Normally I make it a personal mission to tune our Richard Scoble. He would fall under the classification of “celebrity blogger”, someone who’s influence over “what’s hot” in the tech community is disproportionate to the actual news he covers.
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Education Week Article Makes Me a Prophet
The latest Education Week issue has a profile of teachers embracing “open resources”, those that are free to the public and easy to tweak for whatever your personal needs may be. I’m not claiming to have “invented” this idea; and it’s great to see it in more populated circles than my little blog.
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An Open Software Services Ecology :: autonomo.us
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An Amazing Workshop Starts Tomorrow–Would Attend if not for Freakin Grad School Orientation
A hands-on approach to Third World aid - MIT News Office via kwout
I must say that it’s a bit comforting knowing that I live down the road from M.I.T. A lot of the reasons I came to Cambridge in the first place are playing out over at that campus.
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Oamos Opens Up Meta-Search for Embedding on Websites
Affected Clapping previewed the new Oamos meta-data search engine back in May, and it seems the developer has been busy. Registered users can now embed the search engine right into their own websites. Let’s give it a whirl! (my keywords for the search below were Open Source.) But first, a word from Oamos:
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Excellent Article on the “Difficulty” of Learning Math
Written by Marvin Minsky, a contributor to the One Laptop Per Child Organization.
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A Student’s Revealing Speech
Two weeks ago my school had a dinner for all the mentors, a celebratory affair thanking them for their hard work. Several students spoke. I asked to reprint one student’s speech, as I found it truly remarkable. (Names have been changed.)
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Sir Ken Robinson Addresses a Group of Superintendents @ The Apple Education Leadership Summit
If you’ve seen Sir Ken Robinson’s speech at TED, this will seem very familiar. However, this time Robinson addressed a bunch of Superintendents from around the world at Apple’s Education Leadership Summit, also known as “Educators, Please Buy Macs!”.
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Open-Source Professional Development: Teachers Are Already Doing It!
I stumbled on this post this morning, which led me to a Powerpoint presentation teaching educators how to use Google Docs, EDITED BY OVER 500 people!
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Q&A With Google’s Open-Source Guru
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Open-Source Sewing?
Yup, that’s right. Over at Burdastyle they’re doing what’s called Open-Source Sewing. Make your own design, “improve” on other people’s. Mix and match. It’s a loose application of the term “Open-Source”, but a good marketing angle at least.
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“Bronx 8th-graders boycott practice exam” (From NY Daily News)
A revealing article in the NY Daily News (who knew?) on Wednesday about 8th graders protesting “yet another” standardized test.
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Seed Wiki! Free Wiki’s For Everybody!
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Xoost Offers Real People (Shocking!) Helping You Search Online (revenue model to come later this year)
My name is Xoost and I’m here to show you a new way of searching the web.
Join me and enjoy the Web 2.0+
9194 beta test invitations available now!
Contact me (via comments) for an invite, or simply go to their website.
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“Students discover beauty through their cameras” (in Rwanda)
I found this article, published in Rwanda’s Sunday Times from Global Venture, via Paul Allison’s excellent blog, New Journalism.
To know Rwanda is to know a country stained with sorrow. Kigali’s city streets may be kept immaculately clean, but no matter how hard the government tries, the horrors of the 1994 Genocide will not be swept away.
Every day, a new story of suffering emerges. Every day, a new crime is confessed to. Every day, an old wound is re-opened, leaving little choice but to face the past all over again.
From all of the grief, though, also come stories of awe-inspiring forgiveness, humble hope, and indestructible faith. There is a strength and a beauty in Rwanda – in its people – that not only persist, but undoubtedly serve as the backbone of a nation trying to pull itself back together again.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the small northern town of Bisate, where a group of elementary school children have come together to capture on film the beauty that surrounds them on a daily basis.
Getting the call
Debbie Roessel is an art teacher at the Riverdale-Kingsbridge Academy in the Bronx, New York. She had been longing to carry out some sort of creative exchange with students in Africa. One day, along with her colleague Marisa Harford, the two participated in a conference call with Laura and Sean Clauson.
The Clauson’s are a brother and sister team that hail from America, but are currently based in Bisate, Rwanda. Laura Clauson is the director of Comprehensive Community Health Initiatives & Programs (CCHIPS), an organization that seeks to upgrade rundown rural health clinics. She had caller her brother, Sean, to come and document her first project in Bisate.
An experienced filmographer, Sean Clauson, was then working on what he calls “a mindless commercial campaign for McDonalds Corp,” when he got the call. “I was at the time eagerly searching for ‘meaningful work’ and so I jumped at this opportunity.”
Together, the siblings set off to realize and document the re-birth of the Bisate Clinic. Their progress can be found on ClinicsRising.com, a website started in 2006 by Peter Raymond “out of the need to tell the stories that often go untold about amazing work in health care worldwide,” he says.
Hatching the plan
In that first conference call, Roessel asked the Clauson’s to describe some of the cultural differences they had noticed in their time in Rwanda. “Two of their answers were totally unexpected,” she says.
“They explained that the concepts of ‘past’, ‘future’, and of ‘art’ are foreign in Bisate, as a person’s immediate need for food, water, travel-by-foot, and getting medical care consumes nearly all their time,” explains Roessel. “As an artist, I cannot imagine living in a world with no creative means for expressing and sharing ideas.”
With that, Roessel had an idea. Why not start a photography project that would not only help children in Bisate express themselves creatively, but also make them focus more on the beauty that surrounds them.
Because the Bisate Clinic had already established a health outreach program at a local school, the logistics of the project were relatively easy to arrange. Roessel found a grant to purchase cameras for the students, then wrote a detailed lesson plan, which her daughter, Lauren Fitzsimmons, carried out along with the Clauson’s and their translator, Elie Sebigoli.
A class of students at Bisate Primary school was selected to participate in the project. Each student was given a camera and some basic training, and told to take twenty-four pictures all of one thing – the one thing they found the most beautiful to them – and write down why they chose their subject.
“We planned collaboratively to create a project that would be intellectually stimulating, engaging, and practical,” says Harford, “and jointly decided on the central theme: ‘What is beautiful to you?’”
“The class was clearly excited and enjoyed spending the three hours learning how to operate the cameras and experimenting with different camera angles and lighting situations,” says Roessel.
At the same time, a group of similar-aged students from the Riverdale-Kingsbridge Academy in the U.S. were also selected as participants in the program and given the same instructions.
The two groups of students would then exchange their photographs in order to expose the other to “lifestyles and ideas that are different from their own,” says Harford.
The photos
Sandrine Mukandekezi is a 15-year-old student at Bisate Primary school. She was also one of the participants in the photography exchange program. For her assignment, she took a picture of a stone.
“The reason is that the stone makes me happy,” she says. “This place reminds me of my father, young sisters and brothers who died. When I think about all of them, I have to go to sit on that stone to watch the beauty of nature and forget my life problems.”
16-year-old Tumukunde Marie Chance chose to photograph her brother. “The reason I chose my brother is because he is the only one I have and he loves me very much.”
For 17-year-old Michael Ihimazwe, the most beautiful thing for him was a football. “To play football helps people of different nations to meet and create relationships,” he says. “I remember when our Bisate school football team won a cup, I went to town for my first time. I was excited.” Interestingly, points out Roessel, a student from the Bronx also chose soccer as their object of beauty.
One student’s photograph of the hill upon which her parents were buried proved especially moving to Sean Clauson. “That really hit me in the heart,” he says, “and powerfully reinforced my faith in this project’s ability to communicate at a very deep and personal level.”
The goal
“I think that it is important to pause every now and then to notice things that give us pleasure and have a special meaning,” says Roessel. “Just the act of seeking out something beautiful directs our minds to focus on the goodness in the world.”
Beyond that, says Clauson, the power of film can play an important role in any nation’s development. “Countries must first cross their cultural divide before they can effectively assist one another,” he suggests. “We must understand before we can effectively help.”
Harford echoes those sentiments, saying, “I think that young people always benefit from being exposed to lifestyles and ideas that are different from their own, and that this exposure is good both for the Rwandan students and our students.”
Students in the Bronx were particularly shocked, says Harford, “to consider kids their age who spent their afternoons working in the fields with their parents or listening to the radio to hear news of the war across the nearby border with the Congo.”
For that reason, this project proved especially enriching to the children in Bisate, since many of them had never even held a camera before, let alone had instruction on how to use one.
The reaction
“The students have loved the project,” says Harford. “Both groups of students took the project very seriously, thought carefully about their subjects, experimented with lighting and angles in their photographs, and wrote insightful and touching accounts of their work.”
Students in both Bisate and the Bronx embraced the project wholeheartedly, devoting much time and energy to capturing the perfect frame, with some even asking for an extension on their given deadlines until the weather became more ideal.
“That the students were so vocal and outgoing and excited about the project was an extremely pleasurable surprise,” says Sean Clauson. “I was especially impressed because the kids so rapidly developed firm ideas about what they wanted to shoot and also how they wanted to shoot it. For kids who had never even held a camera before this was quite an incredible thing to witness.”
What’s next?
When the student’s photographs have all been developed and mounted, they will be put into an exhibition for display in both the Bronx and Bisate, bringing their messages of beauty and intercultural exchange to a wider audience.
In the meantime, Raymond and the Clauson’s will continue in their efforts to work towards and document the revitalization of health clinics throughout the developing world.
Clinics Rising has most recently moved onto documenting a new clinic in Shingiro. “Working with our producers, writers, filmmakers, designers and photographers we can help them tell their story in the way that it needs to be told,” says Raymond.
For now, students and teachers in Bisate and the Bronx alike anxiously await the final product, but no matter what the outcome, the rewards for both have already been realized.
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SourceForge: Open-Source Software Depository
What has SourceForge done for you lately? As of today (it’s updated daily) there’s 273,633 pieces of software available to be downloaded and opened up: take a look at their guts (code), tweak it, and make it yours!
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Open-Source Solutions for Proprietary Problems
I thought I’d drop you all a quick a note and let you know what’s been going on over at Affected Clapping. The truth? Not much. As most of you know, I’ve been preoccupied with applying to, and choosing, the right graduate school to study International Development. I’m happy to report that this July I’ll be starting my studies at Brandeis University, at The Heller School for International Development.
This recent change in my life has led several people to ask: “what about the website?” Fear not! Affected Clapping shall live on!
However, like the field of development, I think it’s time for the focus of the site to broaden ever so slightly. Instead of searching for Open-Source solutions to Educational problems, Affected Clapping will now be a source of news and analysis for Open-Source solutions to Societal problems; why limit the benefits of having an Open-Source philosophy to education? And why pretend that educational problems exist in a vacuum?
The truth is that we all see things in our world we’d like to change every day, and these things aren’t limited to education (though that’s certainly a big one!). Affected Clapping will be a place for new ideas, ideas that aren’t limited to education. There have been many instances when I’ve run across a new idea that didn’t quite fit into AC’s agenda because, though Open-Source related, it didn’t involve Education per se. It’s comforting to know that this won’t be a problem any more.
In line with this new approach to my website, you’ll notice a complete redesign as well. I hope you like it (don’t be shy—let me know in the comments section what you think): it’s aimed at helping you get a better overview of ALL the content available to you at AC.
Thanks for all your support, I look forward to hearing your comments on the new design.
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50 Evernote Invites Now Available!
They just keep on coming! Leave a comment for an invite.
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Is Oamos the Future of Digital Data? Or Just Something Fun? (Prob. the Latter)
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