- I attended the “Thinking Big about Learning” event at Stanford last month. I would strongly recommend watching the talks by Doorley on the future of the university and Wojcicki on student-driven learning using media. If you’ve never heard Carol Dweck before then watch her video, but if you have then skip it – it’s the same flipping thing she’s been saying for 15 years. But the concept of a growth mindset is important enough to give her a free-pass to everything for life! Carl Wieman’s talk was also great.
- My @Powerfm987 interview on the Child Gauge 2015 where we spoke about education, reading by age 10, school fees and inequality, teacher training, priorities and whether or not government is working with researchers in education (short answer: yes, but probably not enough).
- Last year Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton gave a lecture at LSE “A Menagerie of Lines: How to Decide Who is Poor?“
- Megan Beckett‘s beautiful concept maps showing how “Life and Living” concepts fit together across the Grade 4-9 science curriculum.
- Corruption Watch releases report on money mismanagement in South African schools. Sigh.
- “How much inequality is reduced by progressive taxation and government spending in SA?” – useful to get some stats on the table! the gist of it
- “Through progressive taxation and pro-poor social spending, the SA fiscal system reduces income inequality significantly. The extent of this reduction is larger than in twelve comparable middle-income countries measured similarly. Nevertheless, ‘final’ income (i.e. income after major taxes, government transfers and spending) remains more unequal than in comparator countries. While the fiscal system has an important role to play in reducing inequality, interventions to improve the distribution of wages, salaries and capital income are needed”
- I came across an important SA company, Advantage Learn which offers teaching videos for Grade 10, 11 and 12 in maths, science and NBTs. I know James and Crispian personally and have some friends that were taught by Trish and rave about her teaching. Looking forward to exploring this further in December…
- MIT PHD student Dan De Kadt has a new paper on service delivery and voting behaviour, finding the opposite of what one would expect: “Studying southern African democracies, where infrastructural investment in basic services has expanded widely but not universally, we find a surprising answer to this question: Voters who receive services are less likely to support the incumbent.” (It’s a pretty small world in SA – Dan and his team at Glenwood were our main debate rivals in high school!)
- Some links from Mike Youngblood who taught one of the courses I took at Stanford.
“Here’s a few quick resources for you. Some are coming from more of a design perspective, others from more of an anthropological perspective – but they’re all talking about the intersection between the two.
- Hanington, Bruce M. “Relevant and Rigorous: Human-Centered Research and Design Education” in Design Issues (Summer 2010, Vol. 26, No. 3, Pages 18-26).
- Fulton Suri, Jane. “Poetic Observation: What Designers Make of What They See” in Design Anthropology (Springer, 2011) pages 16-32.
- Salvador, Tony et al. “Design Ethnography” in Design Management Journal (Fall 1999) pp 35-41.
- Two cool schools in the SF area – AltSchool and Nueva School
Nic Spaull 
