ejourney with technokids

 What are you passionate about? If one is interested in literature, we can set up a project for that. Or biology, politics, anthropology, music, whatever. Or they might be excited about an abstract question, like how do boys learn differently than girls? How will life be different if medicine someday allows us to live to 150? Will learning someday be largely video rather than text based? There is no limit to the amount of students who can be involved. If you have 20 students with 20 individual interests we (or they) can set up 20 different sites.

To get the ball rolling, here are 4 projects which were just proposed today by our Board. Your students are welcome to get involved with them.

1. Wikipedia Editing Experiment. Wikipedia seems as if it will be important for students for quite a while. Of course, teachers worry about students using it as a resource because anyone can edit its articles. So today Wikipedia announced that it is revising its system of fact-checking articles, by having more qualified approved editors read articles first. So we plan to have students write an article for Wikipedia on a subject which hasn’t appeared there yet. One suggestion would be to write on Speleonectes Atlantida, a crustacean recently discovered in a lava tube in the Canary Islands which is not yet in Wikipedia (because the news about it just came out today). Your students could write an article about it for Wikipedia, and then track how editors change it, and how it gets referenced in search engines, blog lists, and social networking sites. They would have a hands-on demonstration of how knowledge spreads on the Web.
2. Another is the Australian audio literature archive project. There are many Australian poets and writers who recorded their works vocally as far back as 1890. These recordings are scattered far and wide. We’d like to set up a site which collects these recordings and offers them in formats which students actually use today, like itunes, podcasts, .wav, .aud, and Windows Media Player files. You can find something similar (for English Poetry) at poetryarchive.org.
3. Dengue Fever tracking. Dengue fever kills hundreds of thousands of people a year in tropical countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia (and even northern Australia) but it gets no press compared to AIDS and malaria. The Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil has started a pilot program to track the Aedes mosquito, which carries dengue fever, via widely scattered cell phone networks. We plan to participate in Kenya and Malaysia, using solar powered cell phones donated by Samsung, which just invented them. If your students want to be involved they could use Google Maps and statistical analysis software to track the movements of the Aedes mosquito.
4. Rwanda Holocaust photo memorial: Friends in Rwanda asked us to put up an online photo memorial showing victims of the 1994 Rwanda massacres which took a million lives. This would involve getting photos of victims from our partners at cardsfromafrica.com, digitizing them, and appending a biography wherever possible. Of course this might be emotionally difficult for most students, but whoever takes on this project will learn powerful things about history, culture, and psychology.