- 21st century education has arrived. The Big History Project (above). Bill Gates throws his weight behind a brilliant history professor and creates an interactive website which has lesson plans, assessments, videos, links, worksheets, and everything you might want when teaching high school history about the big questions in life. So very happy to see this!! Now we just need this for 25 other topics/subjects and we will have a world-class education available to anyone with an internet connection! How exciting.
- Two photos of the Shanghai skyline taken 26 years apart. Definitely the most incredible image I’ve seen this year. Pictures speak a thousand words.
- The history of the world since 2000 BC distilled into a single graph – wow. WOW!
- 40 maps that will help you make sense of the world – incredible!
- Great 2 minute video animation about the Pale Blue Dot
- Great OECD case study on the success of education reform in Brazil: “Brazil: Encouraging lessons from a large federal system“
- Teaching teachers technology – M&G article summarizing the recent EdTech conference in SA.
- “You become like the 5 people you spend the most time with” This awesome group photo from the Solvay International Conference on Electrons and Protons has 29 people in it, 17 had already won or would go on to win the Nobel Prize. Go Marie Curie!
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Some great course outlines for those of you eager to find comprehensive reading lists on curriculum, education in developing countries and the economics of education:
- Two courses on curriculum: 1) “Pedagogy, Knowledge and Society” (UCT 2013), and 2) “Changing frameworks of curriculum policy, implementation and Evaluation” (UCT 2013) – both by Ursula Hoadley & Co. I attended the first one last semester and and am currently attending the second one – both highly recommended. The first is more theoretical and very much about Bernstein (very interesting). Ursula is highly gifted at concretising the abstract and showing how these theories are relevant for policy discussions in South Africa today.
- Currently writing a chapter for the IJR on accountability and teacher content knowledge. Given how important the Bruns, Filmer and Patrinos book “Making Schools Work” (2011) is, I asked Helen Blaine to collate the abstracts from some of the more relevant/interesting articles. And because sharing is caring I’ll include links to them here: 1) Pages 25-28, 2) Pages 80-85, 3) Pages 135-139, 4) Pages 248-251. Nice for a quick overview 🙂
- Great weekly interviews with education academics/leaders at Harvard EdChat.
- Cool website with a list of education apps for iPad.
- Two new CDE reports: 1)”Affordable private schools in South Africa“, 2) “The missing sector:Contract schools: International experience and South African prospects.”
- Statement by the Minister on progress in the schooling sector (here). Glad to hear they are now publishing guidelines for the administration of ANA.
- An eye-opening 20min video of the experiences of a heterosexual girl in a homosexual world – very moving. Perspective is everything.
- It’s always nice to read evidence-based articles that show there has been large improvements in South Africa since 1994. I’d encourage all South Africans to read this short 3×3 article by three of the country’s top economists: “The significant decline in poverty in its many dimensions since 1993“
- In case you were wondering, the simple formula for correcting for guessing on multiple choice questions (MCQs) can be found here –> Thanks Robert Frary!
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Nic Spaull 