Hi everyone - along with my colleague Ewan McIntosh we are supporting the UN agency for ICT's ITU conference with a project that involves students all over the world.
The Metaconference 2011 will, for the first time, open the doors to young people in schools across the world, inviting them to join the conversations at ITU Telecom World 2011 (World 2011) [http://world2011.itu.int] from 25-27 October in Geneva, Switzerland.
We are setting out challenges that you and your class could get involved in covering 7 key areas or issues that challenge millions of lives every day.
We are inviting 10,000 global school children (8-18) to design the innovations that could make a real difference to their world, and submit their videos, blog posts, photographs and sketches, through you, to http://world2011.us/get-involved/
We want them to tell us how technology could be harnessed to:
- alleviate poverty and hunger
- improve education for all
- address gender inequality
- make sure everyone has access to health care
- protect our environment
- make disabled people’s lives easier
- close the gap between the developed and developing world
Ideas and prototypes will be shown to delegates at the World 2011 event in Geneva, Switzerland on October 25-27. In addition, we'll be encouraging all students to send in their ideas live during the event, with the event's expert panels answering your students questions and points.
We've done our best to provide some brief online lesson starters and project ideas to help you make the most of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for your students [http://world2011.us/category/inspiration/]. There's also a collaborative space to share your own teaching and learning approaches, as well as upload video, audio, photographic or written content from your students' work.
This is YOUR chance to be part of a world-first experiment, to have YOUR voice heard on a global platform, to have YOUR ideas seen by the very people who make the decisions that affect our everyday lives.
How can technology make our world happier, safer and smarter? How can people from different countries work together to make our world more sustainable?
Once you’ve registered [http://world2011.us/get-involved/], you can share your ideas and prototypes with each other and the 5000+ students already signed up. Your ideas will also form a significant part of World 2011's Manifesto for Change; a blueprint for using technology to make a real difference. This challenge comes to you from the International Telecommunication Union http://www.itu.int
We hope that you will be encouraged to sign up your classes: http://world2011.us/get-involved/
This is a great opportunity as all too often these large conference are talking shops with no real substance and no opportunity for student voice - well here is that opportunity!
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