Dot Learnt

Hats off to the power of social media. By now, many of you might have come across the latest Facebook, Twitter and Internet sensation – Kony 2012. The 30-minute video is the brainchild of Jason Russell a young Australian filmmaker who is looking to make Joseph Kony, the violent leader of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Movement, famous – or rather, infamous.

This post is not intended to shower you with the horrors of Kony, his abduction of over 30,000 children or his advocacy of child soldiers. Rather, this post is meant to highlight the two-fold brilliance of the online campaign.

Invisible Children is an international campaign to stop the Kony problem, putting an end to Africa’s longest-standing armed conflict. Within 24 hours, a single day, the short film had over 4 million views. Currently, the link is closing in at 15 million. (more…)

The Ivy League is the crème de la crème of universities. Prestigious and world renowned for their academic rigor and their ability to prepare students for what is becoming an even more competitive job market, these schools entice students from all over the world. Recently, Stanford University has knocked down the walls of the classroom and pushed aside the admissions office. They’re providing high-quality education to anyone in the world, for free.

With a focus on the most common and talked about topics in technology today, the three courses including Machine Learning, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Introduction to Databases will take students on a self-paced exploration of what a typical Stanford student would see. Students partaking in the semester long course will be expected to devote time to reading course materials, completing assignments and taking exams and quizzes.

So the walls of the university have been knocked down – come one, come all! Similar programs such as Massachusetts’ Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare or Open Yale Courses all seek to unlock the world of knowledge and empower the minds of students, both in America and abroad.

Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford research professor teaching the artificial intelligence course explains that the current times have called for this academic shift. “Technology has progressed, connectivity has progressed and video has progressed,” it is time to take the “Stanford education out into the world to people who cannot afford it or who do not have access.”

Who would have thought that the day would come where anyone regardless of SAT scores, GPA, teacher recommendations or work experience could get an Ivy education? The degree though, that still comes with hefty tuition bill (for now at least).

Keep Calm and Learn On,

Nora

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Beyond the movies, the hospitality, the humor, the protests, the history, you find something that every Egyptian simply gets used to–traffic. At the nexus of overpopulation and a weak infrastructure emerges inefficiency.  Thinking about infrastructure in the context of school systems, we realize that schools are more than just teachers and students. To run smoothly they need countless resources, upkeep, processes and people. With so many moving parts at play, inefficiencies are bound to emerge.

Enter IntaFeen – the Arabic phrase for Where Are you? I’m sure most of you have taken note of the latest ‘check-in’ fad on Facebook. By grazing your minifeed, you can easily take note of where your co-workers are for lunch (and potentially crash the party) or which of your friends is attending the latest ISTE conference. With apps such as FourSquare continuing to gain popularity in the States, six Egyptian men, straight from the heart of the Silicon Valley have opted to return to their roots and introduce the Land of the Pharaohs to ‘check-in’ culture.

Allow me to highlight what a tool like IntaFeen can do for school districts in Egypt (and other societies challenged by education infrastructure inefficiencies). Imagine a school that integrates the IntaFeen technology into their administration system. A teacher running late on the day of an exam can instantly ‘check-in,’ giving administration an estimated time of arrival. More often than not, exams are canceled due to teachers getting caught off guard by unbearable traffic. The school’s administration could then designate another teacher to administer the exam or predetermine an alternative plan of action.

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Early this month, the social media hegemon laid down the law and stated it was acquiring Push Pop Press, a digital bookmaker that is famed for their dynamic digital content for Apple’s ipad. Dare I say it? These are not just books. These are elegant, visually teasing, intellectually stimulating packages of knowledge.

So what’s the deal? Is Facebook trading in their status updates for a bunch of e-books? Not necessarily. What the multibillion-dollar company is doing though, is recognizing the growing market for e-books and asking for a piece of the pie, or at least claiming rights to it. A Push Pop representative explains how the “ideas and technology behind [their company] will be integrated with Facebook, to give people an even richer way to share their stories.”

Let’s talk e-books for a minute. As of recent, the Association of American Publisher’s released data showing e-books as the bestselling category in American publishing. Just a few months ago, Amazon came out and stated that after four years of selling e-books, they are “now selling more of them than printed books.” E-books allow users to engage in the learning process as readers dive deeply into the content with the use of multimedia and interactive text-supporting features. For example, in Al Gore’s first e-book, published and created by Push Pop Press, Our Choice allows readers to explore audio, video and interactive graphics as they read. Users become more than readers, they become a part of the story itself.

Through the fusion of access, content and connectedness individuals, organizations and governments alike are hopping on board the digital and mobile technology train. Just recently, the government of South Korea has mandated that all school-age curricula will become digitized by the year 2015. In one the New York Time’s recent opinion piece, Virginia Heffernan discusses how 65% of today’s grade-school youth will end up doing work in a field that has not even been invented yet. Such developments should only push us to embrace technology use in the classroom, as technology will help us better prepare for society’s evolution. How’s that for knocking down the bookcase?

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Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Sid Djerfi, a Teach First ambassador and current Associate Director of Regional Expansion at Teach First. Prior to his current position, he worked on implementing the Teach First model in Lebanon and the UAE. It was during this interview that Djerfi unveiled his viewpoint on the biggest problems that countries in the MENA region are facing in terms of education, and how we can help solve them. You’ll find the full interview below, followed by highlights from our conversation.

In your opinion, what challenges do MENA education systems face when it comes to taking advantage of education technology in schools?

There are obvious issues we can talk about such as the issue of connectivity or the issue of accessibility, but I’d like to focus on the bigger picture. The problem that MENA countries face is that in a lot of places, students have sufficient access to knowledge, but unfortunately they do not know how to utilize that information. They do not know, for instance, how to decide on which Ted Talk they should listen to. Also, a lot of the information out there is in English, and many of the students might not be able to understand.

So what you’re saying is that it goes beyond giving them access to technology, it is more about teaching them how to implement the technology. Correct?

Absolutely. There have been a lot of initiatives that have focused on getting computers into schools. But how do you use the computers? If a teacher asks a student to find research on cancer for instance, the student will return with a variety of different sources. Can the student tell what is biased information from what is not? Can they put in the right keywords when searching for things on Google? It is as if the library has been built in the town, but the kids are unable to figure out which book to read for the answers. (more…)