· April, 2006

Stories about Education from April, 2006

China: Truth penetrates firewall

  29 April 2006

In ‘China Good News Vol. 3‘, the Laowiseass blogger posts a letter from a reader: “I just saw a PBS documentary about what happened in Beijing in the summer of 1989 with my roommates. The three of us were shocked by not only the bloody, barbarian event, but also the...

Jordan: Customer Service

Speaking her mind about the ‘customer service’ in the Arab world, Khalidah says: “We see large companies with hundreds of employees and fancy titles, their organization charts can fill a whole wall, each manager has managers and those report yet to more directors, those directors report to boards and boards...

Pulse of the Saudi Blogosphere

Football and ice hockey, hijab and fatwas, bloggers meetups, and much much more from the Saudi blogosphere this week. Let's go… Starting with Swalfy, who did not seem so surprised that Riyadh Gitex, which supposed to be the biggest IT exhibition in Saudi Arabia does not has a website. He...

Martinique: Parental Rant

  26 April 2006

Bien Vu wonders (FR) why his/her teen-aged son is being taught History in French class. “Martinique doesn't do anything like anyone else [in the French school system],” says the blogger “unless this is our very own national curriculum.”

Taiwan: English teaching essentials

  26 April 2006

Mark at Doubting to shuō blogs critically on what separates good ESL teachers in Taiwan from the bad. “Obviously,” he writes, “this is pretty subjective.”

Belarus: Alternative Student Resource

  25 April 2006

Iryna of TOL's Belarus Blog writes about a Belarusian-language alternative online student resource – www.studenty.by: “More than 10,000 people visited the web-site when the first cartoon about Vasilek, a freshmen university student who came to Miensk from a small village, was posted a couple of months ago (you can see...

Japan: Online language learning

  25 April 2006

Chris Bunting at Buyo shares his discovery of two free online Japanese learning tools: one mouse-over pop-up translator and a vocabulary-drilling role playing game.

Image from Haiti: Sell Art, Support a School

  25 April 2006

La Bonne Recolte by J.B. Chery. Image courtesy AyitiCherieConnexion AyitiCherieConnexion posts a slideshow of Haitian paintings and writes (FR): While surfing the web the other day I discovered a not-for-profit project from New York which uses Haitian art to fund a school in Haiti. I'm talking about the Vassar Haiti...

Bangladesh: Plagiarism

  24 April 2006

Deshcalling on how plagiarism in Bangladesh seems to be prevalent – “When plagiarism becomes rife as it has in Bangladesh educational institutions it devalues the degrees or diplomas awarded by those institutions and also undermines the intellectual potential of the country.”

India: Death of a student

  24 April 2006

The Instant Me writes from Armenia on the death of the Indian student – “A fact that I would like to bring under, is that no one from the university, accompanied the body back to India. The reasons they gave was that a visa could not be made ready, and...

Quotas in Brazilian Universities: The Online Debate

  21 April 2006

This post is also available in Portuguese. There is an important public conversation going on in Brazil. Affirmative action quota policies are being implemented in some Brazilian universities*. The debate will heat up in the coming weeks as Congress considers a new law (law project nº 3627/2004) that would establish...

Belarus: “Public Repentance”

  21 April 2006

Iryna of TOL's Belarus Blog writes about “public repentance” taking place in Belarus now: “Students, who spent 10 to 15 days in prison after being arrested on the Square or during the March 25th demonstrations, are being forced to declare publicly that their legal participation in peaceful protests against election...

Landing at the Iraqi Blogodrome

As a postscript to the 1970 Gil Scot Heron poem ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised‘, There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock news… The Revolution Will Not Be Televised The revolution will be no re-run brothers; The revolution will be live. The revolution will be blogged. And...

Belarus: Europe's Involvement

  20 April 2006

TOL's Belarus Blog writes about the extent of Europe's interest in Belarusian affairs and about countries that offer scholarships to (so far) 20 Belarusian students expelled for political reasons.

Sri Lanka: Violence in the University

  19 April 2006

Moju on University politics and the violence on campus in Colombo. “At the same time, the sort of violence in which students engage is becoming more and more harmful and has spawned a new culture of violence among youth everywhere.”

Moldova: High School Physics Class

  19 April 2006

Peter Myers of Adventures in Moldova writes about his experience of visiting an “under-attended” high school physics class in Moldova: “Grigore Fyodorovici lamented to me after school about the fact that no boys came, because ‘they're the ones who really need physics.’ Girls don't need physics, he reasoned, because most...