Education
Courage
Guest post by tf
Daniel Schneidermann lost his job because he spoke out. Now his associate, Judith Bernard, has had a job offer withdrawn because she, too, spoke out.
Schneidermann is the host of Arrêt sur Images, the television show that analyzes television, shown every Sunday at 12:36pm on France 5. He was also a columnist for […]
Reading
Guest post by tf
Fifteen percent of French students leave elementary school without being able to read properly, according to Ministry of Education statistics. The Education Minister, Gilles de Robien, blames this on the whole word method of teaching, which emphasizes word recognition, over the phonetic method, in which children spell out words syllable by syllable. […]
Skype Out
Guest post by tf
Each French cabinet ministry has its own official responsible for the national defense related aspects of that ministry’s work. For the Ministry of National Education, Higher Education, and Research, that official is Bernard Vors, who, in September, acted boldly to protect France from the malign influence of a dangerous piece of software, […]
Blackboard
Guest post by tf
Blackboard is an online system used by many universities, in the United States and elsewhere, to animate classroom discussions beyond the classroom, through forums and other web-based tools. Administrators at New York University (NYU) are pioneering a new use of Blackboard: to spy on faculty and graduate teaching assistants.
Graduate students who work […]
Separate and Unequal
Jonathan Kozol has an important article in the latest issue of Harpers. Although the magazine hasn’t made it available online, you can read it here. In it he dispels the notion that the problems which occasioned Brown v. Board of Education have gone away:
Schools that were already deeply segregated twenty-five or thirty years ago are […]
Failure
One of the things I try to explain in my dissertation is the failure of Taiwan’s current educational policies. What do I mean by failure? This is a question that came up recently when Scott Sommers tried to answer a similar question. Scott did an admirable job of showing how politics has made it difficult […]
Crazy English
Someone recently mentioned to me that I should see Yuan Zhang’s 1999 documentary “Crazy English.” Although the few reviews I’ve found of the film suggest that it could use some editing, the subject matter is fascinating: China’s first major self-help guru, Li Yang, whose gimmick is a new way of learning English. Namely, by shouting […]
Savage Minds
Last September I wrote an article in Anthropology News encouraging my fellow anthropologists to get online. I was frustrated that while there are numerous blogs by just about every other branch of academia, anthropologists were still largely absent from the online hubbub. Since I wrote that article, the anthropological blogsphere has been slowly expanding. This […]
Flickrology
Last year, when I was offered the opportunity to teach a course on anthropology and photography at Haverford College, I immediately knew I wanted to do something with Flickr. I even wrote to the folks at Flickr to see if they would offer free “pro” accounts to my class for the semester. They politely declined. […]
Expendable
The hunger strike by students supporting a guaranteed living wage at Georgetown was a success. According to the DC labor web site (where I can no longer find a link to this story):
Highlights of the agreement include a raise to a minimum hourly wage of $13 beginning this July, annual wage adjustments based on the […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
