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ICTs in Education Prize: call for nominations 23-05-2008 (Paris) © iStock "Digital Opportunities for All: Preparing Students for 21st-Century Skills" is the theme of the 2008 UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize for the Use of ICTs in Education. Funded by the Kingdom of Bahrain, the US$50,000 prize is divided between two winners. Every year, this prize rewards activities that demonstrate best practice as well as creative use of ICTs to enhance learning, teaching and overall educational performance. Submissions for candidature must reach UNESCO via the governments of Member States, in consultation with their UNESCO National Commissions, or by international non-governmental organizations which maintain formal relations with the Organization. The deadline for submissions is 31 August 2008. Winners will be celebrated at an award ceremony on 14 January 2009 at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris.

Measuring linguistic diversity on the Internet UNESCO has been emphasizing the concept of “knowledge societies”, which stresses plurality and diversity instead of a global uniformity in order to bridge the digital divide and to form an inclusive information society. An important theme of this concept is that of multilingualism for cultural diversity and participation for all the languages in cyberspace.

UNESCO encourages Governments to participate in the next meeting of ICANN 06-06-2008 (Paris) © iStock UNESCO encourages Governments to participate in the next meeting of the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), to be held in Paris from 22 to 26 June 2008, in Le Meridien Montparnasse (19, rue du Commandant Mouchotte, 75014 Paris). The GAC plays a key role in guiding public policy issues discussed within ICANN, particularly with regard to the development of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). IDNs are the Internet domain names that could contain letters with diacritics, such as accent marks, or characters from non-Latin scripts. Currently the Internet domain names, for example “unesco.org" or “louvre.fr”, can contain only Latin scripts. UNESCO is committed to actively participating in the development of IDNs as part of its broader commitment to promote universal access to information, and cultural and linguistic diversity in cyberspace. Membership of the GAC is open to all representatives of Governments, public authorities as well as intergovernmental organizations. For more information on ICANN and GAC, and to register for the Paris meeting, please click here