Group items tagged

ALMOST three quarters of year 9 schoolboys admit to "covert bullying", according to a world-first Australian study. The survey of almost 800 Victorian students found 72 per cent of year 9 boys and 65 per cent of year 9 girls had engaged in covert bullying, such as spreading rumours or excluding other children.Lead researcher, Professor Sheryl Hemphill, said it was surprising to find more boys than girls engaging in this type of bullying."Covert bullying was always thought to be predominantly done by girls, but our figures show for the first time that boys are actively engaging in this behaviour," she said.

Evoke emerged from discussions with universities in Africa who increasingly wanted to find avenues to encourage their students to engage in local communities and develop innovative solutions to local development challenges. The universities were searching for ways to engage students in real world problems and to develop capacities for creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurial action that many believe will be the engine for job creation now and in the future.

Evoke  therefore is designed to empower young people all over the world, and especially in Africa, to start solving urgent social problems like hunger, poverty, disease, conflict, climate change, sustainable energy, health care, education, and human rights.; to collaborate with others globally; and to develop real world ideas to address these challenges.Players will be challenged to complete a series of ten missions and ten quests -- one per week, over the course of the ten-week game.   The "text book" for this course is an online graphic novel written by Emmy-award nominated producer Kiyash Monsef. 

The game's creative director, alternate reality pioneer Jane McGonigal, is debuting the game at this week's TED conference in Long Beach, California.  As she describes the game, "An evoke is an urgent call to innovation.  When we evoke, we look for creative solutions. We use whatever resources we have. We get as many people involved as possible. We take risks. We come up with ideas that have never been tried before. That's what we're asking players to do in this online game. To learn how to tackle the world's toughest problems with creativity, courage, resourcefulness and collaboration."

“Most countries in the very poor world cannot afford to provide free access to secondary education,” Prof. Sachs told UNICEF Radio. “Even the Millennium Development Goals fall short of what they need to be, because they only talk about primary education.”

In addition to financial support, schools need to provide young people with a quality education, including Internet access, to help develop a globally connected curriculum that meets students’ needs.

One result is that they deliberately decided to complement the delivery of the devices with extensive engagement with local stakeholder groups, did a lot of capacity building with teachers and trainers, and tried to help align what they were doing with what was happening in the formal education system.

hat said, there are very real concerns in some quarters that e-book initiatives from the 'West', however well-intentioned, are potentially an important tool contributing to a subtle form of, for lack of a better term, cultural imperialism. Worldreader is apparently working on a platform for African authors and publishers to be able to distribute their works electronically, so that it will be easier for students to read books from local authors, consistent with the learning goals of local school systems.  While not downplaying the difficulties of getting large educational publishers to make their content available digitally for use by students in Africa, this desire to help promote digital marketplaces for African reading materials is perhaps the most ambitious aspect to the Worldreader initiative.

When they went back and asked, "what if content was digitized and made available at $1/book?", many people suddenly got very interested. 

When the only Haitian public teacher training institute collapsed in Port-au-Prince as a result of the earthquake, the once sparse availability of professional development opportunities for Haitian teachers became non-existent. Understanding the importance of continuous teacher training, Fanfan Joseph, an English teacher and President of the English Club of Cap-Haitien, organized a four-day training workshop for 50 English teachers in Cap-Haitien. Focusing on lesson planning, reflexive teaching, and cooperative learning techniques in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom, Joseph trained participants on practical skills that they could use in their classrooms immediately. The participants of this workshop celebrated Joseph’s efforts and encouraged him to organize another workshop, which he promptly did. This September, Joseph’s follow-on workshop focused on skills for effective teaching and learning in large classrooms. Teachers around the world struggle with large class size; a typical school in Haiti can include as many as 250 students in one classroom. The participants in Joseph’s workshops represent many different schools across northern Haiti, and each of them teaches hundreds of students. As a result of Joseph’s workshops, thousands of students across northern Haiti are engaged in interactive classrooms with teachers who have benefited from this recent and relevant training.

Another English teacher, Abel Mercier of Port-au-Prince, recognized that one of the most important things children need during times of crisis is the permission and space to have fun. “The secret to coping with post-traumatic stress in a community after an event such as the earthquake is to promote recreational activities among the children, teenagers, and adults,” says Mercier. This summer, Mercier organized a “Day of Fun” for over 80 high school students from Lycée Cité-Soleil in Port-au-Prince, the capital city that was hardest hit by the earthquake. Students gathered at the beach for a stress-free day of sports, arts, games, and more. By including a short workshop on the geological forces that cause earthquakes, and another on understanding the effects of psychology trauma, Mercier elevated his “Day of Fun” to a meaningful experience for a community in the midst of recovery.

Jovenal Thomas, another English teacher from Cap-Haitien, collaborated with Red Cross volunteers to deliver CPR training to high school students. “There is no Civil Defense Warning Program here, no 911 telephone number to call, limited ambulance service and very little access to medical treatment,” says Thomas. “Students need to be trained to deal with emergencies when they encounter them.”

Founded in 1988, the People's Decade of Human Rights Education (PDHRE-International) is a non-profit, international service organization that works directly and indirectly with its network of affiliates — primarily women's and social justice organizations — to develop and advance pedagogies for human rights education relevant to people's daily lives in the context of their struggles for social and economic justice and democracy. PDHRE's members include experienced educators, human rights experts, United Nations officials, and world renowned advocates and activists who collaborate to conceive, initiate, facilitate, and service projects on education in human rights for social and economic transformation. The organization is dedicated to publishing and disseminating demand-driven human rights training manuals and teaching materials, and otherwise servicing grassroots and community groups engaged in a creative, contextualized process of human rights learning, reflection, and action. PDHRE views human rights as a value system capable of strengthening democratic communities and nations through its emphasis on accountability, reciprocity, and people's equal and informed participation in the decisions that affect their lives. PDHRE was pivotal in lobbying the United Nations to found a Decade for Human Rights Education and in drafting and lobbying for various resolutions by the World Conference on Human Rights, the UN General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Commission, the UN Treaty Bodies, and the Fourth World Conference on Women.

The 'Talking Book' is a low-cost audio device device with recording capabilities -- imagine a rubbery MP3 player about the size of a grapefuit -- rather ingeniously engineered (and re-engineered) to meet specific needs and usage scenarios in very poor communities in Africa.  It is designed for use in local languages, using locally produced content, as tool to promote literacy among primary school children (to cite just one goal and target group). One way to think of the device, Cliff said, is as a  'small portable computer without a display'.  While the project is still in its pilot stages, it is notable for its express interest in investigating solutions that are low cost and scalable from the beginning, and in rigorously monitoring and evaluating the impact of its interventions.

Literacy Bridge began, he said, with the idea that the most effective approach towards ending global poverty requires empowering people with better access to knowledge, and that those in greatest need are impeded by illiteracy, disability, and inadequate infrastructure. (Here's video from a talk Cliff gave at Google about the project's goals and approach to development.) The project is operationally very lean, supported financially by hundreds of individual donations and by thousands of volunteer hours. 

I have never heard a presentation from a project proponent about the development of an ICT device (of whatever sort) meant to be used by poor people that contained so many comments like what I heard from Cliff: "our users told us"; "we learned from our users that ..."; "what we found out when speaking with and observing our users caused us to radically change how we were thinking, and so we re-designed ..." etc.  The iterative, user-centric design process the Literacy Bridge has been engaged in to develop the Talking Book stands in stark contrast to that demonstrated by most (almost all?) of the 'ICT for development' initiatives in the education sector that come through our offices here at the World Bank. 

2. Education for peace

272. Governments, non-governmental organizations, women's groups and the mass media should encourage women to engage in efforts to promote education for peace in the family, neighbourhood and community. Special attention should be given to the contribution of women's grass-roots organizations. The multiple skills and talents of women artists, journalists, writers, educators and civic leaders can contribute to promoting ideas of peace if encouraged, facilitated and supported.

273. Special attention should be given to the education of children for life in peace within an atmosphere of understanding, dialogue and respect for others. In this respect, suitable concrete action should be taken to discourage the provision of children and young persons with games and publications and other media promoting the notion of favouring war, aggression, cruelty, excessive desire for power and other forms of violence, within the broad processes of the reparation of society for life in peace.

The 67-page report, "Promises Unfulfilled: An Assessment of China's National Human Rights Action Plan," details how despite the Chinese government's progress in protection of some economic and social rights, it has undermined many of the key goals of the National Human Rights Action Plan (NHRAP) by tightening restrictions on rights of expression, association, and assembly over the past two years. The report highlights how that rollback of key civil and political rights enabled rather than reduced a host of human rights abuses specifically addressed in the NHRAP.

ut the NHRAP's value was undermined by the government's simultaneous commission of human rights abuses during the same period. In 2009-2010, the government: continued its practice of sentencing high-profile dissidents such as imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo to lengthy prison terms on spurious state secrets or "subversion" charges; expanded restrictions on mediaand internet freedom; tightened controls on lawyers, human rights defenders, and nongovernmental organizations; broadened controls on Uighurs and Tibetans; and engaged in increasing numbers of enforced disappearances and arbitrary detentions, including in secret, unlawful detention facilities known as "black jails." "China needs a credible national human rights action plan that is designed and implemented to improve its human rights performance, not deflect criticism," Richardson said. "The Chinese government's failure to meaningfully deliver on the National Human Rights Action Plan's key objectives will only deepen doubts about its willingness to respect international standards as its global influence grows."