Charity Water

During the 30 days of September, 29 other bloggers and I have joined together to see if our different communities could collectively raise $30,000 for charity: water, to provide clean water for people who don't have it. 30 Bloggers, 30 Days, $30,000.

Here's what you can do:

+ Give. $20 gives one person clean water for 20 years!
+ Share. Tell your friends on Facebook and Twitter about what we're doing. We're using the hashtag #30water and pointing people to http://mycharitywater.org/30 (shortlink: http://bit.ly/b1eht9)
+ Blog about it. Many of you also have your own blogs. We want you to write about it too and get your readers involved. Just point your readers to our site: http://mycharitywater.org/30

Of all the things I admire about charity: water, here are some details that stick out to me:

+ 100% of all your money will go to water projects. It's not going to printer ink or insurance policies – they have private donors for that. Your money provides water.
+ Our money will go towards building water projects in Central African Republic. Click here to see a video they made specifically about the people there.
+ After you give, charity: water will keep you up-to-date with the status of the project you gave to, provide you with GPS coordinates of exactly where the well is being built, and take pictures and video along the way.
+ Our page has a status bar at the top that shows up-to-the-minute progress of how much money has been given.
+ Like I said earlier, $20 provides one person with clean water for 20 years. An average water project costs $5,000 to build and provides clean water to 250 people. If we raise our goal of $30,000, we'll help 1500 people get clean water!

Please take 4.5 minutes to watch this video. It is their founder Scott sharing how this organization came about, the ins-and-outs of how it all works, and the incredible success they've had in the first few years of existence.

charity: water 2010 September Campaign: Clean Water for the Bayaka from charity: water on Vimeo.

For seriously good, award-winning recipes

When our son was born in early 2007, my wife, daughter and I were living in a three-story, six-bedroom house in Canada (Vancouver, BC) along with six other people and a dog. Every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights we would have what we called "community dinners" where one resident would cook for all the rest. I looked forward to the nights when Stephanie cooked.

Post April 2007, we all moved away and the house was torn down and replaced by two, tall duplexes. But Stephanie's cooking lives on.

Last year she began her blog - http://www.dollopofcream.com/ - and it's getting noticed. Most recently by salon.com who awarded her in the crisp category.

Enjoy.

An excerpt from Stephanie:

Rote grütze has been on my mind for the last seven summers.

My relatives served it to me in Hamburg when I was visiting, and I remember being surprised by the tart red berries and cataloguing it in my mind as yet another delicious German dessert.

They served it – thick and saucy and full of berries – with a light vanilla sauce.

That is the traditional way to eat rote grütze and I heartily recommend it.

However, I happen to have vanilla ice cream on hand . . . and that led to the revelation that I could put rote grütze on top of ice cream instead of sauce on top of rote grütze.

Rote grütze literally means red groats. Groats, I have learned from extensive research, are any hulled cereal grain. Here, they refer to plump and ripe summertime berries... [Read more]

Some of my favorites this year from Vimeo

CL!CK: A LEGO Short Film from Lego Click on Vimeo.

Q&A from StoryCorps on Vimeo.

Nuit Blanche from Spy Films on Vimeo.

Dry Fish from Andy Martin on Vimeo.

Sony Bravia from Laurent MAKOWSKI on Vimeo.

I'm Digging Joy's New Blog

Some Old Pics I Love

Beirut (2005)

Venice (2004)

Winder, GA (2008)

Andahuaylas, Peru (2007)

Vancouver, BC (2007)

An Idea for Education

Below is an essay I wrote recently for a particular application. I didn't get in...but I can't shake the idea. What do you think?


Describe an idea (yours or someone else's) that you believe could significantly improve education. How would it change education?

As I explore this question, I have in mind that forty-one percent of the over nine hundred freshmen at my school, the largest public high school in Georgia, right now are failing mathematics. Many students today, it seems, are not fully engaged in education, and we are not seeing in those that are the interdisciplinary and intercultural qualities that many professionals suggest must be present for them to successfully navigate our changing reality. To be sure, my proposal does not resolve the myriad factors involved, but it does address this predicament at its core and also the challenges that public education faces broadly.

Earlier this year, Mark Taylor (Columbia) wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times that I cannot get out of my head. He argues for a curricular reorientation, urging educators to dissolve traditional curricular divisions (eg, math, science, language arts, history) and to reorganize academic knowledge and skills around contemporary global challenges that are inherently more interdisciplinary and intercultural (eg, water, energy, media, et al). I share this vision with two small caveats: first, that we limit the restructuring to avoid unwanted dilution of subject matter, particularly of those highly specialized themes that require laser-focus attention to minutia; and second, that efforts to incorporate more teacher-led small groups into students’ schedules accompany the reorientation.

Such a program will generate a more engaging curriculum where the connection between class work and real life is more apparent and the possibility of young people contributing solutions to the larger conversation increases. It will also graduate students who more naturally think and operate along multidisciplinary and multicultural lines and are better equipped to address 21st century questions. Even teachers will progress as these new exchanges challenge habits of compartmentalized thinking and break down the intellectual barriers to cross-disciplinary epiphanies that are often snuffed out by rigidly divided curricula. Finally, the incorporation of small groups will increase accountability for learning and the extent to which teachers can mentor their students for the public good.

I see as one possibility refining (and redefining as needed) such a plan during my studies next year. Regardless, I say let us renovate our instructional approach, and drastically. Let us revamp our students’ plan of study, enlarge their experience, and involve them now in the global conversation.