I spent a few hours in Tom Bradley International Terminal last night and was surprised at how much of a “hub” it has been in my own life.  While sitting in the food court upstairs, I could remember being in the same place at least 15 years ago while leaving for Scotland.  I also had memory flashes of my first trip to Nepal and saying goodbye to a girlfriend in the exact same place.  In fact, if it were possible to take a cross-section of time in LAX for the past 20 or so years,  you would probably see me at many significant points in my life.

I am flying Virgin America for the first time on a short visit to DC and thought it was generally pretty good. Here are a few of the more memorable features of the flight:

• Probably the most entertaining and funny safety video I have ever seen, featuring a man with a fish head, a matador, and a geeky-looking nun.

• Hip and casual crew. “Captain Chaz” made the pre-boarding announcement and invited us to see the cockpit of his cool new Airbus. The whole crew is “a team” (e.g. “inflight crew members, prepare for takeoff).

• Purple lighting reminiscent of a trendy lounge or nightclub. Trance techno music playing when you enter the cabin (and continually in the cabin).

• The inflight entertainment seems good, but I haven’t used it as I am working on my laptop using the nice 110VAC power in every seat.

A bonus is that some of the flights seem to be quite empty, probably because the airline is relatively new. On my flight to DC there were no more than 30 people and everyone had 3 rows to herself.

As the lack of posts over the past month and half might suggest, things have been fairly quiet in my life. Work is keeping me very busy, as is the dissertation and two articles I have been working on. I just finished Nepal in Transition: Educational Innovation written by Horace and Mary Reed in 1965; it describes education in Nepal at a crucial time from a very unique perspective. I also read an article on BBC today that claims individuals are willing to make significant changes in their lifestyles to avoid climate change.

I’ve spent most of the past 10 days in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and Dubrovnik (Croatia). Apart from the weather, Sarajevo was great…beautiful city, nice people, good food, etc. It is also very good value for money. On the road to Croatia you can see a lot of beautiful, snow-capped, rocky mountains. It is an interesting drive, as you actually go from Bosnia to Croatia, then back to Bosnia (for its 10 km of coastline) then into Croatia again.

While Dubrovnik is a nice place, it is clearly overrun with tourists. It seems that prices have shot up a lot in the past few years and are now on par with pretty much anywhere else in Europe (Greece, for example). Still, it is a very beautiful place and was worth going. The train back (from Ploce) was interesting, a relic from the 70s or 80s.

I’ve just left Sarajevo after attending the World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES) 13th conference.  Apart from the weather, it was a good experience, I met a lot of wonderful people and learned a lot.  My own presentation went fine, although though truthfully speaking it was poorly attended and not a very valuable experience.  Anyway, I now have lots to think about and to read, which should help with the ongoing dissertation.

Asne Seierstad’s Bookseller of Kabul recounts various episodes in the life of a family in the months after the fall of the Taliban in 2001.  The patriarchy of Afghan society seems to be an overriding theme: the author shows how Sultan, the title character, rules his family almost despotically: women are regarded as chattel and marriage is viewed as an exchange of property.  The stories are based on true events, Seierstad actually spend several months living with the family.

I am not an expert on Afghan society, so it is difficult for me to interpret the Bookseller of Kabul, but I did find the repetitive theme of male domination to be somewhat reductive: it sometimes seems to be the only defining feature of the family.  Additionally, the work is in fact a type of ethnography, it lacks reflexivity that might lend greater credibility to the events. Seierstad is completely transparent in all the episodes she portrays, as if she were invisible and suspended from the ceiling.  Although she acknowledges she frequently fought with the Kahn family in the foreword, her realationship to them is never mentioned again  It seems unlikely that a Norwegian women could live with an Afghan family without influencing the course of their lives: portraying that would have added greater depth to the book.  Also, the book itself is problematic: Seierstad depicts the characters and their relationships in an almost entirely negative light.  Is the family aware of the book?  If so, what were their opinions and how does the author construe her relationship to them?

Without doubt, the Bookseller of Kabul is a captivating and well-written book, but it at times it seems to only tell part of the story.

I just tried to download firefox in Croatia, but found it nearly impossible. Going to firefox.com takes me to http://www.mozilla-japan.org/products/firefox/, which displays mostly ????? as Japanese fonts are not installed on this machine. Finding an English download is actually quite difficult, as google search results are similarly localized to prioritize Croatian pages. It would be much easier if organizations simply took one to the URL one requested, rather than trying to infer something about you based on your IP address.

I have been doing a lot of reading on ICT (information and communication technologies) and education lately. What continually surprises is the disjunct between what research shows ICT in the classroom can do and what proponents claim it can do. I have found the One Laptop per Child project, which aims to distribute the MIT $100 laptop, so questionable in this respect. Here are three reasons I feel this way:

1. $100 is a lot of money. In many low-income countries educational expenditures are less than USD 20 per student per year. It is hard to justify spending 5 years of a student’s budget on a laptop. If the project reaches its goal of 100 million laptops, this will mean a total expenditure of roughly $10 billion dollars. Could this money be put to better uses?

2. Theory over evidence. The OLPC mission is based heavily on the theory of constructionism as described by Papert, Kay, and Negroponte. However, actual research on 1:1 student computing (i.e. providing each student with a laptop) really don’t show the kind of results predicted by OLPC.

3. The challenge is not inexpensive hardware. The root causes of poverty today are to be found in complex social, political, and cultural relationships on both micro and macro levels. Information access and education are the this way to address this, but these do not require large numbers of computers. In fact, my experience is that these goals are best served by programs initiated at the community level.

I do think that the $100 is an impressive and socially-conscious piece of engineering. I do like the use of open hardware and open source software. However, I really don’t like the unsubstantiated claims made in the name of education and poverty alleviation for the world’s poorest children.

I recently got a new Sony Vaio (VGN-FZ140E) for my new job. While I was excited by the 2GB of RAM, 200GB hard drive, “X-Brite” Screen, etc. I was appalled by the amount of blatant advertising force fed to me on a computer that I paid for. Basically, the Vaio comes pre-loaded with loads of trial version software that is enabled by default and will ask you to buy it at every possible opportunity. Various forms of pre-loaded advertising included:

• Symantec’s Norton Anti-Virus
• Adobe Acrobat (Full verison, not just the reader)
• The entire Spider Man II DVD
• Microsoft Office “One Note” Read the rest of this entry »

I finally gave in and watched “The Secret” movie online a few nights ago. Essentially, this movie claims one can have/acheive/become anything one wants by using the “law of attraction.”  This entails visualizing yourself where you want to be and eliminating negative thoughts and doubts.  I found several things to like and several more to dislike about this The Secret: Read the rest of this entry »