Amira Mortenson performs the song "Three Cups of Tea"

This performance is inspired by the book of the same title written by her father, Greg Mortenson.



Good news just tweeted by Greg Mortenson: From 2000 to 2010, Afghanistan school enrollment went from 800,000 to 7 million, including 2.5 million girls.

Collaborative Consumption

Michael Wesch recently tweeted about the growing trend of "Collaborative Consumption". This YouTube video explains the concept:

We are at the start of the "Big Shift" away from the 20th century defined by hyper-consumption towards the 21st century, an age of Collaborative Consumption.
But just how LARGE and FAR-REACHING is this groundswell? Watch & listen.

It seems to me that this ties in with the notion of "cognitive surplus" as explained by Clay Shirky. He argues that the time Americans once spent watching TV has been redirected toward activities that are less about consuming and more about engaging—from Flickr and Facebook to powerful forms of online political action. And these efforts aren’t fueled by external rewards but by intrinsic motivation—the joy of doing something for its own sake. I think that the enthusiasm for saving resources and sustainable living are a part of this shift.

World Simulation Project

From Professor Michael Wesch,Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Digital Ethnography where he was Kansas State University's 2008 U.S. Professor of the Year.
You may remember him as the creating of the short film:

YouTube - The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)

Wesch's motivation for the World Simulation Project:

"The World Simulation is a radical experiment in learning that is the centerpiece of the Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course at Kansas State University, created in a fit of frustration with the large lecture hall format which seems inevitable in a classroom of 200-400 students. Of utmost concern to me, was the nature of questions I was hearing from students, which tended to be administrative and procedural rather than penetrative, critical, and insightful. My least favorite question was also the most common: "What do we need to know for this test?" Something had to be done, so I set to work creating the World Simulation."

Watch the trailer for this project:



This project is nothing less than awesome. For the full set up, rules and objectives, and the wiki with full materials, see the Project website

We need to globalize education

Alan November argues that we need to change the concept of the learner to that of being a contributor.

Myths and Opportunities: Technology in the Classroom by Alan November from Brian Mull on Vimeo.