Sharing Good Practice
less water – they presented their
solution at Oxford University, 400
students went on a march in Peru, a
huge mural was created in India and
Portugal, so students will be reminded
of the project every single day.
If we fail to give our students the skills
they need to successfully navigate
their reality, we risk a future where
technology has undue influence over
our lives.
Imagine this scenario: A woman gets
into a self-driving car on her way
home from work. In order to get the
ride for free, she is forced to spend
20 minutes at the fast food restaurant
that sponsored her trip. This has
become a new way of advertising.
After eating an unhealthy snack that
she really didn’t need, she passes the
rest of the time by sharing a few highly
biased, government sponsored news
stories on her social media feeds. The
government software that constantly
analyzes social media data increases
her social credit score by 2 points. She
knows that her social credit score is
close to being high enough to give her
access to a better job. She checks her
smartphone to see whether her child
has had a good day at school. Her
son has been angry 2 times, stressed
for less than 30 minutes, and spent a
few minutes laughing at lunch time,
all of which has been recognized by
the facial recognition software and
cameras that are located throughout
the school. Upon arrival at home,
she unlocks her front door with the
aid of neural sensors attached to her
eyeglasses and before proceeding to
ask her home network to order dinner
for her family.
This story is dangerously close to
being reality. In Beijing people do
have a social credit connected to
face recognition. In Chinese schools,
children’s emotions are scanned every
20 seconds, and mind controlling
devices are available on the internet
for no more than US$250. Schools
need to transform and we need to
question ourselves how. The home
networks that we use like Amazon’s
Alexa and Google Home, to turn on
our lights, buy goods and order food,
send our data to their companies every
few minutes so that advertising can be
better targeted to our desires.
Jane Goodall, world renowned
primatologist and anthropologist,
founded the Roots & Shoots
programme with the goal of
bringing together youth to work on
environmental,
conservation
and
humanitarian issues. In 2018, Roots
and Shoots approached Timmers to
collaborate in developing Innovation
Lab Schools in Africa and South
America. Each lab school aims to offer
a free quality education to children
living in rural areas. The facilities are
typically equipped with an internet
connection, laptops and educational
resources including Lego WeDo and
Minecraft.
Apart from a local teacher, students will
learn by having a Skype lesson offered
by a global teacher community of one
thousand educators. Students across
Class Time
|
|
May - Jun 2019
| 43