1. As Demographics Shift, Kids' Books Stay Stubbornly White (Blair)
When it comes to diversity, children's books are sorely lacking; instead
of presenting a representative range of faces, they're overwhelmingly
white. How bad is the disconnect?
What Shakespeare understood, Professor Sandel insisted, was the
transformative power of money. When it enters into social relations it
changes things. When economists asked
the citizens of a Swiss village if they would accept being designated a
nuclear-waste storage site, 51 percent said yes. When the question was
posed again, this time with the promise of a cash reward for living with
the waste, the yea votes plummeted, to 25 percent. The money, they
said, made them feel that they were being bribed to perform a civic
duty.
I'm convinced by the arguments of Mimi Ito and her various
colleagues associated with MacArthur's Connected
Learning movement that in the future, learning will take place from cradle
to grave--in schools, online, in museums, libraries, makerspaces, and all kinds
of other "third spaces" for learning that we have yet to imagine. Young people
need access not just to schools but to ecologies of learning that envelop
students in learning opportunities.
What they've been flocking to see is mostly invisible: 12,000 sensors
buried under the asphalt, affixed to street lamps and atop city buses.
The sensors measure everything from air pollution to where there are
free parking spaces. They can even tell garbage collectors which
dumpsters are full, and automatically dim street lights when no one is
around.
5.
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