[fb_button] As the Paris talks on climate change receives global media attention, I am reminded by the New York Times this morning of how powerful a news narrative can be once the global frame of reference is melded with the personal accounts of people hit by consequences.In this particular NYT story, three features stand out, one obviously being the theme of climate change itself. The second theme is the way
Read MoreArticles by: Oddgeir Tveiten
Friendliness works — take 2
Last year living close by, I found this place because they play classical music. It’s the usual set-up in Berkeley, as in a lot of other places across this country: A bunch of people sitting at tables with one computer each, hacking away, and drinking coffee or tea while enjoying the benefits of free internet. Traffic on the outside. Traffic on the inside. It’s not your internet cafe of the 1990’s. Everyone
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Friendliness works
About a week into my current trip to Palo Alto and Berkeley, I find myself sitting in a place I know all too well: Peet’s Coffee House on University Avenue in Palo Alto — the heart of Silicon Valley. The first one for me, way back in 2008 when I first came here. And countless visits since moving home, moving back, and then moving home again, in the summer of
Read MoreWe are the world, right?
Notes from the classroom: The importance of being there A lecture with my international students sums up this week, for me. I teach a course in global political communication. I have about eight different nationalities in my class. And this week we were to talk about how the international media frame and cultivate the theme of “global survival issues”; like poverty, climate change, ethnic class division and locked-in despair. Does it
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Learning and global development
Exited to plan for the upcoming BETT conference in Mexico City, where I will be doing two plenary talks to an audience unfamiliar to me: Spanish-speaking teachers and education managers. The notes are here, and by way of a few small points: [dg ids=”898,899″] How can one link the discussion of learning, technology and globalisation to the UN Global Development Goals? How should we think about that? From the rosy
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Sailing home; Flying Frenchmen on the beach
Coming to California, and then just never leaving…. The story repeats itself all the time: You live here in the Bay Area and you meet nice people, talkative people. As today, when I walked with my family down by the Alameda beaches in the Bay, looking at the occasional swimmer, surfer and bird celebrating the last days of April. This is a wonderful place to do so. But I approach
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