreneurial motivation: He has is focusing his work around the realization of knowledge/research opportunities, whereby he aims at developing technology meant to give impaired folks more equal opportunities, and he is professionally commercializing the output through a dedicated private enterprise Kurzweil Educational Systems

That's the spirit and the future we want to create!