Resource: Global Dimension Website

This site offers free access to a number of educational resources on global issues. 

The Global Dimension Website is managed by DEA, a UK education charity that promotes global learning. As well as the site editor, there are a number of editorial and curriculum advisors, bringing a wide range of experience in teaching and supporting the global dimension in schools(…..)

This website is a guide to books, films, posters and web resources which support global, intercultural and environmental understanding for all age groups and subjects.

From climate change to poverty, water to fair trade, you can find a huge range of teaching resources and background material(…..)

You can browse through the teaching resources database from any page of the site by choosing the curriculum subject, type of background material or topic .

(From Global Dimension )

Link: Global Dimension Website

 

Resource: Open Directory Project (ODP)

An excellent Web Directory to use as a search tool, “Google ’s directory is a copy of the Open Directory, and it spiders Open Directory frequently. It gives sites listed on the Open Directory special popularity relevance in it’s search results.”(The Open Directory Project Analysis-SEO Logics)

The Open Directory Project (ODP), also known as dmoz (from directory.mozilla.org, its original domain name), is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. (wikipedia)

From dmoz website:

The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.

The ODP powers core directory services for some the most popular portals and search engines on the Web, including AOL Search, Netscape Search, Google, Lycos, and HotBot, and hundreds of others.

The ODP is 100% free. There is no cost to submit a site or to use our data. Anyone can download and use ODP data at no cost provided they comply with the ODP’s free license agreement and attribution. Also, there is no cost associated with listing and submitting sites.

Link: http://www.dmoz.org/

 

Report: Teacher supply, recruitment and retention in six Anglophone sub-Saharan African countries (EI, 2007)

From Eldis

Title:Teacher supply, recruitment and retention in six Anglophone sub-Saharan African countries
Authors: D. Sinyolo
Publisher: Global Campaign for Education , 2007

Full text of document

This document reports on a survey conducted by Education International, which investigated teacher supply, teacher attrition, teacher remuneration and motivation, teacher absenteeism and union involvement in policy development in six Anglophone African countries. The survey was undertaken in The Gambia, Kenya, Lesotho, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

 

Resource: Child protection project in Europe website

This website offers access to a variety of resources, including a very useful documentary library with reports and documents on topics related with education, child protection and living conditions of disadvantage children (For instances see the 2008 report Last in Line, Last in School)

The Child protection project in Europe website is a product of the Regional Child Protection Project, located in Budapest, Hungary.

This project is implemented by Terre des hommes - Child Relief, based in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Terre des hommes - Child Relief launched in mid 2005 the Regional Child Protection Project (RCPP) for South Eastern Europe. At the end of the pilot phase, in January 2007, Tdh decided to concentrate the efforts of the RCPP to contribute to the common goal: children in migration are better protected against exploitation.

Links:

• Child protection project in Europe
• Terre des hommes

 

Report: ‘The Bologna process and the UK’s international student market’ (HEPI, May 2008)

The Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) as recently publish a report analyzing the impact of the bologna process ‘for the future of the UK as a destination for international students’. “The Bologna process and the UK’s international student market” indicates that ‘UK has been an active and influential participant in
European higher education reform’. A recent article at the Guardian, “UK universities at risk of losing foreign students“, offers an overview of the report an points out that the paper warns that UK could lose out lucrative international students as a result of the Bologna process. In short, “the Bologna process means that other European countries are providing the bachelors then masters degree structure that was unique to the UK” thus, this is resulting in an increasingly competitive market in a context that erodes some of the competitive advantages that UK universities had.

Links:

Report: “The Bologna process and the UK’s international student market” (HEPI), May 2008

Article: Lipsett, Anthea (May 22, 2008). “UK universities at risk of losing foreign students” The Guardian.

 

The ‘Minerva’ Project: The Military Academic Complex in the US?

New concerns on the Pentagon initiative “the Minerva consortium” were raised recently by the American Anthropological Association.  Minerva is a DOD initiative that seeks to “involve universities in the global war on terror” (Wired news) .The anxiety of scholars about the use of social science research in unethical manner with the purpose of enforce military operations is justify and related with a history of past violations (e.g. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment,Human Radiation Experiments, etc) that led to the establishment of scholarly ethics codes of human research . This is a worrisome development that is generating heated debates. An overview of the Minerva initiative in a recent article at the Insider Higher Education address the responses to a recent letter by the president of the American Anthropological Research Association to the Bush administration and the Congress. The Chronicle of Higher Ed. News Blog indicate that in this letter, the association’s president, Setha M. Low, writes that,

“it is of paramount importance for anthropologists to study the roots of terrorism and other forms of violence.” But Ms. Low, who is a professor of environmental psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, argues that it would be better for such research to be financed by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Endowment for the Humanities because, she says, those agencies are more familiar with anthropology and have established structures for peer review.

This however is not addressing the crucial questions that seem to linger behind the debate: what will be the purpose of social research funded by the Military in the current context? is this about the building of a ‘better public policy’ of conquest? will social research be use to harm the subjects of research?. Those are critical questions that cannot be avoided. Again, it is important to remember that there is a past and current history of governments using professional expertise to justify and/or support human rights abuses (e.g. torture and the medical profession). In a similar manner in a critical posting at the Open Anthropology blog is asked the following question:

Are American anthropologists being called upon to cure the pathologies of their own society, to reduce the toxic glorification of war and the malignant sanctification of brutes in uniform, or to provide practical advice on how to better control subject populations?

Finally, I wonder , following Sharon Weinberger posting at Wired news : “will Minerva go the way of theVietnam-era Project Camelot?”

 

Resource: Harvey Project - nteractive, dynamic human physiology course materials on the Web

Harvey Project is an international collaboration of educators, researchers, physicians, students, programmers, instructional designers and graphic artists working together to build interactive, dynamic human physiology course materials on the Web.

Founded in 1998, the Harvey Project has over a hundred participants in nearly twenty countries. It has received funding from the US National Science Foundation . The Harvey Project has developed over forty learning objects, mostly Java simulations and Flash(tm) animations . Check out some of our learning materials (RLAs) and please join us if you’re interested in helping out.

Link:Harvey Project

 

Resource: The UNESCO Portal on Higher Education Institutions

From UNESCO:

This portal offers access to on-line information on higher education institutions recognized or otherwise sanctioned by competent authorities in participating countries.

It provides students, employers and other interested parties with access to authoritative and up-to-date information on the status of higher education institutions and quality assurance in these countries.

Currently, information can be accessed on the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Egypt, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Norway, United Kingdom, and the United States of America. In the next stage of the project, the number of countries covered will be expanded.

The country information on this portal is managed and updated by relevant authorities in participating countries. More information on the national processes for recognizing or otherwise sanctioning institutions is available on the country pages.

Users are encouraged to consult several sources of information before making important decisions regarding matters such as the choice of an institution, course of study or the status of qualifications. Individuals wishing to have their qualifications recognized for work or further study are advised to consult the competent authorities of the country in which they are seeking to have their qualifications recognised. It is also important to note that some institutions not on the national lists may offer quality programmes. Users are encouraged to contact the national contact point(s) for each country, if necessary, for further information.

Link here

 

State-istics and the challenges of representing global higher ed

A great post by Kris Olds at the Global Higher education blog on new forms of graphic representation of the global  flows and networks in higher education policy.

From Globalhighered:

The globalization of higher education and research is starting to become represented in some insightful graphic formats, as we hinted in our November entry ‘Global geographies of R&D‘. This said the creators of graphic representations are stymied by what Peter Taylor at Loughborough University deems state-istics; the fact that many of the statistics analysts use are created by national governments (for even multilateral agencies like the OECD or the World Bank need to draw out their data from member nations). As Taylor notes, though in relation to the challenges of acquiring data on the relations between ‘global cities‘:

The common term for social data is ‘statistics’ a term that derives directly from the word state. This is, of course, no accident: large-scale data collection on human activities has its origins in state needs and continues to be dominated by states: hence my portrayal of it as state-istics.

Unlike the natural sciences, within social science there is little or no ‘big science’ where very large sums of money are committed to solving theoretical problems. The latter enables natural scientists to concentrate on developing measurements specifically designed for their theoretical purposes. In social science, most data that is collected relates to small-scale cumulative scientific activity. To get an evidential handle on big issues, researchers normally rely on the statistics that are available, that is to say, already collected. Collection is carried out usually by a state agency for the particular needs of government policy, not, of course, for social science research. But the problem is much more than the possibility of having to use unsuitable data. Basing ‘big social science’ on state-istics means that the state defines the basic dimensions of the leading edge ‘macro’ social research and therefore the framework within which most social research is conducted.

Transnational higher education challenges us all, for networks and flows cross national borders, in often untracked ways, and many of the key movers and shakers in this unsettled context are select institutions, or city-regions, but certainly not national spaces.

 

Resourcer:Worldmapper

Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest. There are now nearly 600 maps. Maps 1-366 are also available as PDF posters. Use the menu above to find a map of interest.

An example is the following map on Tertiary Education Spending Growth (1990-2001).

The territory size shows the proportion in spending in tertiary education between 1990 -2001.

The site informs that:

There have been spending increases in tertiary education in 135 of the 200 territories in the world, between 1990 and 2001. North America and Southern Asia are the only regions where there has been a spending increase in every territory. In Eastern Asia there has been a spending increase in every territory except for Mongolia. In Central Africa there has been a spending increase in every territory except for Burundi.

The size of spending increases varies hugely between places. Increases in spending per person in North America and Western Europe are over 4 times those in the next highest regions of Eastern Europe and Japan.