Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

The great firewall of china comes to the US via Bing. It looks like Bing is filtering Chinese language searches in the US to match more what someone would see INSIDE china. This is pretty disturbing but also points to the challenges of creating different "filters" by country and also knowing where people are coming from (due to the use of proxies.)

Artificial Intelligence and the "deep learning" movement are hitting it big time: big bucks and big influence on our future. Geoff Hinton is working for Google to help improve voice recognition, image tagging and more. Microsoft, IBM, Baidu (search enging in China) and others are getting into AI. This is part of education as AI and learning tools can be greatly impacted. Read and share this article if you're an education or technology futurist. Fascinating.

Pakistan is pushing to educate more of its children, amidst financial woes and a struggle for more funding. Their goal: 100% enrollment. Of course, there is a great effort also to build a firewall in Pakistan much like the "great firewall of China." That said, there are many lovely educators from Pakistan who contribute and connect increasingly online and I wish this country well as well as the many countries working to increase enrollment. "As schools returned to session in Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province this fall, the newly elected provincial government - with the help of the non-profit campaign Alif Ailaan - launched an enrollment drive. In its first month, the drive managed to enroll nearly 245,000 out of school children - about 65% male and 35% female - across 25 districts of the province, according to figures provided by Alif Ailaan. But considering Pakistan's education woes, where more than 25 million children between the ages of 5-16 remain out of school, it is a small step. "In order to provide schooling to all the kids, we need about Rs. 138 billion (roughly $1.2 billion) just in KP - for school infrastructure, classrooms, teachers so on and so forth," Joudat Ayaz, the province's education secretary, told me over dinner. Ayaz estimates the number of out of school children in KP between 2 to 3 million, about 20% to 30% of the school-age children in the province. "You can't do this [reaching 100% enrollment] in one go - you have to do it progressively, over six or seven years.""

Yes, it is time to explore space. It may just take a political competitor to wake up the United States to the space-age advantage it has had for decades as the Chinese plan to land a robotic probe on the moon. We need to be talking about space. "China's mission to robotically land on the moon next month is sure to stir up lunar dust, but it may also cause a political dustup, too. China is in the final stages of preparing its robotic Chang'e 3 moon lander to launch atop a Long March 3B rocket, slated for liftoff in early December. The ambitious mission is built to first orbit the moon, then propel down to a landing site, after which a small, solar-powered lunar rover will be unleashed."

The LtL Beijing campus is our main location, placed in the Central Business District of Beijing, well connected by subway and buses.

This site provides a photo archive of 100 years of Chinese history from 1850-1950. Search by location, event, date and much more. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Mandarin+%26+Chinese+culture

"Visualizing Cultures was launched at MIT in 2002 to explore the potential of the Web for developing innovative image-driven scholarship and learning. The VC mission is to use new technology and hitherto inaccessible visual materials to reconstruct the past as people of the time visualized the world (or imagined it to be). Topical units to date focus on Japan in the modern world and early-modern China. The thrust of these explorations extends beyond Asia per se, however, to address "culture" in much broader ways-cultures of modernization, war and peace, consumerism, images of "Self" and "Others," and so on."

A useful website for finding out about China and learning Mandarin for children and adults. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Mandarin+%26+Chinese+culture

A superb adventure game set in China. Learn about this fascinating country while solving puzzles. There are three levels to complete. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Mandarin+%26+Chinese+culture

A superb adventure game set in China. Learn about this fascinating country while solving puzzles. There are three levels to complete. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Mandarin+%26+Chinese+culture

A superb adventure game set in China. Learn about this fascinating country while solving puzzles. There are three levels to complete. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Mandarin+%26+Chinese+culture

In the chinese lantern festival (coming up on February 6), children in China and in other areas across Asia, carry lanterns with riddles on them as they go into their temples. Here are some lesson plans and templates for making your own lanterns. You could have students put riddles on them relating to topics you have going in your classroom.

There is a human cost when manufacturing is outsourced to places that do not respect human rights. This article is making the rounds in light of Apple's stellar financial performance but it can be related to other companies too. Overseas reall means "no one sees" and thus no one cares. We should care about human beings being treated in a humane way no matter where they live.

This is a great set of language resources and games for learning Mandarin Chinese. Topic range from greeting, family, eating, parts of the body and more. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Mandarin+%26+Chinese+culture

Chinese New Year Collection with many different lessons at all age levels along with downloadables to use. If you are expecting your students to have global literacy, you cannot afford to ignore China. This is a fun time to teach about it - kids love dragons and fireworks!

Global Asia/Australia Connections

Filter fever is a symptom of fear. We all see clearly what China is afraid of. But what on earth are US public schools afraid of?

Very interesting article from Newsweek about how creativity works in the brain, and how it can be trained in an educational setting. It describes a "crisis" trend where creativity scores in America are decreasing.