[DDN] Educators! Register now for the Global Kids' Digital Media Essay Contest
Are you an educator who works with high school-aged students? Then register NOW for the Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative's Digital Media Essay Contest, supported by the MacArthur Foundation. In February 2006, Global Kids will launch a Digital Media Essay Contest. We want to support you to prepare your students to submit an entry. Do your students: *** search the Web *** send instant messages *** play computer games *** download MP3s *** post on blogs *** send SMS text messages If so, then we want to hear what they have to say about it. Would you like: *** $75 for your involvement! *** A $10 gift certificate for each of your students who participate! *** Support from Global Kids during each of the steps! *** An opportunity for your students to shape the next generation of MacArthur's multimillion dollar investment in education reform! If so, learn how to register your class TODAY at www.GlobalKids.org/olp/dmec. This is a small, pilot project, so act now. Please feel free to pass this on. -- ___ Barry Joseph [EMAIL PROTECTED] Director Online Leadership Program Global Kids http://www.globalkids.org/olp http://www.NewzCrew.org Sign-up for the Global Kids' Newsletter: Send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
[DDN] oakland county, michigan, free wireless pilot starts in march
Pilot Oakland cities going wireless soon By Catherine Kavanaugh Daily Tribune Staff Writer Computer users in seven cities will be able to unplug their equipment and still access the Internet for free when Wireless Oakland comes to their towns with a target start-up time in March, 2006. In Royal Oak, the service first will be offered in the area bounded by Woodward Avenue, I-696, I-75 and 12 Mile Road and then branch out to the rest of city, according to Interim City Attorney David Gillam. Royal Oak is one of seven pilot cities along with Troy, Madison Heights, Oak Park, Birmingham, Pontiac and Wixom. Eventually, all 910 square miles of Oakland County will go wireless. (snip) http://www.dailytribune.com/stories/012506/loc_wireless25001.shtml -- Phil Shapiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.digitaldivide.net/profile/pshapiro http://www.digitaldivide.net/blog/pshapiro http://www.his.com/pshapiro/stories.menu.html Wisdom starts with wonder. - Socrates ___ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
[DDN] Searching for Bangladesh
I'm excited in the way that only a geek who likes languages can be... I turned on my computer yesterday and Google came up in Bangla (Bengali). That shouldn't be too surprising since I live in Bangladesh, but this was a new and surprising trick for my computer. I didn't change anything, but apparently Google started a local server (google.com.bd) which serves up content in UTF-8 encoded Bangla. From talking with friends around the world, it sounds like Google just kicked off a slew of these country-specific search engines. I'm country director of the Global Connections and Exchange Project (GCEP) in Bangladesh, a project which aims to introduce computer and internet technology into schools, and to promote intercultural lessons via the internet. Last year, we put up a website in UTF-8 encoded Bangla. For fun, I tried to find it...a little ego surfing -- I typed the name of my organization into the search engine in Bangla: relief international and hit three times. I then tried just relief and hit our page; I tried international and hit our page. In fact, as I broadened the search terms to common items like school, site, link and a bunch of other common words, I began to realize that there just aren't a lot of websites in Bangla. I'd like to think that our site is super-special (and it, of course, is), but the world's sixth most spoken language is critically under-represented on the internet -- talk about a digital divide. Part of the problem has been standards. One standard is used in India, while a proprietary standard is dominant in Bangladesh. I believe that Unicode Bangla was only finalized around April of last year. With the exception of our project, a few linux-related sites and a few wikipedia entries, the Bangla-language wired world has been a virtual desert. A few developments bode well for Bangla on the internet, though: 1) availability of unicode fonts (for instance, Vrinda which ships with WinXP and a series of open source fonts), 2) availability of browsers that can render unicode Bangla correctly (IE, Firefox, and probably others), and 3) a popular search engine that can find some content in Bangla. Perhaps this last factor will be enough to kick off an explosion of internet use, but a fourth pillar is still missing: a critical mass of content. We've been working on ways to jumpstart Bangla content. Last year, we started the first two Bangla-language projects on the Project Gutenberg, Europe site. We've done a number of collaborative projects between schools in Bangladesh using Bangla-based email and forums, and have developed projects culminating in production of essays, school newspapers and web pages in Bangla, all of which end up on the web. We're hoping to be part of a process to build local language content to the point that casual users can perform a search and find something useful in their own language. We may be a drop in the bucket when it comes to the global picture, but we hope we're a good example to early adapters of Bangla content development. For a brief glimpse of the language and a discussion of how it can be implemented on the internet, I've made a couple pages found at: http://www.connect-bangladesh.org/bangla Our Project Gutenberg projects can be found on the Project Gutenberg Europe site: http://dp.rastko.net/ Jack Welch, Country Director Relief International - Schools Online, Bangladesh +880-173-032-998 http://www.connect-bangladesh.org The Global Connections and Exchange Program is funded by the US Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, per provisions of the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act of 1961, as amended. ___ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
Re: [DDN] Chile: Bachelet Digital (fwd)
Thanks for flagging this Andy. It's an impressive initiative on the part of Chile (of which I am proud because it is my native land). I note that the initiative is not mere political spin, as Chile has made a new proposal to the WIPO Development Agenda in keeping with this policy: http://www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/mdocs/en/pcda_1/pcda_1_2.pdf. John -- John T. Mitchell http://interactionlaw.com On 1/25/06, Andy Carvin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From Global Voices -ac Bachelet Digital (in Spanish) is a newly launched weblog by incoming president, Michelle Bachelet, which will serve as a measuring stick for her Digital Agenda: 2006 - 2010″ program. The blog - with the tagline, four years to digitalize Chile - so far, concentrates on themes like internet access, open source software, and Creative Commons licenses. http://www.bacheletdigital.cl/ -- Andy Carvin acarvin (at) edc . org (until Jan 31) As of February 1: andycarvin (at) yahoo . com http://www.digitaldivide.net http://www.andycarvin.com ___ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message. ___ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
[DDN] Blogging Scholarship
For anyone on here currently a US resident and in school, this may be a nice
way to make some money...
_
From: Katy E. Pearce [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, January 26, 2006 11:47 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; 'Katy E. Pearce'
Subject: RE: Blogging Scholarship
Sorry all, forgot to read the fine print:
Open to legal residents of the United States, age 16 or older as of June 1,
2006, who will be attending a regionally or nationally accredited college,
university, or vocational school for during the 2006 or 2007 calendar year.
_
From: Katy E. Pearce [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, January 26, 2006 11:39 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Blogging Scholarship
Wow!
Scholarship DetailsScholarship ID: 126072
Scholarship Title Blogging for Progress Scholarship
Contact Art Morgan
Address 3182 Campus Drive #222
San Mateo, CA 94403
Website Address http://www.progressiveu.org/
javascript:sdcOpenWindow('http://www.progressiveu.org/', 'new_win',
'width=720,height=' + (screen.height - 200) +
',toolbar=no,menubar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes');
Application Deadline Varies
Number Of Awards 8
Maximum Amount $1,000
Scholarship Description
ProgressiveU.org is now accepting entries for its second semiannual Blogging
for Progress Scholarship contest. The contest encourages current and
prospective college students to write about current events, society, the
environment, and public policy.
The first-place winner will be awarded a $1000 scholarship, and three
runners-up will be awarded $300 scholarships.
The deadline for entries is June 1, but early entrants have an advantage, as
scoring is based on the number of posts and readership over the five month
period of the contest. There is no fee to enter.
Last year's entrants reached an audience of over half a million people
during the contest period, and their postings continue to be read by
thousands of people each day. We encourage all budding writers, journalists,
bloggers, and leaders to start blogging for progress today, and make your
voice heard.
More information, and registration forms are available at:
http://www.progressiveu.org/BFP_FAQ
javascript:sdcOpenWindow('http://www.progressiveu.org/BFP_FAQ', 'new_win',
'width=720,height=' + (screen.height - 200) +
',toolbar=no,menubar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes');
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Re: [DDN] phoneblog
It certainly is a good idea, if not original. I remember making an LJ phone post from the top of Mt. Si in Washington a few years ago. Your audience gets a much better experience of the moment, and of you. You can create more human value, that is, a higher-bandwidth human connection. On the other hand, it makes the blog reading experience discontinuous. At least for me, this is a big cost, because it costs a lot of my time and attention to change modes. Also, you can't skim a phone post, or a moving video post for that matter. And if the audience doesn't have speakers or headphones plugged in, or is in a public space, they may just skip the content. Having a transcript a la LJ helps with these faults, but does away with the advantages of the medium. It'll start being interesting when we stop caring so much about blogs and CMSs and IMs and eMail, and gather all the clever little ideas we've come up with and put them at the service of, that is, structure them around, human communities and human ends. Sorry for that sentance. Cheers, Peter Abrahamsen Red Libre de Ometepe, Nicaragua [EMAIL PROTECTED] On 1/25/06, Champ-Blackwell, Siobhan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.phoneblogz.com/index.php This is new the era of blogging. Keyboards are out. Remembering a situation for later recollection is history. Now you can blog wherever, whenever, even with no internet connection. PhoneBlogz allows you to blog by phone - to your own blogging software on your own server. We support direct posting and remote polling. Check out the rest of the site for more info. Has anyone used this before? siobhan Siobhan Champ-Blackwell Community Outreach Liaison NN/LM-MCR Creighton University Health Sciences Library 2500 California Plaza Omaha, NE 68178 402.280.4156/800.338.7657 option#1,#2, then #1 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://nnlm.gov/mcr http://medstat.med.utah.edu/blogs/BHIC/ http:// medstat.med.utah.edu/blogs/BHIC/ http://www.digitaldivide.net/profile/siobhanchamp-blackwell http:// www.digitaldivide.net/profile/siobhanchamp-blackwell ___ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to digitaldivide- [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message. smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature ___ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
Re: [DDN] Searching for Bangladesh
Excellent post! I'm a native Bangla speaker, though my Bengali's not great...I grew up half here in the US and half in Calcutta, India. My dad's from Barishaal, so I can speak / understand a few dialects more than your typical city Bangla speaker, but my reading / writing is getting woefully rusty. Having Bangla resources on the web would serve a secondary purpose; for people like me, it would let me keep in touch with the language. Since I'm online a *lot* of the time, reading the news from the subcontinent or updates on digital divide issues in Bangla would be enough to keep me from getting rusty, especially if Google adds a translation service to help me out eventually. Adding translation would also mean that I could add Bangla to my list of translation options for Drupal (http://www.digitalraindrop.com/Drupal-CivicSpace-Translations). For some reason, I have the impression that there is much more content online in the East Asian languages than in other language groups. I'll speculate on the reasons for this; feel free to chime in with your own thoughts. Firstly, I think it's significant that China, Japan, and Korea have computers being sold with operating systems in their languages, keyboards in their languages, even BIOS settings in their languages. I was in Calcutta a year ago, and talked to a few nonprofits and businesses working in computer education with marginalized communities who are frequently not highly literate in English, and not one of them could point me to a computer store selling hardware with Bangla (or Hindi) defaults. A couple of computer hardware vendors I talked to didn't even know where I could get things like that, or how I could set my computer up to work with Bangla fonts. This leads me to believe that those who are using Bangla fonts are doing so as a novelty...people who are already somewhat fluent in another language (usually English) and who use another language (again, English) for most of their digital lives. The real end user, the user who does not speak English, is not online. The real user in Korea, Japan, and China, the big three East Asian nations, *are* online. Thus there is a specific need for content in their languages, while there is no real need for content in Bangla...while we may represent the 6th most spoken language in the world, in terms of languages used and needed online we're nowhere to be found. Given this, I don't think Google offering Bangla search results is going to change anything, though it's a welcome first step. The overwhelming number of Bangali (adj: of Bengal, or Bangladesh) nonprofits and schools involved in digital education are using English, and basing their work on necessary English literacy classes. As long as this is the case, native Bangla speakers will continue to be more comfortable using English as the lingua franca of the internet. To see a significant jump in Bangla resources online, we're going to have to see an intermediate step: these schools and nonprofits are going to have to shift, at least partially, to a model of digital training in local languages. And for that to happen as anything more than a novelty or an experiment, we're going to have to see adoption of local language computer use in businesses, so that it becomes a valid part of workforce development. And this is where the problem is. There are historic social and cultural reasons for English use on the subcontinent being linked with greater affluence, greater power, and greater prestige. As of now, the business models that involve digital literacy (even a secretary in an office...not usually considered a high-powered job in the US) targeted this elite population. And for good reason, since it's a very, very large population in India. So why limit ourselves to Bangla, when our middle class (really an upper class in bourgeoisie disguise) is more comfortable typing in English, and would have to be re-educated in Bangla fonts and keyboard skills...also necessitating, to some level, that our support staff be re-educated in similar skills? To displace these models, a nonprofit is going to have to leap all of these tiers and create an overarching solution from end to end, from education to employment, to serve as a model that makes economic sense. For example, if an NGO (especially a well-established, influential one like Brac, http://www.brac.net/) were to set up a website development service in Bangla and English, using workstations with both languages and involving development work in Bangla, to plug in to a digital literacy program, they would be creating their own need for Bangla language computer operators. The obstacle here is that you are doing a disservice to the first people to pass through your Bangla computer literacy course. Is this justified? Because according to the status quo, you're hurting their job opportunities by *not* making them English computer users. At some point
[DDN] Access to Internet2
DDN Colleagues, I have two questions regarding Internet2: 1) Do you think it would be worthwhile for adult literacy/basic education programs (in cbo's, public schools, libraries, community colleges, etc.) to seek Internet2 access?* Internet2 might be used for teacher access to professional development courses (some from universities), student access to online learning resources or courses, and possibly in other ways. 2) If so, what would be good steps to take to work toward this access? David J. Rosen [EMAIL PROTECTED] * (Internet 2 is a network that allows more than 220 universities — and a few research-related companies and government organizations — to use advanced online services ... at speeds 100 times faster than normal connections.) [ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10944795/ ] ___ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
[DDN] guide to the Internet for journalists in developing countries
Part of bridging the Digital Divide, IMO, is building the capacities of particular groups of professionals, and aspiring professionals, to use it. With that in mind, I'm passing on the following: The Net for Journalists: A practical guide to the Internet for journalists in developing countries UNESCO collaborated with the Thomson Foundation and Commonwealth Broadcasting Association to produce a handbook for journalists of developing countries on the use of Internet for journalistic purposes. This training handbook, which is written by a journalist and trainer Mr Martin Huckerby, is designed for both print and broadcast journalists and journalism students in developing countries around the globe. The handbook aims to provide journalists, especially from developing countries, with some practical skills in exploring and exploiting the Net for day-to-day journalistic assignments. It teaches how to search the net more effectively and efficiently, not only for facts and figures, but also for images, audio and video. An important feature of the handbook is that it does not only tell where and how to get the information one needs, but also how to evaluate and verify the information gathered. In short, it keeps the tradition of journalism of verification. The handbook can be downloaded from http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=21010URL_DO=DO_TOPICURL_SECTION=201.html (near the bottom of the page) I have NO further information on this resource. -- Jayne Cravens MSc (Dev Mgmt) (Open) Bonn, Germany Services for Mission-Based Orgs www.coyotecommunications.com International Development Studies Work www.coyotecommunications.com/development Contact me www.coyotecommunications.com/contact.html www.ivisit.com id: jcravens.4947 ___ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
[DDN] 20th anniversary of the Challenger disaster
Hi everyone, Tomorrow marks the 20th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, which killed seven astronauts, including educator Christa McAullife. I've just posted some memories from that day on my blog; I witnessed the disaster from outside my junior high school that cold morning in Indialantic, Florida. http://www.andycarvin.com permalink: http://www.andycarvin.com/archives/2006/01/remembering_my.html For those of you who are members of Omidyar.net, I've started a bulletin board discussion where people can post their memories of the Challenger explosion and discuss the loss of the first and only teacher in space: http://www.omidyar.net/group/community-general/news/1136/ andy -- Andy Carvin acarvin (at) edc . org (until Jan 31) As of February 1: andycarvin (at) yahoo . com http://www.digitaldivide.net http://www.andycarvin.com ___ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
