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"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."

"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

"To mark last month's World Teachers' Day (sponsored by UNESCO , the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), photographers from Reuters took pictures around the world of educators with their students in a telling exhibit of the very different circumstances under which children attend school. Here are 15 pictures taken by Reuters photographers, revealing the spectrum of "classrooms" - from those with literally no resources to those well-stocked and housed."

"It has me thinking about what it would mean to improve online classes. A few ideas come to mind: Use multiple platforms. I'm not against using an LMS as a central hub. However, I think it's valuable to experiment with the types of productivity tools you will actually use outside of a classroom. Use Google Docs to share ideas, create surveys, and ask questions. Use Google Hangouts to meet as a group. Go project-based. I haven't figured this out entirely with my first class but my hope is that we can go fully project-based in the same way that my face-to-face class is. In fact, the asynchronous nature of online classes actually means there is a better potential of creating a project-based culture that mirrors the way people actually work on projects. Make something together. I use a collaboration grid with co-creating and communicating on separate spectrums (x-axis) and multimedia and text on another spectrum (y-axis). This has been an effective way to think through collaborative tools that allow students to co-create. Embrace a synchronous/asynchronous blend: I love using Voxer because students can speak back and forth in the moment. However, if they miss it, they can listen to it later. The same is true of using a Google Hangouts On Air. Make it more connective. We tend to treat online instruction as if it is a linear process and we don't do enough to link things back and forth and connect ideas, resources, discussions and content creation in a seamless, back-and-forth nature. Incorporate multimedia. It's a simple idea, but I create a short video at the beginning of each week and I encourage students to create video and audio as well. This has a way of making things more concrete. There's something deeply human about hearing an actual human voice. I know, crazy, right? Go mobile. I don't simply mean use a smart phone. I mean assign some things that allow students to get out in the world and create videos, snap pictures, or simpl

"This is a story about clothing. It's about the clothes we wear, the people who make them, and the impact the industry is having on our world. The price of clothing has been decreasing for decades, while the human and environmental costs have grown dramatically. The True Cost is a groundbreaking documentary film that pulls back the curtain on the untold story and asks us to consider, who really pays the price for our clothing? Filmed in countries all over the world, from the brightest runways to the darkest slums, and featuring interviews with the world's leading influencers including Stella McCartney, Livia Firth and Vandana Shiva, The True Cost is an unprecedented project that invites us on an eye opening journey around the world and into the lives of the many people and places behind our clothes."

"In 1973, near the height of the 'population bomb' panic, a computing programme called World1 offered up some predictions for the future. It anticipated a grim picture for humanity based on current trajectories. Tracing categories such as population, pollution and natural-resource usage, World1 calculated that, by 2040, human civilisation would collapse - a century after the best year to have been alive on the planet: 1940. This film was originally broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) News as part of a report on predictions for the coming decades made by cutting-edge computing technology and leading thinkers of the time. The second segment features interviews with members of the Club of Rome, an elite think tank composed of government officials, academics and business leaders focused on the future of humanity. Their view is a bit sunnier, anticipating a world where global governments are forced to cooperate to solve complex problems, people widen their cultural horizons and work fewer hours, and limited consumption - not wealth - becomes a mark of prestige. Viewed today, it makes for an engrossing artifact, raising far more questions than it answers about humanity's ability to effectively predict its future and correct its course."

"The Kaua Moho was the last species of it's entire genus and it was the last genus in it's family. This male was not just the last of his kind, he was the last being on his entire branch of the evolutionary tree, there was nothing left on the planet that was even close to being like him. That kind of loneliness is unimaginable. No other avian family has had every single species within it go completely extinct in modern times. Different species of Moho lived on each island of Hawaii and their evolutionary cousins the kioea birds lived alongside them, but starting in 1800 (about the time Europeans started arriving to the islands in significant numbers and also about the time the native human population of Hawaii also got decimated by diseases) one by one they died out due to the introduction of foreign avian diseases and parasites, habitat loss, and hunting for their plumage. 2 hurricanes within 10 years of each other finished them off. They are all gone and that song or any song like it will never be heard again save for in recordings. The hurricanes dealt the final blow, but 95% of it was humanity's fault. This has become common in Hawaii due to having so many species that only exist there. A LOT of those species are gone now because the arrival of Europeans brought disease, invasive species, and people straight up killed them or destroyed their habitats. It is a similar situation on every isolated island or area in the world as humans have expanded and explored every nook and cranny on the planet, no matter how hard it is to get to or how little business we have there we feel the need to interfere in even the most delicate and tiny ecosystem. Even the large, continent sized ecosystems are suffering. It doesn't matter if there are millions or even billions of an animal or plant, we will find some way to kill them all. It is only in the last few decades that serious steps have finally been taken to preserve the few areas on this world that we have not destroyed, but

"the ultimate goal is not to have students blog, it is to have students improve their literacy skills and have the ability to be digital writers, and to do things that would not be possible without the technology.  It is about students creating content to hyperlink to the world, to embed photos and video with text.  It is about students publishing, and then to have the opportunity to receive feedback on their work, review, edit and republish. It is about students producing work not only for their teacher, but for the world. It is about students having their own space to be creative and connect in new ways.  It is, ultimately, about students having greater ownership of their learning."

+ video aquí: http://www.ite.educacion.es/es/mediateca-congreso-ced/videos/952-conferencias-dia-6-auditorio-i "La pregunta circuló rápidamente por la red y llamó mi atención mientras pensaba en esta intervención. Las primeras respuestas tardaron apenas unos minutos en aparecer. En la versión estadounidense del debate predominaron las respuestas que tenían que ver con conceptos como creatividad y emprendimiento, pero también hubo algunas centradas en la necesidad de más habilidades y de desarrollar la capacidad de resolver problemas. "I wish someone told me that learning skills and getting real-world experience is infinitely more valuable than good grades. The world is looking for problem-solvers who help them push forward, not people who can regurgitate answers on a test", decía una especialmente clara. "No es tanto el qué, como el cómo", respondían rápidamente en el debate hispano. "Más que los contenidos lo que falla son las metodologías, los enfoques" continuaba ese mismo participante. "Me hubiese encantado que alguien nos hubiese enseñado a poder desenvolvernos mejor en el mundo real. Enseñar a trabajar en equipo y potenciar lo mejor de cada uno para conseguir un fin colectivo. Dejar de educar en masa para centrarse en las cualidades específicas de cada individuo. Que hubiesen quedado atrás los sistemas individualistas de educación ya que nos vuelven a todos más egoístas" aportaba varios comentarios más abajo Mireia. "Me hubiera encantado aprender a aprender y no que me enseñaran a memorizar datos que olvidaba después del examen. Aprender a tomar mis propias decisiones y a equivocarme", respondía en la misma línea Casilda."

"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

Ver At School "France in the Year 2000 (XXI century) - a series of futuristic pictures by Jean-Marc Côté and other artists issued in France in 1899, 1900, 1901 and 1910. Originally in the form of paper cards enclosed in cigarette/cigar boxes and, later, as postcards, the images depicted the world as it was imagined to be like in the year 2000. There are at least 87 cards known that were authored by various French artists, the first series being produced for the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris."

"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."

"The time is now: the crisis resulting from climate change is huge, impossible to ignore, and demands an immediate response of an unprecedented magnitude in our history. Flavia Broffoni is the leader of Extinction Rebellion in Argentina, and tells us how civil disobedience is one of the ways for the world to remain our world and last for long. She is a political scientist specializing in international relations and environmental policy, but she defines herself as an "anti-extinction activist and regenerative practitioner." Among many works, she was Policy Coordinator of the Wildlife Foundation / WWF and Director of Environmental Strategies of the Environmental Protection Agency of the City of Buenos Aires. She is the founder of AI.Re, a regenerative intelligence accelerator and coordinates the non-violent civil disobedience movement "Extinction Rebellion" in Argentina. "

"... The prediction is a pretty damn good one. The world is now about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than it was and carbon dioxide levels are at 415 ppm. The estimate was part of Exxon's "high case" scenario, which assumed fossil fuel use would quicken and that the world would be able to tap new reserves in the late 2000s from at the time unreachable shale gas. The memo also warned that the extra carbon dioxide would enhance the greenhouse effect and that an "increase in absorbed energy via this route would warm the earth's surface causing changes in climate affecting atmospheric and ocean temperatures, rainfall patterns, soil moisture, and over centuries potentially melting the polar ice caps." Honestly, it gave me chills re-reading the memo 37 years later. The company clearly described all the horrors we're facing now. The only thing its scientists got wrong was that what they called "potentially serious climate problems" wouldn't emerge until the late 21st century. So much for that. ..."

"Because the world is a sphere, it is impossible to draw it on a flat surface without distorting it in some way. These distortions are known as map projections, the mathematical rules for how to stretch each point on the Earth's surface onto a 2-dimensional plane."

"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."

"The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. Hot Potatoes is freeware, and you may use it for any purpose or project you like. It is not open-source. The Java version provides all the features found in the windows version, except: you can't upload to hotpotatoes.net and you can't export a SCORM object from Java Hot Potatoes. "

"Back in the 1980s, a group of social workers in Jamaica visited low-income homes one hour a week for two years, bearing age-appropriate toys for the kids and advice on child rearing for the parents. Researchers tracked the outcomes, and a generation later, the results are in. The children whose homes were visited by social workers became adults who earn wages that are 25 percent higher than those earned by peers who had not been visited. Their I.Q.s are an average seven points higher, and they are less likely to resort to crime or suffer from depression. Other studies, including several recent ones in the United States, have shown similar results, contributing to a consensus on the importance of early childhood development that has led governments around the world to increase spending on the first five years of life. In Latin America and the Caribbean, a region of longstanding social and economic inequality, several countries have been especially ambitious. Brazil and Chile doubled the coverage of day care services over the past decade, while in Ecuador they grew sixfold. These investments build on historic gains in child nutrition and health. But while Latin American children are now healthier and more likely to attend preschool, they still lag far behind in learning, particularly in the areas of language and cognition, when compared with their counterparts in wealthy countries. What are we doing wrong? ..."

Knowmad Society explores the future of learning, work, and how we relate with each other in a world driven by accelerating change, value networks, and the rise of knowmads.