From The American University’s (my undergrad university) ListServ:

Urban Teacher Center is an innovative teacher preparation program that supports dedicated individuals to become outstanding teachers. Our applicants make a four-year commitment, including a one-year residency followed by a three-year teaching commitment. Our residency year is based on the medical model:  residents complete a structured clinical experience in an urban elementary or K-8 school. Residents also engage in a rigorous Master’s of Education program. We are looking for candidates who do NOT have any background in education.

We are reaching out to campus and advisor leaders who may be able to share our work with colleagues and students, and who can help us grow an applicant pool for our year one cohort. We are looking for individuals who have completed their undergraduate degree by June, 2010; who have a minimum 2.75 GPA, and who have demonstrated leadership potential. Applicants should have a high degree of interest in public service, and in dedicating themselves to improving conditions for urban youth.

UTC is unique for several reasons. First, our residents work together in teams of 4-6, and are placed as teacher teams as well – a direct response to the isolation we see so many of our best teachers facing. Second, our residents receive superb preparation in conditions that mirror the conditions they’ll face as teachers. Third, our teachers are expected to improve student performance. UTC is the first program in the nation that will link a teacher’s ability to improve student learning with program completion.

To learn more, please go to our website:  www.urbanteachercenter.org. attached is a one-page flier for distribution. Feel free to also reach out to us directly with any questions at this address. Our final deadline is April 16. Thank you for helping us identify strong candidates who want to make a real difference for children who need and deserve the best teachers in the nation.

Hexayurt

This looks very interesting. I wonder if it will make it to Haiti…

From their website:

The Hexayurt is a new kind of sheltering solution. To make the simplest hexayurt, make a wall by putting six sheets of plywood on their sides in a hexagon. Cut six more sheets in half diagonally, and screw them together into a shallow cone. Lift with a large group on to the wall, and fasten with more screws. This shelter will last for several years and costs less than $100. It may be ideal for a variety of disaster relief situations.

Where's the GPS?

I got these off of Do Lectures >> Matt Jones Designer. Creative Director. Web guru. Blogger. And was directed there by Tim Ferrirss of 4HWW. Very interesting  – the use of maps to tell stories. Here are a couple links:

1. FixMyStreet – Report, view, or discuss local problems like graffiti, fly tipping, broken paving slabs, or street lighting.

2. Cabspotting – Cabspotting traces San Francisco’s taxi cabs as they travel throughout the Bay Area. … Brought to you by The Exploratorium, Yellow Cab, and Stamen Design.

3. Bio Mapping – Christian Nold – Bio Mapping by Christian Nold is a research project which explores new ways that we as individuals can make use of the information we can gather about our …

4. OpenStreetMap – Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 license by the OpenStreetMap project and its contributors. …

Dakar, Senegal

This looks very interesting and something I’m going to learn more about. I received this via email from Chimurenga:

AFRICAN CITIES READER

[A creation of the African Centre for Cities & Chimurenga Magazine]

“All African cities are the product of multiple trajectories and origins, which implies that that the living, breathing, pulsating fact of African cities adds up to a form of ‘pan-Africanism’ that is more interesting than the tired tropes of pan-African Nationalism that remains the stock and trade of many official discourses about transnational and trans-local practices on the continent. We believe that ‘pan-Africanism as a practice’ despite the repeated deaths of pan-Africanism as a nationalist discourse opens up multiple explorations into the spatial specificity of cities crafted in the border zones between informal/formal, licit/illicit, chaotic/ordered, etc.”

The African Cities Reader seeks submissions for its launch issue (2008/9) organised around the theme: “Pan-African Practices”.

The Reader is open to writing and art in multiple genres (literature, philosophy, faction, reportage, ethnographic narrative, etc) and forms of representation (text, image, sound and possibly performance) by practitioners, academics, activists and artists from diverse fields across Africa in all of her expansiveness.

All published work will be remunerated @ $500.

Deadline Friday 31st October 2008.

Full details here.

For further information contact:

Greer Valley
africancitiesreader@chimurenga.co.za
T) +27(21)4224168
C) +27(0) 722395945
www.chimurenga.co.za

Here’s what the link has to offer if for some reason you’re having issues with it:

AFRICAN CITIES READER

[A creation of the African Centre for Cities & Chimurenga Magazine]

In many senses African cities are amongst the most generative and vibrant places on the planet. Yet, we know next to nothing about what goes on in the places. Not that there is any shortage of caricature, hyperbole or opinion about what makes African cities such quintessential spaces of dystopia and atrophy. We believe that a range of interventions that seek to engage the shape-shifting essence of African cities are long overdue and present this modest initiative as one contribution to a larger movement of imagination to redefine the practical workings of the African city.

For us it is self-evident that one has to take the youthful demographic, informality and a non-conventional insertion in global circuits by African urbanites as a starting point for a sustained engagement and retelling of the city in contemporary Africa. The cultural, livelihood, religious, stylistic, commercial, familial, knowledge producing and navigational capacities of African urbanites are typically overlooked, unappreciated and undervalued. We want to bring their stories and practices to the fore in the African Cities Reader. In other words, the African Cities Reader seeks to become a forum where Africans will tell their own stories, draw their own maps and represent their own spatial topographies as it continuous to evolve and adapt at the interstice of difference, complexity, opportunism, and irony.

In terms of focus, tone and sensibility, the Reader will be vibrant, unapologetic, free, accessible and open, provocative, fresh, not take itself too seriously, but also be rigorous and premised on the assumption that it will grow and evolve over time.

The launch issue (2008/9) will be organised around the theme: “Pan-African Practices”. The back story to this theme is the recognition that all African cities are the product of multiple trajectories and origins, which implies that that the living, breathing, pulsating fact of African cities adds up to a form of ‘pan-Africanism’ that is more interesting than the tired tropes of pan-African Nationalism that remains the stock and trade of many official discourses about transnational and trans-local practices on the continent. We believe that ‘pan-Africanism as a practice’ despite the repeated deaths of pan-Africanism as a nationalist discourse opens up multiple explorations into the spatial specificity of cities crafted in the border zones between informal/formal, licit/illicit, chaotic/ordered, etc. Furthermore, in terms of over-arching knowledge projects, we perceive a productive space between: on the one hand, the imperative to respond to and engage with the dismissal of blackness/blackhood by a stream of postcolonial philosophy – a move we suspect may be too soon and too definitive – and, on the other, the insistence of dominant discourses and institutions that some essentialist African exceptionalism and solidarity is possible. However, the idea is not to dwell here but simply to use the idea of materially and symbolically grounded practices to explore the public and popular cultural dimensions of pan-African cityness. Throughout, the critical focus will invariably fall on practices, phenomenologies and spatialities and their intersections.

Naturally, flowing from this exploratory vantage point, the African Cities Reader will be open to multiple genres (literature, philosophy, faction, reportage, ethnographic narrative, etc), forms of representation (text, image, sound and possibly performance), and points of view. The African Cities Reader will seek to embody and reflect the rich pluralism, cosmopolitanism and diversity of emergent urbanisms across Africa. Thus, the Reader invites and undertake to commission writing and art by practitioners, academics, activists and artists from diverse fields across Africa in all of her expansiveness.

Submissions will be accepted until Friday 31st October 2008, and should be submitted electronically in Word format or low resolution JPGs to the email address below. Submissions may vary in subject matter and will be assessed on their relevance to publication’s theme. All work should accompany a short abstract, biography and relevant contact details.

For further information contact:

Greer Valley
africancitiesreader@chimurenga.co.za
T) +27(21)4224168
C) +27(0) 722395945
www.chimurenga.co.za

Stewart Brand of The Long Now Foundation has some highly interesting videos from a BBC series he did a few years back. Below is his excerpt and 6 great videos follow:

This six-part, three-hour, BBC TV series aired in 1997. I presented and co-wrote the series; it was directed by James Muncie, with music by Brian Eno. The series was based on my 1994 book, HOW BUILDINGS LEARN: What Happens After They’re Built. The book is still selling well and is used as a text in some college courses. Most of the 27 reviews on Amazon treat it as a book about system and software design, which tells me that architects are not as alert as computer people. But I knew that; that’s part of why I wrote the book. Anybody is welcome to use anything from this series in any way they like. Please don’t bug me with requests for permission. Hack away. Do credit the BBC, who put considerable time and talent into the project. Historic note: this was one of the first television productions made entirely in digital— shot digital, edited digital. The project wound up with not enough money, so digital was the workaround. The camera was so small that we seldom had to ask permission to shoot; everybody thought we were tourists. No film or sound crew. Everything technical on site was done by editors, writers, directors. That’s why the sound is a little sketchy, but there’s also some direct perception in the filming that is unusual.

1. How Buildings Learn – Stewart Brand – 1 of 6 – “Flow” – 30 min

2. How Buildings Learn – Stewart Brand – 2 of 6 – “The Low Road”

3. How Buildings Learn – Stewart Brand – 3 of 6 – “Built for Change”

4. How Buildings Learn – Stewart Brand – 4 of 6 – “Unreal Estate”

5. How Buildings Learn – Stewart Brand – 5 of 6 – “The Romance of Maintenance”

6. How Buildings Learn – Stewart Brand – 6 of 6 – “Shearing Layers”

A quick video of some goings on in the Ikeja section of Lagos Nigeria.