Thursday, June 30, 2011

Open Source Education

Resources:

www.curriki.org
www.oercommons.org
www.openstudy.com
MIT OCW Scholar
http://www.lowescreativeideas.com/Home.aspx
http://www.lowescreativeideas.com/woodworkers/ShopClass/shop_class_projects_1009.aspx
http://oreilly.com/pub/topic/science - O'Reilly DIY Science
http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com/9781449389543 - Cooking For Geeks online
http://expeyes.in/ - A Tool for learning science by exploration and experimenting
SlugTube (UCSC Videos)
The Do It Yourself Scholar

Columbia Virtual Academy - WA State K-12 Online!

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Libyan DIY Weapon Workshops


Amazing photos here.






Photos courtesy of The Atlantic.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

"Sustainable Community Development"


Is this my field?

Heard it described as Gwendolyn Hallsmith's shtick here.

Wiki has entries for community development and for sustainable development.

Where can liberals and conservatives agree? Local currencies, organic ag, sustainable (resilient) communities, etc. AND, how to make sure the "poor and disenfranchised" don't become serf communities adjacent to or within better-off communities?

And more on local currencies, since that's what the podcast's about:

"The things that complementary currencies do best is connecting underutilized resources with unmnet needs [e.g. people who want to work but don't have work, theatres that have seats to offer but aren't selling all their tickets, etc.]"

"Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty" (Duflo and Banerjee)


"A big constraint is what we call lazy thinking. I think we have a tendency as social scientists to look for the gulity party when we see something bad is happening... If we actually took on the burden of thinking about the problem, about thinking about why the problem arises rather than making up a story about it, looking at the data rather than starting from our premise or our ideology, sort of trying new things rather than just saying that this is how things are always done so this must be the right way to do it... we can actually make a lot of progress."

The 3 I's: ideology, ignorance, and inertia

LSE lecture podcast here. Book here.