Teaching 21st Century Skills
For decades, the emphasis in public education has been on making sure that students can read, write, and do math. But can they apply those skills in a real-world scenario, such as designing a bridge? Can they identify what information they need and use digital tools to find it? Those are some of the capabilities known as "21st-century skills". In a knowledge economy, the reasoning goes, the abilit... posted on Jan 08 2009, 6,193 reads

What Will Change Everything?
Every year, John Brockman -- who runs the nonprofit Edge Foundation in New York -- asks a gaggle of forward-thinking people a provocative question. This is the Edge Annual Question for 2009: "What will change everything?" Writer David Bodanis suggests that some kind of massive technological failure would be game-changing. Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, says that reinventing indu... posted on Jan 06 2009, 4,684 reads

Cheering for the Other Side
They played the oddest game in high school football history last month down in Grapevine, Texas. It was Grapevine Faith vs. Gainesville State School and everything about it was upside down. For instance, when Gainesville came out to take the field, the Faith fans made a 40-yard spirit line for them to run through. Did you hear that? The other team's fans. More than 200 Faith fans sat on the Gaine... posted on Dec 28 2008, 6,822 reads

Wings of Love: Airline Ambassadors
She lost her father to cancer on Christmas Eve 1983. Traveling the world to find answers, she came to this realization of life's purpose: love in action. In 1997, this flight attendant started a nonprofit called Airline Ambassadors to deliver small amounts of humanitarian aid to orphanages worldwide. In 1999, she was honored as World Woman of Peace. Meet Nancy Rivard.... posted on Dec 25 2008, 3,309 reads

The Legacy of Secret Santa
At a suburban Goodwill store on Friday, Theresa Settles selected a large, black comforter to warm her family until she can raise the money to turn the gas heat back on. A petite woman approached, her face obscured by dark sunglasses and a wrapped winter scarf, and handed Settles two $100 bills stamped with the words "secret Santa." "The only condition," she said, "is that you do something nice for... posted on Dec 23 2008, 4,227 reads

Kjerstin Erickson's Dream
She didn't have a business plan. She didn't have a revenue model. She didn't have connections. And she didn't have a penny. But as a 20 year-old, Kjerstin Erickson began dreaming the "audacious" idea of creating the largest library for a refugee camp in the world. Kjerstin now works among three refugee camps in Zambia, helping 60,000 refugees to build better lives. This is her story.... posted on Dec 19 2008, 3,469 reads

An Author Turned Visionary Humanitarian
After the runaway success of his Pulitzer-nominated memoir, literary wunderkind Dave Eggers could have settled into a comfortable career cranking out similar material. Instead he took a more dynamic path. He founded the small indie publishing empire McSweeney's, which produces the Believer magazine, and started two nonprofit enterprises with a humanitarian bent: 826 Valencia, a writing and tutorin... posted on Dec 18 2008, 2,394 reads

The Biggest Neighborhood News Blog
A woman in Philadelphia hypes an upcoming public knitting day. A man in Karachi, Pakistan, laments power outages that have become the norm for the frustrated residents there. And a concerned citizen in Bangalore, India, critiques racy advertising that recently went up in the city. These posts-aggregated at Metblogs, the largest city-specific blog network in the world-provide little glimpses of lif... posted on Dec 17 2008, 3,860 reads

Designing For Generosity
Internet guru Clay Shirky has a unique ability to present the chaos of the Web in stunningly clear terms, as he does in this video from Pop!Tech, documenting what a "spontaneously, self-assembling, online philanthropic venture" tells us about the nature of human motivation. Listen as he explains the concept of "designing for generosity," and what we can learn about it from the Josh Groban Foundati... posted on Dec 16 2008, 3,357 reads

Growing Seeds In Silence
"This story I'm about to share with you has been growing in the heart of many people on Cape Ann, where I live. It is the story of Jude, a young deaf man with green thumbs and a big heart who recently opened a plant store in our community called The Silent Seed. I first heard about him from my friend Nana who had noticed the new store during one of her walks and was so inspired by the owner that s... posted on Dec 13 2008, 3,979 reads