OURGOODS: Why is a significant amount of labor considered "outside" of the economy? “What is often called ‘the economy’ (i.e. wage labor for a market exchange of commodities in a capitalist enterprise) is but a small set of activities by which we produce, exchange, and distribute values in our society. What about an economic politics that allows us to think creatively and to start here and now to make new economies? We believe that other, more just and ecologically sustainable economies are possible.
Bhutan: Children Learn To Grow Nutritious Food At School Karma, a student at the Yurung school in southern Bhutan, holds a freshly harvested pumpkin from the school’s garden. Copyright: WFP/Angeli Mendoza Cabbage, chilli, peanuts, cauliflower, spinach, carrots...the garden of the lower secondary school in Yurung, Bhutan, probably has more fresh vegetables than your average neighbourhood market. Everything in the garden was grown by the children, who then eat their produce alongside the food provided by WFP and the government. In this way, WFP is supporting the community as it learns to produce more nutritious food for itself. Open Innovators Intermediary Platforms Research & Development platforms Innocentive – open innovation problem solvingIdeaConnection – idea marketplace and problem solvingYet2.com – IP market placePRESANS (beta) – connect and solve R&D problemsHypios – online problem solvingInnoget – research intermediary platformOne Billion Minds – online (social) challengesNineSigma – technology problem solvingIdeaken – collaborative crowdsourcingInnovation-community.de – Community of innovators & creators. Marketing, Design & Idea platforms Collective Intelligence & Prediction platforms Lumenogic – collective intelligence marketsUshahidi – crowdsourcing crisis informationKaggle – data mining and forecastingWe Are Hunted – the online music chartGoogle Image Labeler – crowdsourced image labeling
Nurturing a society of tree-lovers in an unassuming but definite way Posted 08-Nov-2013 Vol 4 Issue 45 She is not an activist in the Medha Patkar mould, travelling from one place to another and spearheading agitations. But her efforts to motivate children to care for the environment, and her passion for planting trees and tending them, are no less commendable. What Digital Commoners Need To Do The following is a meditation on the strategic phases in the construction of a peer to peer world By Michel Bauwens, originally published at What have we been doing in the last few years, and what should we be doing next? Here is a list of major undertakings, some well under way, some barely begun. All need to be done, are interdependent on each other, but need to be done ‘at the same time’, though there is a certain maturation effect which may need to take place to move from one phase or priority to another. Finding out these interdepencies and choosing amongst those priorities is a matter of debate, strategising, and practical experience.
Read India: Helping Primary School Students in India Acquire Basic Reading and Math Skills Policy Issue: Though there has been steady progress in enrollment, including girls and members of poorer groups, problems of intermittent school attendance and school quality remain pervasive in the developing world. Previous studies showed that volunteers trained in remedial learning and NGO supported remedial teachers were effective in improving learning levels. Women in FLOSS bibliography This page is a bibliography of published works about women in Free/Libre and Open Source Software. Collections Edit GNOME Journal, women's issue, November 2009 Women in Open Source, special issue of the Open Source Business Register, June 2009 Reports Christina Dunbar-Hester and Gabriella Coleman, Engendering Change?
Teacher and Student Motivation, Family Participation, and Student Achievement in Rural Udaipur, India Context of the Evaluation: Educational outcomes in India are often very poor, especially in remote areas. A nationwide survey found that 65 percent of children enrolled in grades 2 through 5 in government primary schools could not read a simple paragraph, and 50 percent could not do simple subtraction or division.1 The provision of education, especially in rural areas, can be obstructed by high rates of teacher absenteeism: the average Indian teacher is absent nearly 24 percent of the time. This figure is often higher in more remote areas, and in 2003, research estimated that instructors in non-formal education centers in rural Udaipur, Rajasthan, were absent 44 percent of all school days. Details of the Intervention: Researchers partnered with Seva Mandir, an NGO in Udaipur, to study the motivation of instructors in rural non-formal education (NFE) centers through a randomized impact evaluation of two interventions.
free_culture Intro Over the past three years, Lessig has given more than 100 talks like the one captured here. On July 24, 2002, at the O.Reilly Open Source Conference he announced this would be one of his last. View It! Removing Higher Education Barriers of Entry: Test Training and Classroom Peer Effects Researchers in Santiago, Chile set out to create a scholarship program with the capacity to provide subsidized test preparation to high-achieving, low-income students. The program will be implemented in conjunction with Preuniversitario UC, an organization linked with PUC-Chile that offers preparatory courses. Eligible applicants for the scholarship were required to 1) have high school grades of at least 5.5 on a scale to seven, and 2) be entering their final year of studies in a government-subsidized arts& sciences high school in urban Santiago. All students applying for the scholarship were administered a sample university selection test (PSU) to evaluate baseline performance. Of the initial group of 1,116 eligible applicants, 488 were randomly selected to receive a 65 percent discount to attend one language course, one mathematics course, and an additional course of their choice (either history or science).
Free Culture: Lawrence Lessig Keynote from OSCON 2002 Editor's Note: In his address before a packed house at the Open Source Convention, Lawrence Lessig challenges the audience to get more involved in the political process. Lawrence, a tireless advocate for open source, is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and the founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. He is also the author of the best-selling book Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Here is the complete transcript of Lawrence's keynote presentation made on July 24, 2002. Lawrence Lessig: I have been doing this for about two years--more than 100 of these gigs. » The tricky ethics of education information, J-Pal edition The Roving Bandit discovered this graph produced by J-Pal on cost-effective interventions for education. That red bar is a result from a RCT in Madagascar which provided families with information on the “returns to education,” resulting in a reasonable increase in attendance (3.5%). What’s the catch? The study wasn’t actually giving people an accurate measure of the returns to education in Madagascar, it was giving people the average correlation between education and income, job availability. Why the distinction?
Education Education remains one of the most promising ways for children to attain a fuller, more productive life. While many developing countries have improved access to education, the quality of education has remained low, and many children leave school having learned few real skills. If universal education is to be attained in the truer sense of enabling these children, their families, and their communities to realize the promise of education, developing countries must improve the quality of the education they offer. J-PAL's Education Program promotes research aimed at providing policymakers and practitioners with the knowledge needed to design and implement more effective education policies and programs, including: The primary open questions in education can be divided into the following seven areas: Pedagogy.