Archive for the 'Education' Category

asia pacific photos, 1840-1940

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on August 5, 2008
in Art, Education, History, Photos and Travel
. 0 Comments

A city wall tower and very clearly, the moat, Beijing, 1840-1860: just one of the many photos from around the Pacific, circa 1840-1940, now to be found online at the National Gallery of Australia’s Picture Paradise exhibition.  Well worth browsing through this eclectic collection of shots of everything from Australian aborigines to Javanese dancers, a white European man in Chinese dress in a Hong Kong studio, bathers on the Ganges, and views of Fuzhou, in “daguerreotype portraits, mass-produced views and portraits on paper made possible by the revolutionary wet-plate and dry-plate glass negative-positive process, and prints from the modern era of small format film cameras and photojournalism.”

Start at the themes page and click through to the different collections, and be prepared for the dizzying format of photos sliding into view from left to right.  I wish they wouldn’t do that.

(via The Asian Studies WWW Monitor: Aug 2008, Vol. 15, No. 9 (283))

virtual worlds in china, association

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on July 22, 2008
in Design, Education, Games and Virtual China
. 3 Comments

I’m interested in virtuality, experience, and culture; Zafka Zhang is a metaverse researcher, blogger, and evangelist, directs research at China’s virtual world HiPiHi, and according to his Twitterstream, recently started his own youth insights and marketing company, China Youthology青年志; Li Feng is an Instructional Technology Specialist at University of Massachusetts Lowell and Second Lifer.  Along with about 20 others, we’re all members (thanks Zafka) of the Association of Virtual Worlds’ Virtual Worlds in China group. It’s new, we’ll see. Join?

Corporate cross-cultural pollination in action

Published
by
Jason Li
on May 11, 2008
in Art, Commerce, Design, Education, Translation and Travel
. 2 Comments

Was passing by Heathrow and picked up a pamphlet about…

And I checked the website, which said they were co-hosting “over 800 events nationwide spanning art, design, cuisine, culture, science, business, technology, education and sport [that] will capture the imagination and advance the UK public’s understanding of China.”

Their lineup seems pretty impressive, and includes these works:

Above by Chen Shaohua, 1992

Above by Ji Ji, 2006.

There is, in addition, an educational component:

Lastly, they even conjured up a clever marketing ploy: To put paper pigeons in Leicaster Square that act as discount coupons:

For more information, see the HSBC Cultural Exchange website.

Question: Are there similar corporate program(me)s in the US?

cross-cultural design: Chinese and Australian collaboration

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on March 30, 2008
in Art, Design, Education, Translation and Virtual China
. 2 Comments

collabor8.png

This looks like a very cool undertaking. Collabor8 (C8) is an 8 week project that will run from the 28th of April to the 20th of June, bringing together Chinese and Australian designers in a series of online courses and discussions. It’s being put on by the Omnium Research group at the College of Fine Arts. It’s completely free for participants, who should be studying graphic arts in China or Australia. From the website:

Design students from Australia and China will join forces for eight weeks, with project convenors, teachers and special guests worldwide, to work collaboratively within a fully online learning environment.

The aims of C8 include:
• providing design students in Australia and China with the opportunity to work collaboratively on a graphic design problem thereby emulating new trends toward global team-based networks within industry.
• stimulating new ways for designers to work collaboratively across cultural boundaries.
• the development of environmentally friendly and sustainable graphic design for ceramics, textiles, product and environment design.

Safe virtual worlds for Chinese children?

Published
by
Jason Li
on December 26, 2007
in Education, Games, Internet governance and Virtual China
. 1 Comment

I’m going to tell this story backwards from the way I read it on billsdue, because I have a different take on it.

Part 1: BaoBao BengBeng (宝宝蹦蹦)

BaoBao BengBeng is a safe, candy-coated virtual world for kids. See the video above — there are rooms, cutesy avatars, items/inventories and casual games built in. It looks like it’s targeted towards elementary schoolers.

(Listen to Danwei’s interview with their CEO here. Visit their website here.)

Part 2: 17-year-old boy burns classmate in retaliation because he’s a WoW Fire Mage

Wowfiremage

The boy responsible gave his classmate a third-degree burn on 38% of his body and is being sent to jail for 8 years. Talking reporters after the trial, he said:

我喜欢模仿游戏人物，特酷，有种“一统天下”的感觉。到后来，虚拟和现实界限已模糊，分不开了。(I love the characters in virtual worlds, it’s cool, and there’s a feeling of "being on top of the world." Afterwards, the boundaries between real and virtual worlds blurred in my mind.)

(See original 新京报 article here.)

Analysis

While some have suggested that BaoBao BengBeng (above) is a safe alternative to violent worlds like WoW, they’re actually two worlds for two audiences. BaoBao BengBeng is for elementary schoolers and WoW is for teenagers. You’d be hard pressed to find teenage boys roaming on BaoBao BengBeng for fun (unless there’s a meeting girls component…).

To take a step back: I really think virtual worlds are not the solution for virtual worlds. In this case, there’s blame attributed to the behaviors promoted by the virtual world, and these behaviors have been catalyzed by an intense attachment to the virtual world. But if the boy had other things to do, other things to play, other places to hang out — perhaps he wouldn’t be roaming the halls at school as a fire mage with a can of gasoline in his "inventory."

Via Game|Life & billsdue.

The door-to-door salesmen of tomorrow

Published
by
Jason Li
on December 11, 2007
in Commerce and Education
. 0 Comments

Alibabasalesmen

Great factoid found from a (somewhat old) SF Chronicle article about Alibaba (the China-based company best known for their web service that connects
manufacturers from China with customers around the world) Specifically, how they
get manufacturers in middle-of-nowhere China aboard and online:

"Beneath its high-tech sheen, the success of Alibaba.com relies on
the old-fashioned shoe leather method of door-to-door salesmen. The
company employs an army of foot soldiers stationed throughout China and
other parts of the globe who call on local businesses and teach their
owners how to upload product photos, manage customer inquiries and
maintain their online presence.

Because labor in China is cheap, Alibaba.com can afford to deploy a
field sales staff of about 1,900 people to recruit new factories to
join the Internet revolution."

Businessweek feature on Asian D-School features Hong Kong

Published
by
Jason Li
on October 22, 2007
in Design and Education
. 0 Comments

Bweekasiad

Businessweek ran an article recently called Rise of the Asian D-School. (Here "D-school" is short for design school, not to be confused with Standord’s "d.school" which is Stanford’s catchy name for its Institute for Design.)

Summary: Asian design schools are ramping up to recruit and retain talent, and multinationals are arming themselves with these grads to conquer the Asian market.

Details that caught my eye: I was happy to see that my hometown’s Hong Kong Polytechnic University named, and that the school had made Businessweek’s top "D-Schools" list two years running. They also mentioned that "Beijing’s Tsinghua University recently hosted a sustainable design workshop with Milan Polytechnic University."

Are these signs that design in Asia is on the rise? Or are they false alarms? To answer that question, answer this one: How long are you willing to wait?

Businessweek: Rise of the Asian D-School.

alt view on Chinese internet addiction

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on August 29, 2007
in Education and Virtual China
. 1 Comment

From CDT, this repost of a useful article from China Youth Daily, in English on china.org.cn.  Article is titled, "My Kid is an Internet Addict", and it challenges the popular Chinese view that juvenile internet addiction is rampant in China, and that internet addiction is a particularly adolescent experience.   It also calls for more room for teenage voices to describe their own virtual experiences.  It would be a great study to spend time with Chinese teenagers and get their views on the subject.  Excerpts:

"…reports are escalating prejudice against Internet use, which is in turn
driving anxious parents to cut their kids off from the Internet. These
biased reports are depicting juveniles as Internet victims, even
stigmatizing them as addicts."

"…adults and experts have monopolized the description of juvenile
Internet usage. They form a consistent pattern of assessment, but the
adolescent participation in their assessment falls short. The
monopolized description lacks introspection and turns a deaf ear to the
teenage voices."

"Many juveniles become addicted to the Internet to escape from the
pressures of real life. Yet when adults criticize this addiction,
experts often ignore the reason why they too become addicted."

"Teenagers get acquainted online. They form groups out of the control
of adults. This process has widened the gap between adults and
teenagers.

Meantime, cyberspace provides an equal, fair place for everyone to
communicate. Appearance, social statue and real wealth are not
important. Real life interactions could certainly drive teenagers to
this less pressured cyberspace."

Graphic journals during historic war

Published
by
Jason Li
on August 13, 2007
in Art, Education and History
. 0 Comments

Image excerpts spliced from scans of 王曲, the official journal of Hu’s #7 military school outside Xian. These particular panels are about military training during the War of Resistance Against Japan.

I’ve translated it as best as I could given the image quality.

Wangqu1_2

Wangqu2_3

Taken from Frog in the Well, the China History Group Blog — where you can read their full analysis of the comic.

So what’s Baidu been up to?

Published
by
Jason Li
on August 10, 2007
in Education, Portals and Search
. 5 Comments

This caught my eye when I was writing that Google post the other day, and I couldn’t resist:

Baidukids

Baidu 少儿, or Baidu Kids, is beautifully done and reflects Baidu’s understanding of the Chinese market. When I was doing fieldwork in Beijing last summer, one of the teachers we interviewed said that some Grade 1 homework assignments involved running internet searches and bringing some results to class. And there is nothing better than a safe search engine for that end. (The only problem would be convincing kids to goto the Kids site.)

The first row of links (the golden paw buttons above) are: Study English, Play Games, Science Knowledge, Child Songs, Cartoons, Parents’ Links. The first link on the top left being "Study English" again reflects an understanding, this time of the parents’ wishes.

I may be reading too much into this though, since it’s only a beta section, and their "understanding" might have come out of luck rather than strategic planning.

Go see the site for yourself.

P.S. Baidu’s also been up to other things, mainly in the converging mobile and web realms. See China Web 2.0 Review’s post about their new call-in search service (powered by real human operators).