1.5 billion learners out of school: A global educational crisis

by | Wednesday, April 01, 2020

The scale of the COVID19 crisis and its impact on global education is hard to comprehend. UNESCO has a website (COVID-19 Educational Disruption and Response) providing almost real-time data on school closures. It is shocking to imagine that in a mere 45 days we have had schools close in over 180 countries, affecting 1.5 billion learners! As Yuval Harari wrote in The world after coronavirus:

In normal times, governments, businesses and educational boards would never agree to conduct such experiments. But these aren’t normal times.

We are living through the largest educational social experiment in history! I am part of an ongoing conversation on the silverliningforlearning website devoted to better understanding the present we are living in and the future that we will be emerging into.

Below is a short promotional video for this project with data and animation showing school closures across the world from the UNESCO site above.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Who is god rooting for?

I have often wondered, while watching sports movies, particularly the ritual prayer scene before the big game, as to who is god rooting for? I mean, surely the other team is invoking god as well? So how does god decide? And if one team wins does that mean their god is...

For Sean & his students

Sean had this wonderful post on his blog (Is this a sluggish strategy?) about this whole scientific and mathematical poetry that is going around. He links to some excellent sci-po's written by his students (see Pushing Scientific Thought Into Art) and also provides a...

WHY: The most important question of all

Why do anything at all? This blog post is a collection of videos and images that I have collected over time that speak to the pointlessness of trying to find an answer to this question and how one question, even if answered, leads to many more. This is the kind of...

Krishnamurti & Dewey in the Metaverse

Krishnamurti & Dewey in the Metaverse

I am writing a paper with Marina Basu about how John Dewey's and Jiddu Krishnamurti's philosophies of education and their implications for learning in increasingly mediated environments. While working on the paper, it struck me that it may be fun to see what Bing Chat...

Rethinking homework, some thoughts…

Shelly Blake-Plock over at TeachPaperLess has a great post about homework and how it can be structured to act as a "cliffhanger." As he says: These days, the homework I give isn't based on some arbitrary idea of how much work a kid should do 'at home' to reinforce...

Avani Amol Pavangadkar…

... was born on the 7th of October, to Amol and Kanchan. [Amol was my partner in crime in the making of Hari Puttar!] We went to visit her yesterday and I took some pictures. Enjoy. View all the pictures

Cognitive psychology of science: Old article

Cognitive psychology of science: Old article

Science ambigram with 180-degree rotational symmetry This chapter, published back in 1998, focused on the cognitive science of science. I realized today that I had not uploaded this article onto my website. So, better late than never, here it is. But before jumping...

Chris Fahnoe paper wins two awards at SITE

Chris Fahnoe is a doctoral student in our hybrid PhD program. As a part of his practicum research he conducted a study investigating whether students embedded in technology-rich, self-directed, open-ended learning environments develop self-regulation skills? We...

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