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Nairobi 2010 Conference Reoprt  Climate Change and Natural Resource Use in Eastern Africa: Impacts, Adaptation and Mitigation Report of the 3rd Scientific Conference of the Ecological Society for Eastern Africa (ESEA) and co-hosted with the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) at Multimedia University College, Nairobi, 19 - 21 May 2010 By Nicholas Oguge, Caroline Lumosi, Teddy Odindo, Joseph Ngondi and Philista Malaki October 4, 2010 Summary While the Earth's climate has changed throughout history, the current warming trend has been of particular concern because most of it is human-induced and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented.  One of the greatest concerns of this global warming is climate variability and change.  The risks associated with climate change add to development challenges such as food and water insecurity. Although climate change is only one of the many drivers negatively affecting biodiversity and ecosystem services, it certainly exacerbates the other factors such as land degradation and unsustainable natural resource use. There is general concern on the accelerating deterioration of the human environment and natural resources. This would widen poverty levels confronting eastern African countries and threaten gains made towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Thus, the Ecological Society for Eastern African organised its 3rd annual scientific conference with a theme addressing this global challenge.  The idea was to bring together researchers, policy makers and the general public together to discuss the climate change phenomena, its impacts, mitigation strategies and adaptation measures with regard to natural resource use in Eastern Africa. In order to address above issues and to reach out to a wider audience, we designed the conference strategically on three tiers:   1. Plenary talks: to provide policy information and direction, science on climate change, ecological and socio-economic effects, how to commun

I'm a so-so fan of Skype. I've used it on an infrequent basis and have had more than a few dropped calls. Audio and video alike. However, it's a cheap way to make long distance calls and seems to work better over wi-fi and the video quality is improving on a regular basis. So therefore it's probably a great tool for the classroom. But how can you use Skype to do more than just make calls? Well, there's a pantload of interesting ways! Check out these fun ideas: Collaborate! Meet with other classrooms: One of the most common projects educators utilize Skype for is setting up exchanges with classrooms around the world, usually for cultural exchange purposes or working together on a common assignment. The program's official site provides some great opportunities to meet up with like-minded teachers and students sharing the same goals. Practice a foreign language: Connect with individual learners or classrooms hailing from a different native tongue can use a Skype collaboration to sharpen grammar and pronunciation skills through conversation. Peace One Day: Far beyond classroom collaborations, the Peace One Day initiative teamed up with Skype itself and educators across the globe to teach kids about the importance of ending violence, war, and other social ills. Around the World with 80 Schools: This challenge asks participating schools to hook up with 80 worldwide and report back what all they've learned about other cultures and languages. Talk about the weather: One popular Skype project sees participants from different regions make note of the weather patterns for a specified period of time, with students comparing and contrasting the results. Collaborative poetry: In this assignment, connected classrooms pen poetic pieces together and share them via video conferencing. Practice interviews: The education system frequently receives criticism for its failure to prepare students for the real world, but using Skype to help them run through mock-up

A significant shift continues to occur within global education markets. It is signified by the manner in which it makes sense to speak of a global education market. It is driven by neo-liberalism and the expansion of markets into all aspects of our lives and it is made possible by manipulation of the third messaging system within the educational triad of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. It is a drive towards accountable, comparable and productive education systems fine-tuned to maximise the return on investment and provide industry with the workforce it desires. What must be asked is how does this trend impact students and are these the forces that should be driving change in our education systems?

post from Half an Hour: excellent explanation of how connectivist moocs work, what the difference is between them and x or wrapped moocs and what open is In this presentation Stephen Downes addresses the question of how massive open online courses (MOOCs) will impact the future of distance education. The presentation considers in some detail the nature and purpose of a MOOC in contrast with traditional distance education. He argues that MOOCs represent the resurgence of community-based learning and will describe how distance education institutions will share MOOCs with each other and will supplement online interaction with community-based resources and services. The phenomenon of 'wrapped MOOCs' will be described, and Downes will outline several examples of local support for global MOOCs. 

This is a must try site which provides an amazing 3D world which teaches English and maths core skills. Players race against two other randomly chosen online players of a similar level. The questions start out very easy and adapt to the performance of the player. The questions are read out and some are displayed on the screen. The player just clicks on the correct multiple choice answer to increase their speed. There is a download for PCs and Macs as well as apps for iPad and Android. There are teacher accounts which allow you to make logins for lots of children quickly. When there log in students will be asked to design an avatar. Because the resource requires a sizeable download it takes a little time to set up, but because it runs on your local device game play is very smooth and quick. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

Search Wikipedia by geographical location. It's a great way to find information about your local area or a study site. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

Repeated success stories of local e-commerce start-ups like Jumia (Nigeria), and OLX (Ghana), the later being part of MIH Internet are cases in point.

The intent of this study is to document K-12 Web 2.0 policies, practices, and perspectives in American schools from the perspective of school district administrators. The study was made possible through the generous support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The CoSN study methodology included: 1) the design and field testing of a Web 2.0 survey for three respondent groups: school district superintendents, curriculum directors, and technology directors; 2) the constructing of a representative, random sample from the 14,199 public school districts in the U.S. stratified by four locales (e.g., urban, suburban, town, and rural); 3) the data collection through online surveys; 4) the weighting of findings to ensure demographic representativeness; and 5) analysis and reporting of the results. The report is based on the surveys from nearly 1200 district administrators, including 389 superintendents, 441 technology directors, and 359 curriculum directors. The reader will note that throughout the report, Metiri identifies the respondent group(s) and the associated weighted number of respondents who answered any particular question or series of questions. The complete methodology for the survey is included in the Appendix.

" Boundary object (BO), originally introduced by Starr (1989), is a concept to refer to objects that serve an interface between different communities of practice. Boundary objects are an entity shared by several different communities but viewed or used differently by each of them. As Star points out, boundary objects in an organization work because they necessarily contain sufficient detail to be understandable by both parties, however, neither party is required to understand the full context of use by the other - boundary objects serve as point of mediation and negotiation around intent. Boundary objects are flexible enough to adapt to local needs and have different distinct identities in different communities, but at the same time robust enough to maintain a common identity across the boundaries to be a place for shared work. Boundary objects are not necessarily physical artifacts such as a map between two people: they can be a set of information, conversations, interests, rules, plans, contracts, or even persons. It is around BOs that Communities of Practice (CoPs) often gather. BOs are 'used' by members of different communities in very different ways, although the representation is shared. BOs are an important class of knowledge artifacts. They are center stage in the dynamics of knowledge exchange. BOs are also known as CISs (common information spaces). Examples: Reports are a classic example of traces as boundary objects that the professionals and other members share. Faxed documents and email massages are also the boundary object among distributed members. Information spaces, where particpants gather to exchange information, co-ordinate activites and create knowledge are another example of BOs A library catalog, an order entry process, travel assistance request form, an organizational knowledge map, i.e. one of the products from your knowledge mapping project! Mapping BOs: Boundary objects are a very useful way to structure and

The tracking vectors assessed in the report included the following: Flash cookies, HTML 5 local storage and Cache Cookies via ETags.

A decade ago, when eLearning as we know it today was an emerging practice, developers installed authoring tools on a local computer. Their organizations controlled all installation, storage, and security. It was, truly, a different world!

Free Posting All Photos, Videos, Blogs, Forum and Events. Welcome New Members and Local Businesses !!!

I recently spent ten days in Cambodia accompanying students on a service trip where they developed their cultural understanding and spent time improving the environment of a local school. While laying pavers and digging a ditch I had a chance to reflect on the difficulties facing education in a country like this. I came away with questions, wondering and few answers. 

"Gaia is an ambitious mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, in the process revealing the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Gaia will provide unprecedented positional and radial velocity measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a stereoscopic and kinematic census of about one billion stars in our Galaxy and throughout the Local Group. This amounts to about 1 per cent of the Galactic stellar population. "

To rank your site on Google and to increase the brand's visibility through organic search traffic, you need to be looking beyond your own site. Off-page SEO covers all SEO techniques that take place outside of your own website. This includes techniques like Link building, Brand building, Citation building, Content marketing, Social media, etc. But also keeping in mind, this covers any technique that doesn't involve making changes to your own website or publishing content on your own site. A good off-page SEO helps to maintain the website's relevance factors and authentication for search engines. Link building is often considered to be the main off-page practice, but this also includes practices like content marketing, appearing on podcasts, social media, building local extracts, landing reviews, etc. Without off-page SEO, one will face difficulty ranking for competitive search terms. Watch the AntWak videos by professionals to understand more about Off-page SEO.