Tryangulation

Is anyone doing the math?

I try not to dwell on bad news here too much, but scrolling through the Turkish news headlines from the weekend was like reading a nightmare of a math exam on fractions, ratios, and irrational numbers.

Haberlerin Türkçesini okumak isterseniz başlıklar üzerine tıklayın.

15:2000
15: The number of free places offered by a test prep center in Midyat in Southeastern Turkey. Three students from each of five different levels were to be awarded a free ride to the dreaded university entrance exam and a glimmer of hope.
2000: The number of students who applied.

150/1000
Just an hour's drive away from Midyat, in Batman, the police chief told children to come back the next day for free shoes. The police, with the support of local businessmen, were prepared to distribute 150 pairs of shoes. 1000 children showed up.  We commend them for their sensitivity and generosity, but suggest that next time they take an introductory statistics course first.

4 786 < 40 000 < n
The National Ministry of Education held placement exams for teacher applicants, with plans to allocate 4786 new teachers. Nearly 40,000 applied. The real question is this: Next year is the first year of the new 4-year high school curriculum (it used to be 3-years). Next year for the first time every high school in the country will have one more grade. We've known this was coming for four years, but to my knowledge there has not been a corresponding 33% increase in teacher training and recruiting (and would even 40K have been enough?).  I can say with a little more certainty that there has not been a nationwide increase of 33%  in physical space. I think someone misplaced a decimal.

2008 - 2000 = 32
A subcommittee of the Turkish parliament directed inspections of the shipyards at Tuzla on the Sea of Marmara. Eighteen have died in accidents at the docks in the last eight months; 32 since 2000. The inspectors found hundreds of violations of regulations concerning safety, fiscal reporting, employment of foreigners, and provision of social security. Maybe these perpetrators of the human condition could benefit from IB math practice exams that require you to "Show your work."

Are you ready to check your answers?

Sorry. The traditional solutions no longer work. You'll have to find new ones.

Ban on WordPress enters its 6th month

We're seeing a lot of these screens lately, so you've got a chance to play 'find the differences'. When posting yesterday about the ban on YouTube, I had forgotten to mention the slightly different ban against WordPress that has been in effect here since August 2007.

The ban stems from a libel suit between two Turkish citizens, one of them using WordPress to publish criticisms against the other. A judge decided that since WordPress did not censor the critic and did not observe Turkish court rulings, that WordPress itself should be punished.

I posted about this back in September, but since I use Bloglines instead of visiting the actual sites, I haven't been feeling the effects so acutely -- and stumbled upon a good argument for feed readers as a freedom of speech workaround. Still, this only enables me to read WordPress blogs from outside Turkey; Turkish bloggers cannot access the site to post to their own blogs.

You can find a good summary of the case here:

WordPress Blocked in Turkey | Citizen Media Law Project

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bummer

Update: the ban was lifted on the 24th.

YouTube has been shut down in Turkey again.

Just like I reported last March, the government here has again taken offense at a video uploaded somewhere by who knows who from who knows where, and in retaliation denies us access to the entire site. I guess that by watching videos we are abettors to the crime.

Sort of like banning newspapers when one commits libel. But who's worse, the government for its draconian measures, or Google for caving in and deleting wanton free speech (which they will do, eventually)?

Bu siteye erişim mahkeme kararıyla engellenmiştir.

 

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2008 is the UN International Year of Languages

According to the Boston Globe, "while an estimated 7000 languages are spoken around the world today, one of them dies out about every two weeks." As the number of languages spoken in the world rapidly decreases, the United Nations has declared 2008 to be the International Year of Languages.  Having worked directly among a people group in Central America whose language is vanishing, I'm particularly interested in this theme.

The dynamics around language extinction are complex, involving external factors like economics and discrimination, and internal factors like self perception and attitudes toward one's own group and towards others. Unlike endangered plants, whose seeds can be preserved in seed banks, and endangered animals that can be protected on nature preserves, endangered languages survive only if people speak them. This is particularly challenging when those people have already formulated reasons for no longer speaking their parents' tongue.

Dictionaries, documentary films and ethnographic studies are only snapshots of the way things were, and awareness campaigns usually target non-speakers of endangered languages (like you, dear reader). Even mother tongue education programs can be compromised if there is no corpus of reading material once children leave school.

I'll watch the events around this theme closely, but I won't expect any miracles.  Nevertheless, as part of my own participation in this international year, I have added the category Languages and linguistics to this blog, and I have already retrofitted some blog posts to reflect the change.

Follow this link to the UNESCO site with resources for commemorating the International Year of Languages.

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No paper? Then let them learn slogans

"By not allowing them to print books, will the thoughts and ideas go away? If they want to teach radicalism, someone can teach without a book."

-- Gershon Baskin, Israeli Director of the Israel-Palestine Centre for Research and Information, on the decision by Israel to halt the importation of textbook paper into Gaza. Click here for more.

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If not pencils, then ban the paper!

I made a joke a few days ago about a ban on pencils as a logical equivalent to Turkey's ban on  Wordpress. Now Israel is banning the importation of paper into Gaza. The  paper is destined to be used to print school textbooks, and since paper is not defined strictly as a component of humanitarian aid in the same way as food and medicines, it is not exempt from Israel's blockade.

It is so widely known that education is one of the greatest weapons against poverty, that I can not imagine the logic of this ban. An unidentified spokesman for the Israeli government said the ban was to keep Hamas from publishing textbooks with inflammatory propaganda, but depriving children of the opportunity to read --and learn-- for themselves seems bent on sealing the fate of those school children to remain impoverished and to become uneducated, undiscerning and without hope.

That sounds to me like excellent raw material for a whole generation of suicide bombers.

For more on the blockade and its impact on education in Palestine, click here.

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Roughly the equivalent of banning pencils

Another foreigner-in-Turkey blogger just sent me an email with his new url, explaining that Wordpress is now blocked in Turkey. Not just his blog, mind you, but everything that has wordpress in the URL.

My friend's blog is just an innocent bystander caught in a legal dispute over a jailed cult leader and the press both for and against his cause. Since one blog in English that is hosted by Wordpress was deemed inflammatory, a judge decided that it would be best to just block Wordpress than try to get Wordpress to ban a single blogger (although that strategy did work in a similar debacle with YouTube a few months ago.

As the smoke which rises from such virtual blog bonfires becomes visible to more and more, we can expect the court decision to be reversed. How those who are threatened by such freedom will respond can still apparently go either way, but they are bound to learn that there is now no closing the door to borderless blogging.

This certainly puts the my-school-blocks-my-blog woes in perspective.

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Bugün ben de Ermeni olayım

Sometimes the best thing to learn is to discover that which we need to unlearn; to undo what we have learned wrong.

Hrant Dink, a famous writer and intellectual Turkish citizen of Armenian descent, was assasinated on Friday by a 17 year old man. The entire country has been shaken by this, and in the face of peaceful demonstrations across the country, there are still the voices of those who blame the victim.

The photo is from the newspaper Hürriyet and shows one of the demonstrations held after the news broke. The banner displays what has become one of the key slogans in subsequent demonstrations and in the headlines of several news articles, "We are all Hrant Dink. We are all Armenians."

One of the first analyses I have seen in English can be found here. I'm not endorsing this or any other interpretation; this is just to help my non-Turkish reading subscribers understand a little more about the situation here. Click here for a longer - and frequently updated - article in Wikipedia.

I write this blog to contemplate the convergence (and divergence) of education and learning. In consideration of that, one thing I take away from this sad event is that neither guns nor laws must ever prevail in the attempt to control what we think or learn or imagine.

As I wrote in the title of this post in Turkish, "Today, I too shall be Armenian."

UNICEF releases report on the state of the world's children

Children with uneducated mothers are at least twice as likely to be out of primary school as children whose mothers attended primary school. That's just one of the ways in which gender discrimination becomes one of the root causes of poverty, disease, and armed conflict.

UNICEF has released the 2007 edition of its annual State of the World's Children report. The focus of this year's report is on gender equality, explaining the relationship between gender discrimination and underdevelopment, and offering examples where an investment in women's rights is a major step toward achieving the UN's Millennium Development Goals.

The website for the report includes, in addition to the full report as pdf, video biographies of women around the world, fact sheets, materials for young people, and a quiz to test your own knowledge of gender equality issues.

Link: The State of the World's Children 2007

Internet censorship report: Taking back the web isn't always easy

At the Spring Teachers Conference in Bursa last weekend I showed participants some easy and free tools for creating web content and making our experience on the web more personal and productive. The tools are part of a technology shift called Web 2.0, which is a movement described by some as 'taking back the web."

However, sometimes 'taking back the web' isn't so easy, as can be seen in the 2006 Internet annual report by Reporters without Borders. According to the report, technologies  developed in China to monitor and restrict web sites, blogs, and even web searches, are now being exported to other countries determined to decide what their citizens read, write or share.

Among the targets of criticism is the European Union, which passed a directive that makes Internet service providers ("ISPs") responsible if anyone uses their service illegally. This is analagous to making the telephone company responsible for illegal conversations, or the postal service responsible for the illegal content of letters. This directive forces ISPs to restrict their customers' free speech in order to avoid incrimination themselves, putting them in the roles of both police and judge.  Will this lead to Blogger censors screening your blog posts before they can be published?

Another international organization that wishes we would trust them more, that is, the United Nations, is also looking for ways to protect us from thinking too much.  BoingBoing reports that:

The UN's Intellectual Property Organization has reconvened to discuss a treaty that will kill innovative Internet audio/video offerings -- like podcasting, YouTube, Google Video, and Democracy Player -- in order to protect the business models of a few entrenched broadcasters.

One of the most important effects of Web 2.0 is that consumers of content become creators of content, and these creators thrive on the content of other amateur content creators.  This threatens not only states who want to control content (that is, what you read and what you think), but also companies whose paradigm dictates that everything (including thoughts) must belong to someone, and cannot possibly belong to everyone.