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"Call it counterintuitive clickbait if you must, but Forbes' Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry made an intriguing argument when he granted the title of "Language of the Future" to French, of all tongues. "French isn't mostly spoken by French people and hasn't been for a long time now," he admits," but "the language is growing fast, and growing in the fastest-growing areas of the world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. The latest projection is that French will be spoken by 750 million people by 2050. One study "even suggests that by that time, French could be the most-spoken language in the world, ahead of English and even Mandarin." I don't know about you, but I can never believe in any wave of the future without a traceable past. But the French language has one, of course, and a long and storied one at that. You see it visualized in the information graphic above (also available in suitable-for-framing prints!) created by Minna Sundberg, author of the webcomic Stand Still. Stay Silent. "When linguists talk about the historical relationship between languages, they use a tree metaphor," writes Mental Floss' Arika Okrent. "An ancient source (say, Indo-European) has various branches (e.g., Romance, Germanic), which themselves have branches (West Germanic, North Germanic), which feed into specific languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian)." Sundberg takes this tree metaphor to a delightfully lavish extreme, tracing, say, how Indo-European linguistic roots sprouted a variety of modern-day living languages including Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Italian - and, of course, our Language of the Future. The size of the branches and bunches of leaves represent the number of speakers of each language at different times: the likes of English and Spanish have sprouted into mighty vegetative clusters, while others, like, Swedish, Dutch, and Punjabi, assert a more local dominance over their own, separately grown regional branches. Will French's now-modest leave

"With little water, scorching temperatures, and not much arable land, the UAE currently imports 80% of its food. Can it go local? In an industrial park built off a highway in the arid land between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, a sprawling new indoor farm will soon grow tomatoes under LED lights in a climate-controlled warehouse near a plastic production facility and other factories. The farm, the first in the world to commercially grow tomatoes solely under artificial light, is one part of a push to transform food production in the United Arab Emirates, where 80% of food is imported. The government realizes that to be resilient, it will need to find new ways to grow food in a desert climate with little rain and temperatures that regularly stay above 100 degrees."

"It seems only fitting to explore the role of questions in education by asking questions about the process of doing so. I propose that we start with the customary way of framing this topic and then proceed to questions that are deeper and potentially more subversive of traditional schooling. 1. WHICH QUESTIONS? To begin, let's consider what we might ask our students. The least interesting questions are those with straightforward factual answers. That's why a number of writers have encouraged the use of questions described variously as "true" (Wolf, 1987), "essential" (Simon, 2002), "generative" (Perkins, 1992; Perrone, 1998), "guiding" (Traver, 1998), or "fertile" (Harpaz & Lefstein, 2000). What the best of these share is that they're open-ended. Sometimes, in fact, no definitive right answer can be found at all. And even when there is one - or at least when there is reason to prefer some responses to others - the answer isn't obvious and can't be summarized in a sentence. Why is it so hard to find a cure for cancer? Do numbers ever end? Why do people lie? Why did we invade Vietnam? Grappling with meaty questions like these (which were among those generated by a class in Plainview, NY) is a real project . . . literally. A question-based approach to teaching tends to shade into learning that is problem- (Delisle, 1997) and project-based (Kilpatrick, 1918; Blumenfeld et al., 1991; Wolk, 1998). Intellectual proficiency is strengthened as students figure out how to do justice to a rich question. As they investigate and come to understand important ideas more fully, new questions arise along with better ways of asking them, and the learning spirals upwards. Guiding students through this process is not a technique that can be stapled onto our existing pedagogy, nor is it something that teachers can be trained to master during an in-service day. What's required is a continual focus on creating a classroom that is about thinking rather

"EdX is a nonprofit online initiative created by founding partners Harvard and MIT and composed of dozens of leading global institutions, the xConsortium. EdX offers interactive online courses and MOOCs from the world's best universities and institutions. Open edX is the open source platform that powers edX courses. Through our commitment to the open source vision, edX code is freely available to the community. Institutions can host their own instances of Open edX and offer their own classes. Educators can extend the platform to build learning tools that precisely meet their needs. And developers can contribute new features to the Open edX platform. Our goal is to build a thriving worldwide community of educators and technologists who share innovative solutions to benefit students everywhere. We invite you to explore Open edX and participate in our growing movement. Frequently Asked Questions What is Open edX? The Open edX platform is a free--and open source--course management system (CMS) that was originally developed by edX. The Open edX platform is used all over the world to host Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as well as smaller classes and training modules."

"A webinar can take many forms, such as a meeting, presentation, or workshop. The main difference between running a webinar and simply posting a video is the interactive component the former offers. Attendees typically view webinars in real time, and there is often the option for them to participate by asking and/or answering questions. This type of seminar offers an excellent opportunity to add a personal touch to your platform and engage your customers. For example, Neil Patel uses webinars frequently to reach out to visitors of his traffic growing website. Step #1: Create a Google Account Step #2: Create a New Event in YouTube Live Step #3: Customize Your Webinar Step #4: Embed Your Webinar in Your WordPress Website Step #5: Invite Attendees Step #6: Broadcast Your Webinar"

"Max Roser (2016) - 'World Poverty'. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of-prosperity/world-poverty/ In the past only a small elite lived a life without poverty. Since the onset of industrialization - and as a consequence of this, economic growth1 - the share of people living in poverty started decreasing and has kept on falling ever since. But as a consequence of falling poverty, the health of the population improved dramatically over the last two centuries, and the population started to grow.2 The growth of the population caused the absolute number of poor people in the world to increase; only recently has the absolute number of people living in poverty started to fall as well. This data entry chronicles the falling poverty over the last centuries."

"Our new blog is designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content. Low-tech Magazine was born in 2007 and has seen minimal changes ever since. Because a website redesign was long overdue - and because we try to practice what we preach - we decided to build a low-tech, self-hosted, and solar-powered version of Low-tech Magazine. The new blog is designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content. Why a Low-tech Website? We were told that the Internet would "dematerialise" society and decrease energy use. Contrary to this projection, it has become a large and rapidly growing consumer of energy itself. In order to offset the negative consequences associated with high energy consumption, renewable energy has been proposed as a means to lower emissions from powering data centers. For example, Greenpeace's yearly ClickClean report ranks major Internet companies based on their use of renewable power sources."

"This is not an environmental book, even though it is concerned with the environment. It is not a book to save the world, even though the world is clearly in trouble. Ultimately, A Matter Of Scale is a book about survival; about ensuring that every individual human has the means to save herself or himself from the crisis that is unfolding. And there most certainly is a crisis; like the waves of a surging river; small and irregular at first, but growing larger, creating whirlpools, rising in treacherous white water, and eventually inundating everything in its path. People know that the climate is changing, that species are being removed from the Earth at a rapidly increasing rate, that entire ecosystems are becoming shadows of their former richness; they know, but they do not understand. The environmental crisis is closing in on humanity from all directions, yet the crisis barely registers on this culture's list of problems. As we stand, humanity is doomed to a collapse that will leave only a few nomads, and a toxic, barely survivable Earth in its wake."

"In the Maasai community where Richard Turere lives with his family, cattle are all-important. But lion attacks were growing more frequent. In this short, inspiring talk, the young inventor shares the solar-powered solution he designed to safely scare the lions away."

"This book YOUNG & CREATIVE - Digital Technologies Empowering Children in Everyday Life aims to catch different examples where children and youth have been active and creative by their own initiative, driven by intrinsic motivation, personal interests and peer relations. We want to show the opportunities of digital technologies for creative processes of children and young people. The access to digital technology and its growing convergence has allowed young people to experiment active roles as cultural producers. Participation becomes a keyword when "consumers take media into their own hands". Digital technologies offer the potential of different forms of participatory media culture, and finally creative practices. YOUNG and CREATIVE is a mix of research articles, interviews and case studies. The target audience of this book is students, professionals and researchers working in the field of education, communication, children and youth studies, new literacy studies and media and information literacy."

"New scientific research is quietly rewriting the fundamentals of economics. The new economic science shows decisively that the age of endlessly growing industrial capitalism, premised on abundant fossil fuel supplies, is over. The long-decline of capitalism-as-we-know-it, the new science shows, began some decades ago, and is on track to accelerate well before the end of the 21st century. With capitalism-as-we-know it in inexorable decline, the urgent task ahead is to rewrite economics to fit the real-world: and, accordingly, to redesign our concepts of value and prosperity, precisely to rebuild our societies with a view of adapting to this extraordinary age of transition."

"Around the world, almost 1 million plastic bottles are purchased every minute. As the environmental impact of that tide of plastic becomes a growing political issue, major packaged goods sellers and retailers are under pressure to cut the flow of the single-use bottles and containers that are clogging the world's waterways. "

"Farmer N'Da Alphonse grows cocoa and has never seen the finished product. "To be honest I do not know what they make of my beans, " says farmer N'Da Alphonse. "I've heard they're used as flavoring in cooking, but I've never seen it. I do not even know if it's true." vpro Metropolis was a video project by Dutch broadcast organisation vpro, that ran from 2008 to 2015. Metropolis is made by a global collective of young filmmakers and TV producers, reporting on remarkable stories from their own country/city. We made a trip around the globe on one single issue: from local beauty ideals to Elvis impersonators, to what's it like being gay, or an outcast or a dog in different cultures."