"Ideas worth spreading" is the motto of a growing annual convention that is held in Monterey, California.  The Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference covers a wide range of topics, from science to the arts, and nearly everything in between.  My fraternity brother, Chris, recently made me aware of this conference, which has been conducted since 1984.

There is an annual membership fee of $6000, however, this fee not only covers attendance to the events, but also attendance for other special gatherings and DVDs of the presentations.  Since not everyone can afford to be this enlightened, the official website was created in response, providing the highlights and best speeches from the conference.

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We’ve written about the One Laptop Per Child project before on The Bivings Report. Now they have launched the Give One Get One promotion running through November 26^th. The way it works is for a $399 donation one laptop is donated to a child in a developing nation and one is sent to another child of your choice.

So why is this a big deal? It’s the only way that the public (read you – the "child") is able to get one of these laptops. At first I questioned the motivation for wanting one. Isn’t personal ownership of one of these cool, inexpensive and innovative laptops against the spirit of the OLPC project? These are supposed to be for the kids, right? I especially thought this when I saw this post the other day on Engadget.

But I think when all is said and done this is a good thing. Gadget crazy hackers get a new toy to play with and will probably make it 100 times as awesome as it already is, and a child in a developing nation gets a fantastic learning and communication tool. Plus as part of the promotion you get a free year of T-Mobile HotSpot Access worth $359.98 and a tax write off of $200 for the laptop you gave. It’s a win-win-win-win. Now all they have to do is keep up with production.

Blogging is so much more than about expressing yourself; it can also serve as a learning tool.  I have learned many interesting things through blogging.  Here are some of the ways that use my blog to learn: 

First, writing is mental exercise that, if done carefully, forces one to think about how to clearly present an idea.  What kind of facts or information does one need to defend a stance?  Can that stance stand?  What are the best words to use>?

Second, a post's comment section is a great way to expand one's horizons.  Not only do others provide feedback, but sometimes they include links to either their own site or other relevant sites.  Sometimes following links left in comments is a great way to find other people who have more information or share a common interest.

Third, analytics programs also help point to other sources of information related to a blog.  If another blog or site is linking to a blog, there's a decent chance that at least the post or page in question is related to one's blog.  Like comments, following sources of traffic one can find a whole community of people who share a common interest.

Fourth, linking to other bloggers and sites that you find useful information also helps one learn.  Blogging is about conversation and writing a post in response to another post (while linking to it, of course) is a great way to debate and collaborate.  Comments and analytic programs can aid in this conversation process.

What are some other ways that one can learn through blogging?

With some of the projects we've got going on here at TBG, I've been thinking a lot about who should blog and how certain parties should open their blog to comments. When a friend of mine approached me asking for help setting up a classroom blog for a summer class he will be teaching, I thought it was a great idea. It got me thinking: should teachers blog? And, if so, how should they blog? I think that blogs could be a great addition to just about any classroom in any grade level–from first grade through university. There are a variety of ways blogs can help teachers reach their students and effectively communicate subject materials: (more…)

While I was aware of the One Laptop Per Child Project - the goal of which is to develop a lost-cost, “$100,” laptop that can be given to children in developing countries for educational purposes - I had not seen much about its progress recently until I read an article on WashingtonPost.com this morning entitled, “Low-Cost Laptop Could Transform Learning .” If you have a few minutes, I would recommend reading it in its entirety – it is not terribly long and I found it to be a worthwhile read.

It serves as a good overview of what the final product will be like, and provides sufficient background about the project itself.  There are two things in the article that I feel warrant my humble commentary.  

The first is related to the operating system developed specifically for the machine, which is nicknamed Sugar.  Sugar is unlike any other operating system that is commonly used today.  Although it is built up on Linux code, it neither resembles most implementations of it, or Windows, or Apple Computer’s OS.  The article describes its runic-oriented, journal-like organization (as opposed to a folder-centric system, such as that used by Windows) in greater detail, which you can read by clicking here.  

I have somewhat of an issue with this “innovative approach.” While I do not necessarily oppose the concept behind the OS, which was developed to be intuitive for children across myriad cultures, I do question the wisdom behind teaching children about technology on a system that is so unique that when they eventually graduate to mainstream computing (which one would assume is one of the goals of the project) a lot of their knowledge will not be directly transferable.

My second area of concern is somewhat similar, and it has to do with a quote by the project’s founder, Nicholas Negroponte.  In the article, he is quoted as saying, “…the children are being trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint. I consider that criminal, because children should be making things, communicating, exploring, sharing, not running office automation tools.”  

Granted, a child’s learning should be more creation- and exploration-focused than say, vocational training.  That said, Microsoft Office, like it or not, has evolved into a nearly universal tool in business and (to a somewhat lesser extent) in academia.  Therefore, what is so inherently wrong about children learning how to use these tools and then utilizing them in the creative process (other than the cost)?  To me, this reeks more of anti-Microsoft / anti-corporate dogma than a legitimate area of concern for a project such as this.

Do not get me wrong – I think that One Laptop Per Child is a great program that is innovative and will make inroads towards closing the technology gap.  No project is perfect, and I completely support these efforts.

Four years ago, MIT made a committment to sharing the educational materials from all of their undergraduate and graduate courses online, making it free and accessible to people around the world. More than 1400 courses from their OpenCourseWare site , ranging from Aeronautics to Nuclear Sciences to Writing and Humanistic Studies is available through written syllabi to video lectures. There are also interactive web demonstrations and complete MIT authored textbooks available for study. 

One of the best outcomes of this initiative is that it has inspired a number of other universities around the world to offer some of their own materials online to the general public.

Some examples of available courseware online:

• The University of Washington, Course in Practical Cryptology. This course has made all the videos, presentations, quizzes and homework assignments online.
• Stanford University, iTunes LecturesIn collaboration with Apple, Stanford introduced a number of lectures on a Stanford version of iTunes . (more…)
  

According to a Reuters article, the 1,753 residents of the farming village of Hansdehar have chosen to connect to the world via the Internet, in hopes that the Indian government might take notice of the poor condition of their infrastructure. From a link on smartvillages.com,  Internet users can see pictures of the village, read profiles of the residents,  learn about the specifics of the infrastructure problems of Hansdehar.

The website was the brainchild of Kanwal Singh, a former web developer for the Chandigarh government. His mother's house will be the set up for the first Internet station in the village. Once the connection has been established, the Internet will enable residents to seek out opportunities they would not have otherwise known existed.

 A number of residents already know what they would like to do on the Internet. Here's a sample:

• Get better prices for their crops by trading on the National Commodity & Derivatives Exchange
• Publish an academic paper on mathematical theory and philosophy
• Find a marriage partner
• Apply to college
• Unite with other rural villages that have been ignored by the government.

John Voelcker, an interactive media strategist, released a review of the top ten technologies that are changing the world. His list is based on technologies developed by social entrepreneurs who thought through the development , usability and financing of their solutions. 

Voelcker's list is as follows, followed by summaries (based on his paper) of what these products actually do:

1. The Enviroloo by Enviro Options (Pty) Ltd of Kya Sands, South Africa.

Sewage treatment poses a problem in the developing world. People are exposed daily to disease carrying insects and contaminated water. In response to this problem, South Africa-based Enviro Options Ltd. introduced a new system, the Enviroloo, which uses heat and ventilation instead of a water-based system.   

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The Washington Post published an interesting article on Sunday about Google's Book Search function.  With the University of California recently adding its massive library to the book-scanning process, this idea of creating a comprehensive digitized library of all the world's books seems like a reachable goal.  This move, which opened the University of California's network of 100 libraries and some 34 million books to Google's scan-and-search framework is a landmark event in Google's quest of digitizing every book ever written.

The Issue

Google Book Search, originally dubbed Google Print,  was the basic idea on which Google creators built their franchise in 1996.  After getting distracted by indexing the entire World Wide Web and earning massive amounts of money, the Googlers returned to their original goal of digitizing books in 2004.

The search function was originally developed as a marketing tool for publishers and authors.  Under this structure, the Google team gained permission from publishers to scan books into a Google database.  Users can now conduct a search online, and their results consist of various books that include the search term within the text of the book.  Citations are provided, along with snippets of text with the search terms highlighted.  Links are provided to publishing companies and bookstores so that users can buy the books online.  In many cases where permission was obtained from publishers, books are shown in their entirety on the Web.  Publishers can track their stats on Google to see how many people are reading their books online, are given the opportunity to "opt out" of the service at any point, and can even make some extra money from Google ads.

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As a current student of Mandarin, I've been looking at the resources the web has to offer to help extend my classroom learning.  The result of my search has been a few sites that are using innovative strategies to help foreigners learn Mandarin and, hopefully, turn a profit in the not too distant future.  The Bivings Group has an extensive network of non-English speakers to cater to our foreign clientele and, as an internet-focused enterprise, are always looking for innovative, global solutions to help in our work and to better our human capital.

The first is an as yet unlaunched site called chinglish.com that has been getting some good reviews (and some bad).  The idea behind chinglish is to provide a combination translation and webmail application (with some other goodies thrown in) that will turn the most mundane and boring ff tasks (reading e-mail) into an opportunity to learn Mandarin.  I think the concept here is simple and powerful.  As someone who can spend hours on email every day, this has the potential to subtly turn a burdensome chore into a continuing learning lesson.  I'll report back when they open their doors.

The other site I'd like to talk about is ChinesePod.com.  I've been using their services for a few months now and am pleased with their direction.  The feature I find most useful is the daily podcasts of audio lessons, which are each either beginner, intermediate or advanced in nature.  Each podcast tackles a different situation, usually a real-world example of a conversation someone might have (asking for discounts at a store, haircuts, getting a date….).  They also offer the occasional video which follows roughly the same line of attack as their audio podcasts.  Perhaps the most intriguing aspect, but one I'm not overly familiar with since I'm still focusing on oral vs. written Mandarin, is their dictionary and flash card sections.  Essentially, any word (character) you're having trouble committing to memory can be tagged and put into a personalized database.  You can then draw on this database to create online flashcards so you can practice.  As far as business models go, chinesepod also has a brick-and-mortar operation in Shanghai so this is an excellent example of how the internet can help draw in "real-world" customers from a free service (the flash-cards require a monthly fee arrangement however).  The site is rounded out with a community feature that features blogs, wikis, forums and a community RSS feed where you can add your blog to the Chinesepod site