Act, Give, Support, Help.

The thoughts and concern of the Fractor Team is with our neighbors to the South.

You can help immediately by donating to the Red Cross to assist the relief effort. Contribute online to the Red Cross, or donate $10 to be charged to your cell phone bill by texting “HAITI” to “90999.” Find more ways to help through the Center for International Disaster Information.

And one other group: Partners In Health have been in the Central Plateau in Haiti for 25 years and are setting up a temporary field hospital in Port-au-Prince and a supply chain through the Dominican Republic. PIH is an incredible organization and have the long standing relationships in place to help quickly and effectively.

In general, it seems that cash donations are best way of helping. Save the in-kind donations for a month down the road when distribution will be easier and the items will be more useful. Haiti needs our support now and for years to come.

Along those lines, consider supporting: Edeyo and the school they are building/rebuilding. Their École du Bel-Air is set in one of the poorest areas of Port-au-Prince, which like the 9th ward in the aftermath of Katrina, has been particularly devastated.

In anticipation of Fractor’s spring launch (whisper, whisper), we want to announce that Fractor’s code is Open Source. We utilized Drupal as our content management system and created a number of customizations, including a java based news and action platform and a java based recommendation engine.

We are currently looking over our site to determine what useful functions can be abstracted and returned to the Drupal community and hope that this announcement will serve as a starting point to a fruitful and rich relationship with the Open Source community.

A prevalence of certain types of genius at particular epochs in history—Jesus, Socrates, Buddha or Shakespeare, More, Marlowe, Johnson, and Milton —seem related to transitional periods between various social, ecological, political or philosophical conditions. We are clearly in such a period as technological advances increase at an exponential rate and global information, economics and travel erase borders and prove our complete interdependence.

Arts, while proving pleasure and meaning due to form alone, have generally provided synthesis, perspective and commentary prior to the collection of statistical or experimental data with the formal meaning always providing a universal element that transcends time.

This is no less true today. Whereas each artistic period flourished after technological or philosophical innovation (the piano, the printing press, the cinemascope) and whereas previous artist worked on the human condition from a local perspective and offered brilliant revelations on the human soul, artists now can paint on the canvas of humanity itself, utilizing the fluid technologies of the Internet, allowing each unique creative nature to render service to the world as a whole until we have created our most alive and fulfilled self-expression as individuals in a global culture.

The latest trends in network technology offer tools for solving global problems writ large. We have an opportunity unprecedented in history to affect change for the good. Improve health care, decrease poverty, and provide solutions to myriad problems simply by the intelligent connection of communities and resources.

While previous lines of demarcation between countries, ideologies, and economies become blurred; I suggest that similar lines between social and technological sciences and the arts are necessarily becoming meaningless as new vibrant arts emerge that provide once again perspective and commentary but in addition, real change.

Last weekend Cinema Village screened “The End of Poverty”, a documentary that traces the cause of today’s global inequality. The filmmaker Philippe Diaz wonders how it is possible that in a world with so much wealth so much poverty can exist? To answer that question the film begins in colonial times with the exploitation of Africa and South America by Europe, continues with the neo-liberalism strategies in South America and shows that today not much has changed in regards to global dependencies. An example is the fact that Germany without growing a single coffee plant is still the biggest coffee exporter in the world.

The film listens closely to workers in Brazil, Bolivia, Kenya, Tanzania and Venezuela. People describe in detail their sub-standard living conditions and economic problems. The reasons for their plight are effectively underlined by the analysis of economists like Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz. The economists propose a “five action plan” that includes a change in tax systems, land reforms, restructuring of government institutions and the “degrowth” of rich nations. “Degrowth” meaning that everyone needs to reduce their consumption and henceforth their waste and environmental impact. The filmmaker calls for a collective action to turn around a statistic as alarming as: “20% of the planet’s population uses 80% of its resources and consumes 30% more than the planet can regenerate”.

The film presents these and many more shocking facts but, with its analysis of the origin of the problem and how it has perpetuated itself, runs out of time before addressing everyday alternatives. I think it’s important to understand the cause of the problem, but you feel quite helpless when you walk out of the theatre. The whole system needs to be restructured but where can we start?

Here is where Fractor can be of use. The Fractor model allows for individuals to come together on a particular cause and participate collectively towards its improvement and solution. In Fractor’s social hub people can connect with others that share the will to make a difference – you can post your actions, talk about pressing issues, reach out to others and learn what other people are doing. The idea is to be able to search for the places and communities where you can make a difference – be it your home, your neighborhood, your city or other countries. Fractor can help you find the situations that need the most attention and the people that are already involved. This way your individual attention can contribute to a collective solution.

Yesterday’s NYT’s contained an interesting article on the value of text messaging to improve compliance of teenage transplant recipients with daily medications. It is not clear from the study whether the messaging or the back-end warning messages sent to parents or caregivers had the most impact but the results were significant.

The combination of autonomy, and the respect shown thereby, with caring oversight are instructive for other learning and management environments. I would expect that multimodal systems that offer a range of learning options to students (paper, small group learning, online and cell based approaches) while allowing teachers a transparent and easy to use set of tools to ensure continual growth on the part of the student in such a complex environment will prove valuable.

Structure and autonomy, empathy and rigor are the coordinates of this rich environment.

The US Department of Education published a report this summer that compared online versus traditional in class teaching from 1996 to 2008. The study concludes that “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”

The report analyzed 99 samples across the 12-year span, most of which take place in college and continuing education settings, with only seven being K-12. Extracting the K 12 studies still shows that students in online learning settings perform better than in traditional classrooms. However, the difference is slim and statistically not significant, requiring caution to generalize these findings.

The report further concludes that hybrid forms, the combination of online and face-to-face instructions, are the most effective. Interesting to note is also that the observed learning advantage through online settings doesn’t come through the medium per se, but through the different use of time (students tend to spend more time online with the material than in the classroom), curriculum and pedagogy. Online learning is much more conducive to the expansion of learning time, a personal treatment of the material and the opportunity for new forms of collaboration.

Taking into account the ambiguity of the study’s findings for the K 12 setting in contrast with the recent rise of new forms of web resources, web based applications as well as collaboration technologies and the pace of change in online education, the question of efficiency looses its relevance. This presents an opportunity to integrate online learning into classrooms and experiment with these forms of pedagogy.

Read the report.

A key portion of yesterday’s debate between New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his opponent Bill Thompson focused on education. According to Bloomberg, state statistics show that students are performing better in key metrics, but Thompson argued that the metrics themselves were flawed and that schools need to cultivate student’s critical thinking skills over and above simple memorization.

We of course believe it is necessary to encourage students to apply what they have learned in class to the real world. Critical thinking requires objective distance from information and confidence in one’s own reasoning abilities. Our educational interface enables students to gain real world experiences relevant to what they learn. The DaVinci Interface provides opportunities for students to have first-hand service experiences, which in turn offers the perspective and confidence necessary for critical thinking skills. And while they are developing these skills, they will be making the world a better place.

The need for 21st Century relevant curricula are being touted by policy makers and supported by educators. How this plays out in the intersection between problem based learning, service based learning, cooperative learning as well online and offline environments is a fertile point of discussion.

What is clear is that the process of learning itself is starting to receive much needed attention and that we will see new methods and tools that create environments that inspire self-learning and passion for life long education.

Schools like the iSchool where all students have day-long access to laptops and have the opportunity to learn in more fluid environments remind me of the best qualities of Montessori schools where the approach to students in-class balances self-learning with cooperative learning and a variety of small communal spaces where students can work and play.

Research shows that gap between puberty and full developmentof the pre-fontal cortex is widening and thus the time when empathy, emotion and passion are dominant characteristics is also widening. This presents a unique opportunity for 21 Century approaches where a process of education, based in compassionate action that integrates the aggregation of knowledge with the communication and civic skills necessary for personal success and indeed to a more equitable and just world.

Yes, the Mind and Life Conference is still ringing in my ears.

mmAct – Will let this one speak for itself