Pan - entire; Gaea - also spelled as gaia - meaning earth. Pangea Day, literally Entire Earth Day.
This is not about the Earth Day celebrated some weeks back (though I’m all for that too) where we turned off our lights for one hour. This is about a dream come true about a dream. A dream shared by everyone on earth.
Her dream: World Peace, like you, me and the beauty pageant contestant. It is really our desire, right. But we ask ourselves “But what can one person do?” I think she asked the same question and she came up with a first step: To meet together. I agree.
From Pangeaday.org
In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the TED Prize, an annual award granted at the TED Conference. She was granted $100,000, and more important, a wish to change the world. Her wish was to create a day in which the world came together through film. Pangea Day grew out of that wish. Watch Jehane Noujaim’s 2006 acceptance speech now.
Pangea Day, the day the world comes together through film.
Pangea Day is over and many Asian countries, including the Philippines, as Technogra.ph blogged, missed the four-hour event because of the time difference. Though we didn’t get to participate actively, it was just the beginning. There is still a lot to do.
Am just wondering if any Filipino film maker submitted, or any Filipino was part of any film or organizing the event, or if there was a Philippine representative in any of the seven cities where the event was. It would be great to hear (or read) first hand info with a Pinoy perspective.
If it’s any consolation, we could trace Pangea Day to a Filipina who had an influence on Jehane. In her 2006 TED talk, she mentions a certain exchange student named Donna from the Philippines.
From the TED talk video:
“A long time ago, about forty years ago, my mom had an exchange student named Donna.”
(Note the Rosary, Missal and “Belo”)
(Donna eating ice cream.)
“And this is Donna teaching my Aunt a Filipino dance.”Unmistakably Filipina, either an Igorot or Muslim dance.
Anybody who knows her? Where is she now, the Filipina behind Pangea Day? Might be a great story for FilipinaImages.com.
Images captured from the TED.com talk.
I just found that aside from Chess, there are three other variations I can play on my iBook.
From the Chess Help File:
Crazyhouse follows the same rules of movement as chess, with the winner being the first player to checkmate his or her opponent. However, when players capture their opponent’s pieces, they receive the same piece of their color to drop into the game at any time. For example, if a player captures a knight, he or she can later drop a knight anywhere on the board, even if it brings about check or checkmate.
In crazyhouse, a player cannot drop a pawn into the 1st or 8th rank. Also, you can promote a pawn to any piece, but if that piece is captured, it reverts back to a pawn for the capturer’s use.
Suicide follows the same rules of movement as chess, but there is no castling. The winner is the first player to lose all of his or her pieces or to have no legal move left. The king doesn’t hold a special significance, and it can be sacrificed like any other piece. Also, players can promote pawns to a king.
Losers follows the same rules as Suicide. However, the king holds the same significance as in chess, and players must reply to checking moves first. But if a player mates, he or she loses.
Is this part of Wesley So’s discipline? I don’t think so (pun unintended), but it might just help him grow his repertoire of moves. Funny thing though is I’ve lost as much as I did with regularl chess yet it felt fun losing. Maybe because it continues to teach me how to think differently from the way I used to.
In life, maybe you can ask yourself: “What will I do if I can do anything I want, regardless of time, money, ability, training, location or physical condition?” You might just have a Eureka moment.
Extra: For book lovers:
There is a great adventure book that used chess and a certain Chess set as its topic. This I think is way much better than a recent around-the-world-mystery-adventure in all aspects. Persons are considered in their equivalent chess piece. Pawns, Black knight, bishop, qhite queen… and a play on the number eight, the chessboard (8×8)… fibonacci sequence… the puzzle of using the knight to cover all squares of the board in exactly 64 moves… music (octave), etc… I wonder if the sequel has been finished or will be out soon.. The tile of the book is The Eight by Katherine Neville.
This was writtend by my Friend GerbsDC way back 1993, a few months after he graduated. He hopes the would-be grads out there would get something from this essay.
BEYOND A COLLEGE DIPLOMA
By Germaine De Castro
For a typical college student, graduation is undoubtedly the most important event in his entire educational life. Well, we couldn’t discount the fact that there are other significant happenings during college life such as being included in the Dean’s List, winning contests, or just plainly receiving a sweet yes from a loved one. Graduation is the time where you are about to trek the halls of a large venue like the PICC together with your fellow schoolmates, walk up the platform upon announcement of your name, receive the diploma, and the traditional bow in front of thousands recognizing yourself as a college graduate. This is also the time for last hugs and kisses mainly because there would be a great possibility that you might not be seeing them for a long time. Some of them might be traveling abroad and permanently settle themselves there or the rapid mushrooming of different business establishments which will definitely lead to separations among peers due to competitions from other job applicants more qualified for a certain vacant job position. Painful as it is amidst the glamor of the event, we could only accept it as a reality and a clear indication that a “new” life is about to be embarked. New, in the sense that, post-graduation blues is a totally different chapter in our lives. This is the real thing and it’s time to prove yourself.
Most of us might have felt a “What now?” feeling after the hostilities had taken place. Inner questions like “Will I be putting up my own business or just start at the bottom as a mere employee?”, “What sort of industry would I be indulging in?”, “How long would it take for me to land a job?”, and “Are my college achievements good enough to put me at an advantage against my job competitors?” would definitely prop up in the minds of the graduates. Let’s not forget the famous “Will I be successful in my career?” statement. I’m sure all of us had thought of this.
Life after college is a totally different scenario. This is where the graduate would be gauged on how much skills were absorbed during his school days. Actually, the working environment is some sort of an extension of a person’s educational life. Learning is an endless process even after the grueling years of school life. This is the time where applications would be given more importance over theoreticals. Due to situational changes in our country and in the world as well, sticking by the book alone would give us a hard time confronting present working problems. What with the constant studies on Management Handling and the fast-paced updating of technology prevailing these days. An average student may turn out to be a more successful employee than an honor student when it comes to work performance. You would just be surprised that everything that you have learned in school are not enough to help propel you to great heights in your career. Those subjects are just your basic foundations to help you be competent in the “new world” you are about to enter into. A lot of new things to be learned are in store for the successful job applicant and it all would commence the moment that person would step on the well-mopped floors of that company reflecting deep inside, “This is it…wish me luck!”.
As you open the doors of your specific department, a warm welcome from your co-employees would be the opening greeting. Definitely, they would be asking themselves, “Will this newly-hired employee be able to contribute to the betterment of the company?”. That would really pose as a challenge for the neophyte and if it would definitely give him the jitters, that would be fine. At least that person is a normal human being and it happens to a horde of newcomers.
Moving a step further up the ladder of life leaving school days behind is a bold move in a person’s life. It would not be all regarding work after college life. Discovering more about life is essential for a person to grow into a more matured individual. He turns out more knowledgeable in tackling life’s obstacles forgetting the days of dependency during his early years. If he decides to live a married life, that would be another bold new step to even greater responsibilities. For the benefit of singles, it doesn’t follow that married individuals are more responsible than unmarried ones. Some couples just wouldn’t accept the responsibility tied to the sacrament of matrimony. Some of us sometimes get pressured in finding a partner in life and this would really cause problems due to lack of maturity. Relationships are not requirements but responsibilities. True love, stability, and a healthy spiritual life are major factors for a happy marriage.
Obtaining a college diploma means a whole lot more than just passing your course with flying colors and celebrating your heart out until the wee hours of the morning. It is your ticket to a whole new ride in your life. A ride full of learning more about the ups and downs of life… a ride full of challenges from God…a ride of everlasting education.
We are forever students in this world. Class dismissed.
While blogging my be one of the more popular routes for communication and self-expression it can also be a good tool for elearning. Sir Martin has used it extensively, and so has Ms. Lacs. I’m sure that there are more teachers out there that I have not come across (and I would appreciate it if you make them known to me. Or you make yourself known, ok?). It is my opinion that anybody who wants to use technology for education should start and keep a blog.
Most bloggers would generally be victims of spammers in all forms, shapes and sizes. A form of spam blogs, scraping content from different sources, have targeted a lot of local bloggers like Yuga, as you can probably see at the end of his posts. Though I am nowhere near Abe’s league, I have had some brushes or two siphoners which fizzled out after a while. (I don’t know if I’ll be mad or thrilled, swinging from “Why don’t you write your own stuff!” to “Is my content not good enough for you?”). RSS Aggregators have made it very easy to do just that. While some copycats have actually copy-pasted manually, RSS has made it possible to automatically suck off content.
Though we may fume at the temerity of this practice and blame the creators of the aggregators, a new positive application for this technology has been gaining praise and approval: using WordPress as eLearning platform using RSS aggregators/scrapers (like wp-o-matic the (”spamblogging” plug-in) to collect a series of posts/courses. Here is a try by David Wiley which looks very promising - and anyone who would want to learn about new media (Blog and Soul Movement, this is a great resource to use for schools! Or anybody for that matter). A technologically-similar undertaking by Stephen Downes can be found here.
The eLearning community, especially the open education and resources (OER) advocates are quite excited about this resurgence. Though many admit that it has surfaced before, it is now that is gaining steam and ready for a comeback.
Translation for the Philippines: Imagine the top 10 teachers of of the same subject using the same curriculum. They put their course content (text, images, video, etc) in their blogs under a CC license. A new teacher can re-use, remix content from them and greatly improve the quality of his course. Imagine that being done to all subjects. On all levels.
Then, use WordPress Multi-User… What do you have?
A free online school!
If you can get all these content, courseware, applications and systems inside a USB drive and have a UMPC like OLPC or the Asus EEE and tweak it so it could run by itself, you’ll have a school in your computer!
Scale this globally and we would have revolutionized education as we know it.
There is no probably little or no problem for GoogleReader to be a school with this scheme. I’d like to see them put a big effort to make this one work without making money out of it (read ads or fees). Just because it’s a good thing to do.
Would Microsoft, Yahoo and the others be left behind? Just ditto re: bold line for Google.
To teachers and anybody who has good content to share: PLEASE PUT YOUR CONTENT ONLINE AND SHARE (use the CC license models)!
To the techies: Can you help make the steps of putting this up, maintaining and monitoring easier, faster and more efficient? Maybe a desktop and online application that is widgetizeable, customizable and open source? I’m sure you can make it as easily as I think it.
Would this solve (at least partially) a great engineering challenge of the 21st century.
Electrification. Electronics, computers and the internet. Radio, TV and highways.
These are just some of the greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century. This site lists down the top 20.
Now living in the 21st century, we probably take these for granted. I combed through each one and initially concluded that there were only two items I have not encountered or used personally. I was wrong since number 20 is extensively used in medicine, specially with cancer treatment. That leaves only number 12, but that is something that I hope Sir Richard Branson and his baby or kin would give me the opportunity to experience.
The current time also leaves us with a lot of obstacles, identified here.
With input from people around the world — much of it on this website – an international group of leading technological thinkers were asked to identify the Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century.
They came up with these:
Make solar energy economical
Provide energy from fusion
Develop carbon sequestration methods
Manage the nitrogen cycle
Provide access to clean water
Restore and improve urban infrastructure
Advance health informatics
Engineer better medicines
Reverse-engineer the brain
Prevent nuclear terror
Secure cyberspace
Enhance virtual reality
Advance personalized learning
Engineer the tools of scientific discovery
If the world can overcome all of these challenges, a new era will dawn upon us. I can’t even begin to imagine how things would be much better.
Already, thinkers, inventors, researchers, engineers and scientists are working on these.
Every person on earth stand to benefit from solving these riddles.
There is also a poll on the site that ranked “Making solar energy economical” as the most “popular/important” challenge. I agree. But there is another challenge that is close to my heart which is Advanced Personal Learning. I think this is key to solving poverty, wars and disease. If this is solved, I think the rest would just follow.
Which challenge, when solved, would create the greatest impact on our world?
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