cuba 2.0, publicación digital del PDC-Cuba

A portion of a text from Oxford's Cairo Genizah Collection that is currently available online. | Photograph by Genizah, Bodleian Libraries, 2012

This week the University of Oxford and the Vatican announced a plan to collaborate in digitizing 1.5 million pages of rare and ancient texts, most dating from the 16th century or earlier. The project is expected to span about 4 years and was made possible by a donation of £2 million (approximately $3.1 million) from the Polonsky Foundation—a charitable organization that supports higher education, medical research, and other general matters in the arts and sciences.

"La escuela es aburrida"

"El mundo entero se está transformando, pero el sistema educativo no ha cambiado desde el siglo XIX". "El modelo del profesor que suelta la lección a sus alumnos y luego los examina bajo un patrón estándar ha caducado". Bajo estas premisas, expertos de medio mundo llevan años pensando en cómo adaptar las aulas al siglo XXI.

Un debate que, hasta hoy, no parecía estar aportando grandes cambios al modo en que aprenden nuestros hijos. El éxito de la Academia Khan –un proyecto que ofrece clases gratis en Internet, que acumula casi 140 millones de visitas y cuyos vídeos ya se utilizan en el programa escolar en varias escuelas de California–, sin embargo, parece haber agitado la discusión en el seno de la comunidad educativa.

El gran eje del debate es cómo hacer atractivos el aprendizaje y la enseñanza. Una misión en la cual las nuevas tecnologías están llamadas a jugar un papel decisivo. Proyectos como la Academia Khan o el del valenciano Juan Medina, cuyos vídeos(www.lasmatematicas.es) cuentan ya con más de 20 millones de visitas, así parecen demostrarlo.

Image: Ecco Press

For one, there are all those "hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races and conductive to dark instincts alien to the German people" ...

Just over two weeks after the death of Vaclav Havel, another Czech literary figure who played a key role in his country's Communist-era dissident movement, Josef Skvorecky, died of cancer Tuesday. He was 87. Once upon a time, Skvorecky had been a vital force behind the intellectual and spiritual current that culminated in 1968's pro-democratic Prague Spring. After the Soviets put an end to it all, Skvorecky and his wife Zdena Salivarova took refuge in Canada, where they founded the dissident publishing house 68 Publishers and lived ever since. As Matt Welch explains:

It was 68 Publishers, founded in 1971, that proved to be a lifeline to both Czechoslovak literature and dissidence, publishing samizdat works from the likes of Havel and Milan Kundera and Bohumil Hrabal that would often be re-smuggled back into the country.

Some people left Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Soviet invasion (just as many escaped Hungary after 1956), and -- quite understandably -- turned their backs on the mangled countries they left behind. Škvorecký was not one of them. He was committed to helping his native land, helping his native language, and perpetuating the free flow of ideas under arduous circumstances.

Balancing the State, Law, and Accountability

Francis Fukuyama shot to fame with a 1989 essay called "The End of History?" which he expanded into a 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. His thesis was a reworking of the "end of ideology" argument propounded in the 1950s by Daniel Bell and others, with an even more emphatic twist. "What we may be witnessing," Fukuyama declared, "is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." The argument seemed hubristic, a product of the era's American triumphalism.

Unpacking humanity’s collective conscience through ‘the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications.’

In 1964, legendary science fiction writer, inventor, and futurist Arthur C. Clarke predicted the future with astounding accuracy, presaging everything from telecommuting to the digital convergence. It turns out he predicted the future in even more granular detail in his 1968 novel-turned-Kubrick-classic 2001 A Space Odyssey, where in Chapter 9 he describes the "newspad" — a strikingly prescient vision for the iPad.