Archive for October, 2006
Universal Design in Asia
Last weekend in Hong Kong, I spotted this sign in a taxi. The taxi number is provided both in braille as well as English as raised characters. Nice to see public transport people paying attention to accessibility.
We were talking about this when my brother mentioned Japanese beer cans having braille markings.
Japanese alcoholic drinks also carry an “alcohol” braille character on top to prevent visually disabled people from accidentally consuming it.
A depression on the milk carton (left) to distinguish it from other drinks.
Universal design is not just for visually disabled people. Here you see a shampoo and a conditioner bottle from Japan. The bottle on the left contains shampoo and it has markings on one of its sides to distinguish it from the conditioner.
The teacher’s job in a connected age
(via Guy Kawasaki’s blog)
Dr, Sugatra Mitra talks about his experiment involving students and how they use the internet
Well, I tried another experiment. I went to a middle-class school and chose some ninth graders, two girls and two boys. I called their physics teacher in and asked him, “What are you going to teach these children next year at this time?” He mentioned viscosity. I asked him to write down five possible exam questions on the subject. I then took the four children and said, “Look here guys. I have a little problem for you.” They read the questions and said they didn’t understand them, it was Greek to them. So I said, “Here’s a terminal. I’ll give you two hours to find the answers.”
Then I did my usual thing: I closed the door and went off somewhere else.
They answered all five questions in two hours. The physics teacher checked the answers, and they were correct. That, of itself, doesn’t mean much. But I said to him, “Talk to the children and find out if they really learned something about this subject.” So he spent half an hour talking to them. He came out and said, “They don’t know everything about this subject or everything I would teach them. But they do know one hell of a lot about it. And they know a couple of things about it I didn’t know.”
That’s not a wow for the children, it’s a wow for the Internet. It shows you what it’s capable of. The slum children don’t have physics teachers. But if I could make them curious enough, then all the content they need is out there. The greatest expert on earth on viscosity probably has his papers up there on the Web somewhere. Creating content is not what’s important. What is important is infrastructure and access … The teacher’s job is very simple. It’s to help the children ask the right questions.
The interview is online at greenstar.org
Need a new PC?
Using Slideshare to share your presentations
An interesting online service to emerge recently is Slideshare. As the name suggest this service enables users to share presentations online. Here is a Powerpoint presentation that I uploaded to Slideshare a couple of days back.
To sign up, go to www.slideshare.net.
Once you are signed in, you can use the “Upload” tab to load your presentation file. Slideshare accepts PowerPoint (.ppt and .pps files) & OpenOffice (.odp files).
What is a pack of post-it doing inside Japanese Chewing Gum Box?
Here are two chewing gums. On the left is from China and the one on the right is from Japan.
Peep inside and you find something in the Japanese box.
I looks like post-its
I was wondering if it was some free gift. I was about to draw funny things on the post-its and stick them all over.
Then my Japanese friend pointed out that the post-its are provided so that we may use it to wrap the used gum before we disposing. The note on the box also mentions that the glue used to hold the individual sheets of paper together is a edible glue. Nihon jin are truly cleanliness and food safety conscious.
Technorati Tags: chewinggum