Tryangulation

The war on education is real

Safia Ama Jan risked her life by running an underground school for girls from her home in Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban. Later, as the director of women’s affairs in Kandahar province, she worked tirelessly to champion efforts to get all Afghan girls back into school, and to provide professional and vocational training for women. She was shot and killed outside her home in Kandahar on 25 September, 2006.

A month ago I wrote about the global war on education, but I used that phrase as a figure of speech, not in reference to a literal war. Since then I read a new report from UNESCO about deliberate and strategic attacks on schools, teachers and students. That report is the source of the quote above.

The report, Education under attack, cites armed attacks on schools, assaults on teachers and students, and forced recruitment of child soldiers, as acts that specifically target institutions of learning; "general daily violence" such as that between students and teachers is excluded.

Specific data from 13 countries is presented, mostly from countries affected by armed conflict. It is reported that "up to 40 per cent of the 77 million or more children in the world who are not attending school can be found in countries affected by conflict".  A summary of the report, with a link to the PDF document, can be found at Eldis.

The world is not flat

I just realized today, after reading a myriad of posts in dozens of blogs reporting on the NECC and BLC conferences in the US that, with one possible exception*, I have never met another "edublogger" face to face.

This week, thanks to some new social networks at Ning, I've met online some Argentine edubloggers (none from Catamarca yet), and one from Guatemala (I'm waiting to see if she's from anywhere near Tacaná). These connections, and the possibilities they hold, amaze me every day. Some would even say the world is getting flat.

Not me.

The world looks flat to some people because they are on the rooftops of high rises, waving and cheering to each other across the gaps; closer to each other than they are to the people on the ground floor of their own buildings.

To carry the metaphor further, visibility at ground level is so bad that people can barely see across the street.

While a relatively few people are becoming ever more connected, there are still millions who never go to school. I have known adults who did not know how to look at a photograph or how to dial a phone. I have known children who died of diarrhea and adults who died of measles. I have known women who didn't know if they were widows, because their government wouldn't tell them. ICT? Information at that level is scarce, communication is paralyzed, and technology is busted.

This isn't about guilt. It's about the frustration I feel that, in spite of all the talk about bridges, the bridges are connecting like to like. I don't want to give up the technology we have, and I don't think we should. Yet at the same time we can't leave so many behind. Sure we need bridges, but we also need elevators, chair lifts, moving sidewalks. We need to connect vertically as well as horizontally.

*a friend who blogs mostly on politics, occasionally on school politics.

What's an iPhone worth?

Last weekend the new iPhones went on sale, and several of the bloggers I read regularly rushed out to be among the first to own one (or two), and publish their reviews. Around the same time I came across a news item from Nigeria about a school that has joined the One Laptop per Child Project (OLPC).

The news from Nigeria was that the Galadima Primary School in Abuja was without electricity so students could not power up their new laptops. I visited the OLPC wiki and left a message to follow up on this, and got a nice response from Walter who said, as I expected, that the OLPC is certainly aware of power shortages in the countries where they work, and have strategies for many alternative energy sources, including hand cranks like the ones shown above.

It's not clear to me why the news article did not go one step further to learn about these alternatives, but it was ironic to me to read, just minutes apart, about basic infrastructure problems in Nigeria and then about a new iPhone owner complaining that it takes too many screen taps to call his wife. It's always interesting to me to see what becomes important when the truly important things are taken care of.

The OLPC features what some have called the "$100 laptop", but which actually costs around $175. These are real computers --not toys-- and they have Internet connectivity, built in microphone and camera, a swivel screen, and the capacity to store hundreds of books (click on the image to enlarge).

I'm not saying people definitely should not buy an iPhone, but we can encourage them to consider an opportunity to divert some discretionary funds to change someone else's world. At least check out the photos and student work here before you decide.

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The global war on education

There's plenty of talk about the global war on terror, but several headlines from the last couple of weeks remind me that there is another war going on, over the right of children --and especially girls-- to basic education. Among the major factions are poverty, greed and misogyny. 

The timing of the recent spate of news items was interesting, since several of the education bloggers I read regularly are now off to various conferences  to discuss educational technology, one laptop per child, school 2.0 and reforming education so that children are better prepared for a future we can now only guess at. 

Maybe I'm envious because I don't get to be around edubloggers very much, that I'm the only adult in my school with a flickr account and a feed aggregator, and I miss being among like-minded folk. But then again, my perspective is colored by experiences that many people at those exciting conferences can only imagine: communities where there are no teachers, schools with no books, girls with no future. 

Change needs to happen on both sides of the digital divide. At the same time, it's good for each side to be more aware of the other. This blog is about "triangulating": determining your position by its relation to other known points. Know where you are.

Now for some points to plot on your map:

Child soldiers in Sierra Leone The Star.com "The United Nations-backed war crimes court for Sierra Leone handed down landmark convictions against three men for recruiting and using child soldiers." That's a good start, but there are still more than 300,000 children forced to serve revolutionary armies around the world. 

Girls in Sudan leave school to earn money as prostitutes  IRIN Africa: "As many as three-quarters of female students [in Juba] drop out because of pregnancy, some as young as 11. Money and gifts are often an incentive to have sex with older men as well as age mates."

Girls in Afghanistan under fire for learning EuropaWorld: "A shooting outside a girls' school in Afghanistan's Logar province left two students dead and four people injured, including a teacher. Two gunmen on motorbikes opened fire as teachers and students were leaving Qalai Saeeda girls' school...  UNICEF is concerned that similar incidents -- and the intimidation aimed at stopping families sending girls to school -- could undo some of the educational progress achieved so far."

Corruption diverts billions of dollars from education worldwide Guardian Unlimited: "Bribery and graft in schools and universities is seriously undermining education systems worldwide and costing governments billions of dollars, according to a new report funded by Unesco (full report available at the link).

Photo by Mehmet Seven.

Well done, Andy!

Last night our son Andy graduated from high school!

It's been a long journey since his first classes in Guatemala (in Spanish), then public schools in Michigan and Texas, followed by several years of private tutoring and homeschooling in Ankara, Turkey until the Oasis International School opened three years ago.

Oasis has around 300 students from 35 different countries, and the warm relationships among teachers and students in such diversity created a great environment for all kinds of learning. Reports are that he'll be remembered as a fun and inquiring student, an entertaining classmate, a leader, and a good friend. In case you can't tell from the photo, his parents are nauseatingly proud!  (click to enlarge if  they don't look happy enough)

Andy's lifelong dream has been to enter the film industry, and he was voted by his class as "most likely to win an Oscar". He starts a film making program in Houston this fall, and though we will miss having him around every day, we know he'll put his creativity and unique perspective to good use.

So, without becoming too mushy, we congratulate you, Andy, and wish you much success and many wonderful surprises ahead!

Still another way to look at the world

I'm collecting sites that have interesting ways of depicting data, and came upon Worldmapper, which uses unusual maps to show all kinds of economic and development indicators, such as literacy and life expectancy. The maps are reshaped so that the relative distribution of the indicator value is shown in the relative size of each country. 

I played around with some of the maps showing education indicators and economic development, and was struck by the similarity in the distribution of spending on primary education (first image), secondary education, and research/development (second image).

Countries with high spending in one category tended to also have high spending in the other two categories. Likewise, countries with low investment in education also had low investments in R&D. I also found a lot of similarity with the map showing the distribution of new patents, a good indicator of innovation. Draw your own conclusions, or read more in the Eldis resource page on education and economic growth.

Worldmapper currently has 366 different maps, and they keep adding more. Visit their site, pick a few indicators, and see if you can guess what shape the world is in.

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Withdrawing and reflecting

First of all, thanks to all my faithful readers out there who haven't cut off their subscriptions due to a recent lapse in posts. I actually have plenty of blogworthy material on the back burner, but the times are against me.

I got busy, then took a business  trip to Wales, and then this happened. I knew one of the victims of this horrible crime, and am working through how this affects the meaning of my life here, not only as a foreigner and as an adherent to a minority faith (a minority here anyway), but also as one who has grown from knowing those who are different from me, in my own country as well as in other countries where I have lived.

Don't expect answers any time soon.

A new way to pretend the world is flat

Never mind flat, the world is upside down... or is it?

I've always loved maps, and in particular the different ways they approach the problem of emphasizing certain details like shape, area, topography, or human impact. That's a problem because, in order to emphasize one thing in a map, you have to de-emphasize something else: blatant distortion of reality in order to get a point across.

I've wanted one of these south-up maps ever since I first saw a similar one nearly 30 years ago. I finally gave in to temptation and got one from ODT Maps; it just came in the mail yesterday. I can't wait to think up some assumptions to challenge. 

Click here for more info on unconventional maps and to get your own.

O happy day

My blog is no longer blocked at the school where I work!

For some reason, when we got a new server, all the custom filter settings were lost, so all the computers within reach of students reverted to surfing that was "free" from blogs and other dangerous content. That's being fixed now, little by little.

Along with that good news, I get to end the week with a couple other successes: one of our teachers is taking the plunge to lead a small group of colleagues in a collaborative blogging experiment, and others have requested a beginner blogging workshop, which we'll do soon.

My part of the world is not flat

I'm bemused sometimes by edubloggers in the western world who feel like they are up against immovable resistance to their efforts to integrate technology in their facilitation of student-centered learning. A scan of the news today prompted me to share some short stories from our local front to put things in a different perspective. But first, I'd like to mention something that I first wrote here nearly a year ago:

I’ve been to lots of places in the world, and have yet to find a country, a city, or even a mountain village in Guatemala that was not simultaneously global and local, and simultaneously jihadist (reactionist) and McWorldly (assimilationist). Somebody ought to just ban dichotomies outright so we can try looking at reality instead of black and white caricatures of it.

The same goes for where I am now, in the midst of people who crave change as well as those who worry about what they could lose if things change any more. The following stories are just some examples of the reality we work in, and should not be taken as blanket generalizations.

Foreign language education "unconsitutional"

The Turkish newspaper Radikal reports that Prof. Şükrü Akalın, President of the Turkish Language Institute (if I am permitted to translate that organization's name into English) advised the Turkish Parliament's Turkish Language Research Commission that education in foreign languages is contrary to the constitution and detrimental to the fabric of Turkish society. Currently thirteen universities in Turkey deliver some or all of their degree programs in other languages, as well as numerous K-12 schools around the country, in particular schools that offer the International Baccalaureate.

Prof. Akalın added that Turkish entries in the Eurovision Song Contest should not be performed in English, but that ship has already sailed since Turkey won the competition in 2003 with an English language song.

The YouTube Wars

Prof. Akalın was probably pleased last week when, for a few days at least, we lost our access to that Eurovision winning song. In response to a satirical video that was offensive to the memory of Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, a Turkish court shut down any access to YouTube.com. The offending video was uploaded supposedly by Greeks wanting to antagonize their neighbors, and it prompted a war of offensive and counter offensive videos and endless (and pointless) comments.  It is against the law here to insult Atatürk, but since the offenders were "out there" somewhere beyond prosecution on the Internet, punishment was levied on Turkish Internet users instead.

The story is even sadder as I remember attending a conference in Athens last fall with several Turkish colleagues, and we were pleasantly surprised at the warmth of so many Greeks, including several who spoke with us in Turkish.

Some children long for a boring day at school

Another recent Radikal story focuses on two of the 170 million child farmworkers worldwide. Fatma, age 12, and her big brother Nevzat  work eight months a year migrating from one region of Turkey to another, working in tobacco, cotton, hazelnut, tea, and sugar beets. Fatma explained to the reporter that she'd like to stay in school and realize her dream of becoming a doctor, but her family desperately needs the money that she and her siblings can earn. During her breaks she reads in the shade of a tractor, and hopes to make it back home to sit in class before school ends for the summer and the family leaves again to work in the cotton fields.

The more things change...

Without putting guilt on anyone, I just wanted to share today how the world isn't always flat, and that there can be dramatic differences from one place to another. Yet in spite of those differences we can have the feeling of "I've seen this before" as we see different outcomes of basic human nature in the face of hope and fear. How we act on our hopes and fears has everything to do with the way we educate --or withhold education from-- our children.