Schools + Libraries + Museums + STEAM + Digital Media Literacy + Cyber Arts + Connected to Fiber Networks

Possible instructions for educators on how they can work together with the learners…

Knowing the tools for 21st Century Learning is primordial to give quality courses. Taking GOLD DUST as an good practice example who is an interdisciplinary and interactive 21st century textbook. It works on the basis of the “Papillon”-method- a new system of education on the basis of ancient wisdom and modern research.

By using the “Papillon” method learners get a mix from structur (text of the virtual world) and freedom (Internet).

The preoccupation with key words (the penetration at the depth central themes) pays for itself in an acceleration of apprehension, and not only during school but for the entire life.

Particularly suitable for team- and project work. The role of the teacher is being transformed. He is providing the direction and ensures the point of reference while the Internet becomes the learning space and the student can work independently. The teacher will play the role of a coach…

Due to the switch between digital and traditional work methods, the productive capacity to reflect and the joy the students experience from experimentation as well as the ability to critically assess the media are stimulated and promoted. Unique learning success becomes possible in this sense by combining technical affinity and the desire to read.

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Ayesha Mir didn’t go to school on Tuesday, Nov. 27, the day after a security guard found a shrapnel-packed bomb under her family’s car. The 17-year-old Pakistani girl assumed, as did most people who learned about the bomb, that it was intended for her father, the television news presenter Hamid Mir, who often takes on the Taliban in his nightly news broadcasts. Traumatized by the near miss, Ayesha spent most of the day curled up in a corner of her couch, unsure whom to be angrier with: the would-be assassins or her father for putting himself in danger. She desperately wanted someone to help her make sense of things.

At around 10:30 p.m., she got her wish. Ayesha’s father had just come home from work, and he handed her his BlackBerry. “She wants to speak to you,” he said. The voice on the phone was weak and cracked, but it still carried the confidence that Ayesha and millions of other Pakistanis had come to know through several high-profile speeches and TV appearances.

“This is Malala,” said the girl on the other end of the line. Malala Yousafzai, 15, was calling from the hospital in Birmingham, England, where under heavy guard she has been undergoing treatment since Oct. 16. “I understand that what happened was tragic, but you need to stay strong,” Malala told Ayesha. “You cannot give up.”

I have written and spoken extensively about the use of Twitter in education:

In addition to the above mentioned uses of Twitter, I am increasingly becoming aware of the importance of Twitter as a CURATION tool for me.

The term “curation” in itself has become quite popular recently. I am not sure yet, if it is another term destined to become a victim of talking at cross purposes among the educational community.

Mike Fisher has blogged about curation and what it means versus the concept of collection.

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In August, four months after Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng started the online education company Coursera, its free college courses had drawn in a million users, a faster launching than either Facebook or Twitter.

The co-founders, computer science professors at Stanford University, watched with amazement as enrollment passed two million last month, with 70,000 new students a week signing up for over 200 courses, including Human-Computer Interaction, Songwriting and Gamification, taught by faculty members at the company’s partners, 33 elite universities.

In less than a year, Coursera has attracted $22 million in venture capital and has created so much buzz that some universities sound a bit defensive about not leaping onto the bandwagon.

Other approaches to online courses are emerging as well. Universities nationwide are increasing their online offerings, hoping to attract students around the world. New ventures like Udemy help individual professors put their courses online. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have each provided $30 million to create edX. Another Stanford spinoff, Udacity, has attracted more than a million students to its menu of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, along with $15 million in financing.

All of this could well add up to the future of higher education — if anyone can figure out how to make money.

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Change races at us. New cars emerge annually, new gadgets seasonally, new software daily. In a blink, a storm juggled life for millions. Yet some phenomena persist. Educational progress for many remains stuck in a time capsule, pushing victims toward a future long past. Fortunately, this is not true for all; flashes of capacity sparkle even in regions off the beaten track.

Recently, I visited a tiny elementary school in a tiny community in Costa Rica. Electricity was sometimes down, occasionally for weeks; internet access was erratic at best. But the school’s leaders and key teachers share a vision of the future and the power of education that reaches toward tomorrow. Children from very different backgrounds learn together, bilingually, integrating subjects, exploring the rich natural realm outside and diverse heritages indoors, understanding their world, building geoliteracy.

From a young age, kids learn to use GPS units, cameras, and the power of maps for integrating data. While the electricity is on (or as long as batteries last), the grade 1-2 teacher uses ArcGIS Desktop on a modest laptop to help students learn the continents; zoom in to navigate the rivers, volcanoes, and cities of Costa Rica; and wander the roads and trails of the community. When internet is available, the grade 3-4-5 teacher uses ArcGIS Online to help students assemble maps, points, and pictures, translating hardcopy assemblages into digital views that help them place their local experiences within a context.

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Kids are growing up on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter -- spending hours every day creating, communicating, and connecting in digital spaces. Whether you’re a tech-savvy parent or a technophobic one, you’re probably looking for tools to help your family navigate the many issues that come along with our media- and technology-saturated society.

This digital world, which can bring young people incredible resources and learning opportunities, also opens up the very real parenting challenges of managing non-stop screen time, preventing cyberbullying, finding age-appropriate content, and more.

Common Sense Media is an organization that provides essential resources for families to manage the impact of challenges like this. We've asked their editors to compile a list of their most popular articles and tip sheets to guide parents as they raise responsible and thoughtful digital citizens.

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There have been five mass extinctions in the history of the Earth. The one at the end of the Permian period, about 250 million years ago, when more than 90% of life on the planet was wiped out was probably the worst. The most recent was the during the Cretaceous, when the dinosaurs (and many others) simply vanished – 65 million years ago.

Now we are privileged to witness yet another mass extinction – this one of the world of print. As with the dinosaurs falling over dead in their tracks in a moment, one print publication after another does the same. Soon TV networks will follow in their footsteps.

The most recent victim of this mass extinction was Newsweek. Like the Tyrannosaurus rex that once roamed the Earth, Newsweek once caused politicians and public figures to tremble. It was the second biggest news weekly in the US (after Time magazine).

I never did business with Newsweek (though I received nice handwritten rejection letters from Donald Graham, who owned the magazine – a class act!). I did, however, do a lot of business with Time magazine, Newsweek's direct competitor (and headed for the La Brea tar pits of the web as surely as Newsweek was).

In 1990, at the dawn of the digital age, I convinced Time that it would be a great idea to equip its reporters around the world with video cameras and to teach them to shoot and cut their own stories. I was fortunate in finding an ally inside the magazine named Joe Quinlan who saw the potential.

I got a contract with Time and went off to train a few of their correspondents in Boston, Jerusalem and Nairobi.

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Educational electronics kits like the one from Minty Geek are a great introduction to the world of circuit building and electronic tinkering, but are perhaps a little too basic for more advanced hobbyists. Three MIT students are currently enjoying enormous success on the Kickstarter crowd-funding platform with a DIY Tesla coil kit called oneTesla that can make artificial lightning sing ... well, erm, play music from a MIDI source. Now where did I put that polyphonic version of This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us by Sparks?

The first version of oneTesla, which didn't play music, was created over the course of three days in February last year. The development team of full-time MIT students Bayley Wang, Heidi Baumgartner and Daniel Kramnik added a MIDI controller a little later, followed soon after by the hatching of plans to obtain some boards, build a few coils and offer a limited number of self-build kits on eBay to help recoup development costs. A user manual was written, revised, written again, and remains in a state of flux until the end of the current Kickstarter campaign.

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We as filmmakers, more than ever, must become as creative and strategic in our distribution, outreach, funding, audience engagement, and evaluation as we are in our filmmaking. We are living in an incredible era of innovation with many exciting new possibilities, philanthropies, platforms and ideas for media and change campaigns -- from the Million Kids campaign of Oscar-shortlisted Bully to the tough Middle East peacebuilding work of Budrus and Just Vision to the impact Invisible War has had in the past year to stop rape in the U.S. military -- with an estimated 10% of the U.S. military having seen the film. These films have created a tipping point on an issue and are moving millions. They are the latest in a tradition and a history that is not often known.

As The Sundance Film Festival approaches, I look back on the world premiere of my film, Trembling Before G-d, at Sundance, and the decade-plus of change work we launched since.

Trembling Before G-d shatters assumptions about faith, sexuality, and religious fundamentalism. Built around intimately-told personal stories of Hasidic and Orthodox Jews who are gay or lesbian, the film portrays a group of people who face a profound dilemma -- how to reconcile their passionate love of Judaism and the Divine with the drastic Biblical prohibitions that forbid homosexuality. As the film unfolds, we meet a range of complex individuals -- some hidden, some out -- from the world's first openly gay Orthodox rabbi to closeted, married Hasidic gays and lesbians to those abandoned by religious families to Orthodox lesbian high-school sweethearts. Many have been tragically rejected and their pain is raw, yet with irony, humor, and resilience, they love, care, struggle, and debate with a thousands-year old tradition.

Faiths in the 21st century -- Anglicans, Episcopalians, Methodists -- are all deeply struggling with gender and sexuality, but with Trembling Before G-d, for the first time, this issue became a live, public debate in Orthodox Jewish circles, and the film was and is both witness and catalyst to this historic moment. What emerged is a loving and fearless testament to faith and survival and the universal struggle to belong.

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New York City's public libraries are serving more people in more ways than ever before, and have become an increasingly critical part of the city's human capital system; but they have been undervalued by policymakers and face growing threats in today's digital age.

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Brian David Johnson, Intel’s in-house “futurist,”* has some important questions for us all:

“How do we prepare ourselves and our children for a future where we are surrounded by ever-increasing intelligent machines? What skills will we need in a future where computers do tasks originally performed by people?

There are two skills that computers will have a really hard time mastering in the next few decades. By understanding how computers and algorithms work, it becomes clear that the skills of tomorrow are emotional intelligence and cognitive synthesis.

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Women’s bodies have become a global battlefield. The brutal New Delhi gang rape case, and the fierce protests it sparked, is just one example. From education of Afghan schoolgirls to veiling in France, female sexuality and freedom has come to symbolize a global conflict “over the nature of the self,” argues David Jacobson, a University of South Florida sociologist, in “Of Virgins and Martyrs: Women and Sexuality in Global Conflict,” which comes out later this month. It’s chiefly an ideological divide of “honor” versus “self-possession” — or, as he puts it in the book, “who owns and control’s one’s body, especially when it comes to women: is it the individual herself or the community, through enforced practices of honor, virginity, veiling, and marriage?”

What Jacobson does beautifully in his accessibly academic book is differentiate between politicized Islamist patriarchy and “the broader Muslim community,” the former being “a core expression of a deeper global fissure,” he explains. “In an honor society, patriarchal and tribal traditions dictate that a woman’s body belongs to and serves the community. … An interest-based society privileges self-determination, the sovereignty of the individual over her body, and ownership of one’s own capital, be it economic, cultural, or social.” As globalization improves the status of many women, it also incites a ferocious backlash against them.

The book offers hints on how to mitigate this divide not only in global conflicts, but also domestic battles over everything from birth control to prostitution. Jacobson spoke to Salon from his office in Florida about virginity, SlutWalks and even monogamy.

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In “The Visitors,” a nine-screen video installation by Ragnar Kjartansson that will have its first American showing next month, the artist lies in a pedestal bathtub almost in a trance, strumming a guitar as he repeatedly sings a refrain, “Once again, I fall into my feminine ways.” Over the course of an hour his voice falls and rises, on its own and in unison with performers on the other eight screens — each seen as if in a painting, playing an instrument in a different room of a beautiful, run-down mansion and singing the same enigmatic refrain at a dirgelike pace.

Last August the nine performers gathered in a room of the mansion, two hours north of New York City in the Hudson Valley, to rehearse. “The Visitors” would be shot later that week in a single take, with nine cameras distributed around the house, but that day they simulated being in separate rooms by avoiding eye contact.

To one onlooker what was most striking was the extraordinary emotional range and intensity of their performances. Limited to just a few simple lyrics, which they repeated dozens of times, the singers created an entirely absorbing ensemble piece that was alternately tragic and joyful, meditative and clamorous, and that swelled in feeling from melancholic fugue to redemptive gospel choir.

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We talk about media literacy, educational technology, 21st Century learning, digital tools, digital citizenship, social media in education and more!

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UNESCO supports the Media and Information Literacy (MIL) and Intercultural Dialogue University Network in the launch of an online course in MIL and intercultural dialogue.

The course is designed for teachers, policy makers and professionals. It is led by the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia and will be offered over 13 weeks, from 25 February to 31 May 2013.

The course will focus on the following subjects:

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