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Several weeks ago, Moses sent me the following message:
I have been lurking on the list for some time now and I find the discussion very useful in my work. Having spent the last 10 years researching and teaching communities of color, I am currently designing an online school, COLORU at: http://saxakali.com/coloru. The school offers 20 free online courses, from African Math to Native American Legends, using e-books and cultural websites.For various reasons, I've been unable until now to make enough time to explore the COLORU site. I'm sure many WAOE members will be interested in what's happening there. My apologies to Moses for taking so long to bring his work to your attention. Web EditorI am interested in communicating with others interested in designing and teaching multicultural curriculum, and in providing online education affordable for even "Third World" students.
Moses Seenarine has published extensively on issues of racism, feminism, gender and other aspects of social equity in the United States and elsewhere:
- The Anti-Feminist Brigade: Women Who Hire Domestic Workers (7/16/99)
- Protecting East Indian Rights in Guyana (Published in Caribbean Daylight, Vol. 08, No. 17, July 2, 1997. New York.)
- Boundaries and Community: Indo-Caribbean Identities in the US (4/20/99)
- South Asians and Indo-Caribbeans Confronting Racism in the US (Published in Cricket Int'l, March, 1999. New York.)
- Gender, Culture and Class in Walter Rodneyâs Writings on Guyana (11/21/98)
- Historical Interconnections between Gender, Class and Race - The Patriarchal Family Under Capitalism: From Colonialism and Slavery, to Globalization and Anti-Drug Policy (10/10/98)
- Keeping the Natives At Bay: Janet Jagan in Guyana (10/20/97)
- Who'll Apologize to the Amerindians? Or what's missing from the Hines-Kanhai-Ellis debate (7/1/97)
- Dalit Female Education and Empowerment (Published in Dalit International Newsletter, Vol. 2, No. 1, February 1997. Waterford, CT.)
- Education of Dalit Women (October 29, 1996)
- Dalit Women: Victims or Beneficiaries of Affirmative Action Policies in India - A Case Study (Paper presented at a Brown Bag Lecture held by the Southern Asian Institute, Columbia University, on April 10, 1996).
- Deconstructing the New Brahmin Academy:An Essay on Sasenarine Persaudâs poem, Letter to Gargi by Sushila Patil and m. seenarine (August 15, 1996)
- Recasting indian women in colonial guyana: gender, labor and caste in the lives of indentured and free laborers (August 26, 1996)
- An Essay on Tim Allen's paper, "Understanding Alice: Uganda's Holy Spirit Movement in Context" (March 31, 1993)
- Agrarian Women's Resistance in Sub-Sahara Africa (April 28, 1993)
There are links to all these articles at http://saxakali.com/Saxakali-Publications/moses.htm. This is just one of many rewarding pages on the Saxakali People of Colour Portal site, http://saxakali.com/, home page of the Saxakali Community. The Community takes its name from an indigenous Amerindian community in Guyana, South America. It is a voluntary, non-profit grassroots organization dedicated to ecological, feminist, social and cultural issues. In the words of the Education and Documentation Center page:
We are a group of environmentally conscious women, men and children with a keen interests in exploring both local and global issues. Here, you'll find lots to see, hear and read, including African, American and Asian history and culture in COLOR AfterSchool Program (CAP), African Historian Ronoko Rashidi and other writers in Saxakali Publications, and environmental issues in Saxakali Magazine. ...Saxakali provides an education and documentation service to individuals and groups, and conducts awareness raising campaigns among various communities. There is an annual environmental conference and co-sponsored meetings with community leaders. The organization publishes Saxakali Magazine bi-annually; and prints other educational materials under Saxakali Publications.We seek to plant seeds of critical thought and foster growth of cooperative relationships among the youth culture.
COLORU sprang from the Cultural Online Learning Organization & Resource (COLOR) Afterschool Program (CAP), which started in 1997. This program provides children of color and other educationally disadvantaged children, with interactive learning opportunities from a cultural and environmental perspective, via the Internet. COLOR recognises that there is very little in common between public and private schools and children of color, who are bombarded with the lives and histories of Europeans in classrooms and society. This results in a low sense of self worth or self-esteem, lack of self confidence, and resistance to formal education among students of color. The organisation sets out to address these vital issues of social and cultural learning through online education in the hope of raising the self esteem in children and communities.
COLORU expands this initiaitve into a comprehensive online school, which offers FREE self-paced, interactive training for people of all ages, divided into five programs: youth, employment, business, computer, and cultural study. COLORU's program serves the learning needs of communities of color by offering classes in education, history, culture, business, computers, and technology from African, Asian, Latino, Middle Eastern, and Native American perspectives.
Courses are delivered to subscribers' desktop or home computers as self-study tutorials, many of which use online books and other materials as well, further reducing the costs of access to learning. It's just a matter of clicking on the links at the right of the home page to take you straight into a rich variety of thought-provoking, well-constructed reading and learning and responding educational experiences. If subscribers need teaching assistance, a small registration fee - US$5.95 a month, or US$65.00 a year - provides full personal access to instructors in one of the five programs, through e-mail, message boards, live chat room and other means.
Communiversity Online Conference
Communiversity Online Conference is an ongoing (March through December 1999) Web-networked debate focused on "Community regeneration through Higher Education, Public Art, Health and Technology." It ran a face-to-face conference in 1997 and a similar event has just concluded at Barnet College in London. This comprised Communiversity Day on Wednesday, September 3, Arts and Health Day on Thursday, September 4, and Education Roundtable on Friday, September 5. The main focus of these meetings was to bring together practitioners involved in the Communiversity network and those working in the arena of arts and health, in order to build up examples of projects which illustrate how Communiversity can work.
Communiversity's philosophy is linked to UNESCO's Education for All and Learning without Frontiers programs, and also with with Widening Participation in HIgher Education and the New Opportunities Fund in the UK. The goals of Communiversity are:
The following projects among the impressive list linked to Communiversity may be of particular interest to WAOE members:
- Unleash peoples`creativity by using public art as the catalyst.
- Use technology to take education and training out of its institutions to where people are and provide the opportunities to develop their potential.
- Create a learning exchange network which will make maximum use of existing capital and human resources inside and outside the community who can educate, train, fund, inform and empower people.
- Provide an innovative degree and post graduate course for academic study, job training and situational learning.
- Start with people who are at present involved in community work in its broadest sense.
- Be part of a long term holistic approach which includes health, environment and employment.
- Community Action Network in the UK - a mutual learning and support network for social entrepreneurs whose group members run integrated activities that combine or cut across project areas or that link individuals or organisations working in different sectors, such as health and fitness, environment, education and training, job creation, community care, art and crafts.
- The Community Technology Centers' Network (CTCNet) - a network committed to providing equitable access to information and communications technology which consists of more than 300 community technology centers across the USA, catering for a diverse range of people get access to computers and a variety of purposes, including use of the Internet.
- Craigmillar Community Information Service, in Scotland - a community based team project, situated on the east side of Edinburgh providing information
network services to the local community, including help lines and a searchable data source for local organisations, and a full range of Internet services at very reasonable rates.
- Project Diane (Diversified Information and Assistance NEtwork) - established in 1992, using digital public telephone network and interactive video/multimedia computer technologies to support cooperative electronic alliances in education, community service and economic development throughout the USA.
The University of the Arctic, with a street address in the Arctic Centre, University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland, describes itself as "A University Without Walls, Bringing Together the Shared Voices of the Circumpolar World." Designed to meet the needs of northern peoples as they face the challenges of a rapidly globalizing world, the University is a partnership of academic institutions, indigenous peoples organizations and the Arctic states. The University is
adopting an innovative approach to make northern education relevant and accessible to all northerners, by:
- sharing knowledge among northerners to face the challenges of regional sustainability.
- harmonizing learning systems of traditional and scientific knowledge,
- integrating multiple disciplines to investigate contemporary issues in the region from a comprehensive perspective,
- combining classroom, mobility and distance learning methods to overcome barriers to education in the north, and
- providing the knowledge and tools for northerners to meet the responsibilities of northern autonomy.
A well-developed system for distributed online learning is seen to be fundamental to meeting these goals, so a committee of the university is being set up to conduct an evaluation of online education needs and interests and to propose appropriate information technology solutions. Through the Distance Learning in Developing Countries Group. and other forums, this committee has put out a call for assistance from "interested individuals, representing institutions and organizations at the forefront of online learning." If you are interested in helping to make the University of the Arctic a success, contact Scott Forrest (sforrest@levi.urova.fi) at the Coordination Office serve for more information.
ultiBASE - Call for Contributions
ultiBASE is a production of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, located in the south-eastern Australian state of Victoria, but it is supported by an international editorial committee and its Website carries the headnote "A World Wide Web Service for Tertiary Educators."
"ultiBASE" stands for university learning and teaching in Business, Art, Society and Education, and specifically covers the seven discipline areas of social sciences and communications, business, art, design, education, humanities and environmental design. It provides
- an interactive forum for the discussion of teaching and learning issues;
- information about conferences, courses and teaching materials; and
- refereed and moderated contributions on teaching and learning research and issues.
Typical contents of ultiBASE include:
Articles:Events:
- moderated: reports of teaching and learning innovations, moderated by ultiBASE editorial staff.
- peer reviewed: reports of original research or critical reviews of issues in tertiary teaching.
- STAR (Situation, Target, Activites, Results) format: clear, brief reports of teaching and learning initiatives.
- work-in-progress: article development for peer feedback.
- conference papers
Resources:
- Updated information on state, national and international teaching and learning conferences, seminars, workshops and events.
Workshop:
- Reviews, descriptions and lists of existing teaching and learning materials including journals, books, software and WWW sites.
- Practical classroom advice and how-to information.
Subscription is free. Go to http://ultibase.rmit.edu.au/Guest/guest.html. This will get you onto the regular mailing list to receive notices about forthcoming publications and other events.
The next issue of ultiBASE, due out in February 2000, will be devoted to pedagogical issues surrounding the development, assessment and evaluation
of online learning and teaching. Subscribers are invited to write on such issues as:
- Online delivery: A co-construction between teacher and learner
- Readdressing the diversity of learners' needs and how they impact upon online learning
- Exploration of the knowledge, skills and understandings best fostered by online delivery
- Appraisal of assessment and evaluation techniques of online delivery
- Analytical case studies, action research models or other approaches which document the developmental processes and/or delivery of courses, subjects
- and or modules online.
Submissions will need to reach the Editor, Mark Laidler (m.laidler@rmit.edu.au), by early November. Mark's postal address is
Faculty of Education, Language and Community Services
RMIT University
City Campus, Bld 37
GPO Box 2476V
Melbourne 3000
Australia
Telephone: +61 3 9925 1702
Fax: +61 3 9925 3049
Arun Tripathi has drawn attention to the annual Global Learn Day Webcast for 1999, which will be held on October 9. Here is an edited extract from the news release at http://www.bfranklin.edu/gld3/gld3pr.html:
INTERVU Inc, the leading service provider for Internet audio and video delivery solutions, and The Benjamin Franklin Institute of Global Education today announced that INTERVU has been selected to provide Internet users with live, interactive coverage of this year's "Global Learn Day III." This 24-hour annual Webcast brings together global leaders in distance education from more than 70 countries to discuss affordable and accessible education for all. The Webcast will begin at 5:00pm PDT on Saturday, October 9, at http://www.bfranklin.edu.
The purpose of Global Learn Day III is to demonstrate that education and training can now be affordably delivered to every corner of the globe through the
use of the Internet. Leaders in Web-based distance learning will deliver presentations from locations around the world, with a heavy emphasis on serving the educational needs of the disabled and the poor.Examples of international keynote speakers at Global Learn Day III include Vinton Cerf, "Father of the Internet," Dr. Robin Mason from The Open University in England, the largest provider of distance education in the world, and U.S. Senator Conrad Burns, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, who will focus on the need for policies to help push distance learning into the most remote areas.
One of the highlights of the event is a special stop in Kosovo to participate in "An Educators Online Conference on Kosovo" where educators and students will be discussing the reconstructing of education in Kosovo.
Internet users who plan to attend Global Learn Day III can reserve their virtual seats through INTERVU AUDIENCE, a software tool that allows users to make their reservation to attend this live Web event. AUDIENCE then generates a desktop reminder for ticketed users before the requested event and takes them directly there, hassle free. The AUDIENCE channel for Global Learn Day can be downloaded at http://www.bfranklin.edu.
The live presentations given during Global Learn Day III will be broadcast over the Internet utilizing INTERVU's recently acquired Netpodium technology. INTERVU's innovative Netpodium Web Events technology provides an interactive, Web-centric solution that enables users to broadcast their messages to thousands, while simultaneously interacting with audiences in a virtual auditorium setting. Participants in Global Learn Day III will have the ability to ask questions of the presenters in real-time, participate in audience polls, view presenters' presentation slides and more.
The success of Conference (Re)Call therefore depends very heavily on input from members. WAOE officers are already out there reporting on events theyâve attended and spotting others to come. Weâd like to see all other members doing likewise. You will see from the items in this issue that reports donât need to be lengthy or detailed, let alone polished. We think the segment will work best on the simple premise that whatever any one member found worthwhile in attending an online education event, or attractive about an event in the offing is likely to benefit and interest other members. So, letâs keep those reports and notices coming in to the WEB Editor.