Paola Antonelli on Design as the Interface Between Progress and Humanity

in Art, Education, Video - Arts & Culture | September 1st, 2011

Pao­la Antonel­li — Senior Cura­tor of Archi­tec­ture and Design at the MoMA, long­time pro­po­nent of human­ized tech­nol­o­gy, self-described “curi­ous octo­pus” — has arguably done more for the main­stream infil­tra­tion of design lit­er­a­cy than any oth­er indi­vid­ual in con­tem­po­rary cul­ture. In her recent open­ing keynote at the unequiv­o­cal­ly titled media and ideas con­fer­ence The Con­fer­ence in Malmö, Swe­den, Antonel­li pulls the cur­tain on her cura­to­r­i­al process and, with her sig­na­ture on-stage charis­ma, takes a reveal­ing look at how her shows go about the incred­i­ble bal­anc­ing act of being both bea­cons of the bleed­ing edge of design and an approach­able edu­ca­tion plat­form for instill­ing in the gen­er­al pub­lic a basic under­stand­ing of the fun­da­men­tal impor­tance of design — some­thing she describes as “push[ing] design down from the realm of art and up from the realm of dec­o­ra­tion and pret­ti­fi­ca­tion into real life.”

“What design­ers do is they take rev­o­lu­tions that hap­pen maybe in sci­ence or tech­nol­o­gy or pol­i­tics, and they trans­form them into objects that you and I can use, that you and I can feel some famil­iar­i­ty or at least some curios­i­ty about, so we can be drawn in and we can start a new life and a new behav­ioral pat­tern. And this idea of design­ers as the inter­face of progress, between progress and human­i­ty, is what I try to stay with.” ~ Pao­la Antonel­li

Antonel­li’s excel­lent new show, Talk to Me: Design and the Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Between Peo­ple and Objects, is on dis­play at the MoMA through Novem­ber 7.

Maria Popo­va is the founder and edi­tor in chief of Brain Pick­ings, a curat­ed inven­to­ry of cross-dis­ci­pli­nary inter­est­ing­ness. She writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and Desig­nOb­serv­er, and spends a great deal of time on Twit­ter.

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Biblioburro: Library on a Donkey

in Books, Education | August 25th, 2011

For more than a decade, Luis Sori­ano, a pri­ma­ry school teacher, has trav­eled the rugged ter­rain of Colom­bia by don­key, deliv­er­ing books to chil­dren in hun­dreds of rur­al vil­lages. The project, pow­ered by his two don­keys Alfa and Beto, goes by the name “Bib­liobur­ro.” And it seeks to pro­mote lit­er­a­cy in areas where access to books is not always a giv­en. You can find more infor­ma­tion and pic­tures on the home­page of the Bib­liobur­ro project and also make a small dona­tion. A video update shows what these dona­tions are actu­al­ly used for.

Bonus mate­r­i­al: The clip above is part of a 60-minute PBS doc­u­men­tary avail­able in full here. If you are a teacher and want to work with the film in class, you will appre­ci­ate this relat­ed les­son plan. Bib­liobur­ro has even been cov­ered by The New York Times, and there is now a sim­i­lar project under­way in Ethiopia.

By pro­fes­sion, Matthias Rasch­er teach­es Eng­lish and His­to­ry at a High School in north­ern Bavaria, Ger­many. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twit­ter.

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Dave Eggers: The Teacher Who Encouraged Me to Write

in Books, Education, Literature, Writing | August 4th, 2011


Thou­sands of pub­lic school teach­ers won’t be return­ing to the class­room this fall, thanks to bud­get cuts nation­wide. And that means more than a few Jay Criche’s won’t get the chance to tap the hid­den tal­ents of young stu­dents. Jay Criche, in case you’re won­der­ing, taught Eng­lish at Lake For­est High School and count­ed Dave Eggers (A Heart­break­ing Work of Stag­ger­ing Genius and What Is the What) as one of his stu­dents. Criche passed away recent­ly, and, writ­ing in Salon, Eggers remem­bers his teacher’s deep influ­ence:

He was kind to me, but I had no sense that he took par­tic­u­lar notice of me. There were oth­er, smarter kids in the class, and soon I fell back into my usu­al posi­tion — of think­ing I was just a lit­tle over aver­age in most things. But near the end of the semes­ter, we read “Mac­beth.” Believe me, this is not an easy play to con­nect to the lives of sub­ur­ban high school­ers, but some­how he made the play seem elec­tric, dan­ger­ous, rel­e­vant. After pro­cras­ti­nat­ing till the night before it was due, I wrote a paper about the play — the first paper I typed on a type­writer — and turned it in the next day.

I got a good grade on it, and below the grade Mr. Criche wrote, “Sure hope you become a writer.” That was it. Just those six words, writ­ten in his sig­na­ture hand­writ­ing — a bit shaky, but with a very steady base­line. It was the first time he or any­one had indi­cat­ed in any way that writ­ing was a career option for me. We’d nev­er had any writ­ers in our fam­i­ly line, and we did­n’t know any writ­ers per­son­al­ly, even dis­tant­ly, so writ­ing for a liv­ing did­n’t seem some­thing avail­able to me. But then, just like that, it was as if he’d ripped off the ceil­ing and shown me the sky.

Over the next 10 years, I thought often about Mr. Criche’s six words. When­ev­er I felt dis­cour­aged, and this was often, it was those six words that came back to me and gave me strength. When a few instruc­tors in col­lege gen­tly and not-so-gen­tly tried to tell me I had no tal­ent, I held Mr. Criche’s words before me like a shield. I did­n’t care what any­one else thought. Mr. Criche, head of the whole damned Eng­lish depart­ment at Lake For­est High, said I could be a writer. So I put my head down and trudged for­ward.

You can read Egger’s remem­brance in full here.

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Download The Edupunks’ Guide to a DIY Credential (Free eBook)

in e-books, Education | August 2nd, 2011

It’s hot off the dig­i­tal press. Anya Kamenetz, a senior writer at Fast Com­pa­ny Mag­a­zine and author of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupre­neurs, and the Com­ing Trans­for­ma­tion of High­er Edu­ca­tion, has teamed up with the Gates Foun­da­tion to release a free ebook, The Edupunks’ Guide to a DIY Cre­den­tial.

The new ebook offers a “com­pre­hen­sive guide to learn­ing online and chart­ing a per­son­al­ized path to an afford­able cre­den­tial,” and it comes com­plete with some handy-sound­ing tuto­ri­als: how to write a per­son­al learn­ing plan, how to teach your­self online, how to build your per­son­al learn­ing net­work, 7 ways to get col­lege cred­it with­out tak­ing a col­lege course, etc.

The book also smart­ly fea­tures a long list of open edu­ca­tion­al resources, where the author was nice enough to give us a small men­tion.

You can read The Edupunks’ Guide to a DIY Cre­den­tial on Scribd, or alter­na­tive­ly you can down­load it in mul­ti­ple for­mats (PDF, Kin­dle, ePub, RTF, etc.) at the bot­tom of this page.

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Doonesbury Confronts Creationism in the Classroom

in Comedy, Current Affairs, Education | July 11th, 2011

Gar­ry Trudeau has tak­en on cre­ation­ism before. He’s doing it again, this time com­ment­ing on the oxy­moron­ic “Louisiana Sci­ence Edu­ca­tion Act,” which allows the teach­ing of cre­ation­ism in the pub­lic class­room. You can view Trudeau’s car­toon in full, and in high res here.

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Michael Moore Tells Wisconsin Teachers “America Isn’t Broke”

in Current Affairs, Education, Film | March 6th, 2011

Jon Stew­art put it nice­ly. Now film­mak­er Michael Moore takes the gloves off. Vis­it­ing Madi­son, Wis­con­sin this Sat­ur­day, he told the crowd “Amer­i­ca isn’t broke.” Rather, the mon­ey that used to run the coun­try sim­ply got siphoned out of the sys­tem and put into unpro­duc­tive Wall Street accounts. Strong words, but if you con­sid­er that most US cor­po­ra­tions pay no US tax­es, that bil­lion­aire hedge fund man­agers pay far low­er tax­es than the rest of you, that we’re pre­serv­ing the unsus­tain­able Bush tax breaks that over­whelm­ing­ly ben­e­fit the extreme­ly wealthy, then you start to think about our nation­al deficits and Wis­con­sin’s bat­tles with teach­ers in a dif­fer­ent light.

Make no mis­take about it. The deficits are a real prob­lem. And any tru­ly exces­sive perks for pub­lic work­ers should be cut. But the mid­dle class should­n’t bear the sole brunt of the nation­al sac­ri­fice. And, so far, that’s all we see. Main Street took the hit in 2008 while Wall Street walked. And that’s what’s hap­pen­ing again…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jon Stew­art: The Teach­ers Have it Too Good (Wink)

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Rethinking Education: A New Michael Wesch Video

in Education | February 10th, 2011

Since 2007, Michael Wesch, a Kansas State Uni­ver­si­ty anthro­pol­o­gist, has released a series of viral videos inter­ro­gat­ing the ways in which new web tech­nolo­gies shape human com­mu­ni­ca­tion and inter­ac­tions with infor­ma­tion. First came The Machine is Us/ing Us, then Infor­ma­tion R/evolution and An Anthro­po­log­i­cal Intro­duc­tion to YouTube. Now he’s back with a new video called “Rethink­ing Edu­ca­tion,” a mon­tage that pulls togeth­er sound bites of thought lead­ers (Tim O’Reil­ly, Yochai Ben­kler, Brew­ster Kahle, Ray Kurzweil, etc.) describ­ing how tech­nol­o­gy is alter­ing the broad­er edu­ca­tion­al land­scape…

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Google Teaches Your Parents Tech

in Education, Google, Technology | December 14th, 2010

Yes­ter­day, Google launched TeachParentsTech.org, a lit­tle spin-off web site that fea­tures 50 how-to videos, all designed to answer your par­ents’ basic tech ques­tions. Your father wants to know how to share a big file? Your moth­er is try­ing to fig­ure out how to book­mark a web page? Sim­ply head to TeachParentsTech.org, find the appro­pri­ate how-to video, send it via email, then free up time to teach your­self more heavy-duty tech.

Many of these videos show­case Google soft­ware. A coin­ci­dence? Hard­ly. Think of this as soft Google mar­ket­ing to the Boomers.

via The Offi­cial Google Blog

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