http://www.theindependentproject.org

The Independent Project is an alternative student driven school-within-a-school that was started at Monument Mountain Regional High School by a student.
The idea for The Independent Project came about from that student’s own experience of high school, and his observations of the experiences of his peers. The two main things he felt were missing from many high school classrooms were engagement and mastery. He also felt that even students who were engaged were often learning material that was not very intellectually valuable. They were learning lots of information, but very little about how to obtain information on their own, or even create new information. His intent was to design a school in which students would be fully engaged in and passionate about what they were learning, would have the experience of truly mastering something, or developing expertise in something, and would be learning how to learn. He felt that the most important ingredient to a school like that would be that it was student-driven. Research by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi on engagement suggested that if students have more control over what they are learning, they will be more engaged, excited, and committed to their studies. He also felt that it was important for the school to be focused on methods rather than specific topics, having students work like actual scientists, mathematicians, or writers.
Eight students were accepted into the pilot program of the school, which ran for one semester and is now complete. The school, dubbed The Independent Project, is now in the stage of redesign and replication. 

Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life By Peter Gray

Our children spend their days being passively instructed, and made to sit still and take tests -- often against their will. We call this imprisonment schooling, yet wonder why kids become bored and misbehave. Even outside of school children today seldom play and explore without adult supervision, and are afforded few opportunities to control their own lives. The result: anxious, unfocused children who see schooling—and life—as a series of hoops to struggle through.

In Free to Learn, developmental psychologist Peter Gray argues that our children, if free to pursue their own interests through play, will not only learn all they need to know, but will do so with energy and passion. Children come into this world burning to learn, equipped with the curiosity, playfulness, and sociability to direct their own education. Yet we have squelched such instincts in a school model originally developed to indoctrinate, not to promote intellectual growth.

http://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-Reliant/dp/0465025994

TED Blog: Photoblog: Step into Liquid Galaxy

TED Blog: Photoblog: Step into Liquid Galaxy

The 7'10" wide building

Four wooden floors between two existing walls, hanging in a steel skeleton, organize this house: downstairs for work, dining on 1st, relaxing on 2nd, sleeping on 3rd, and on the roof, go and enjoy the view.

The border to the outside is only glass. Transparency not only a necessity, but also a trump card.


Link

dan proops - artist's website

His painting join a traditional context of painting and the context of a computer desktop or application. His paintings are done using traditional techniques and subjects, but then there is something added... scroll bars around the frame, pixelated sections, or tool palettes. Sometimes the suject is contemporary, like a picture from a men's magazine, or a trooper in Iraq.

Link

Photo Gallery of Jacob Holdt

www.american-pictures.com

Jacob Holdt has taken 15,000 pictures with his pocket size $30 Canon Dial camera. This website has photo galleries from his different projects. The photo shown here is from his travels in Guatelmala.

[Holdt] was 24 years old when he decided in 1971, like many of his Danish compatriots, to travel across the American continent. He landed in Canada with the aim of rapidly crossing through the United States to get to the true destination of his travels: South America. But from the moment he crossed the Canadian border, Jacob Holdt was struck by an America characterised by poverty and the exclusion of the socially disadvantaged. In his outrage, he described the misery he was witnessing in letters to his parents who, for their part, remained incredulous. His father nevertheless sent him a small camera so that he could back up his accounts with tangible proof. And this is how the long voyage of the young Dane through the United States started, not to be completed until five years and several thousand snapshots later, with a deeply moving work: 'American Pictures 1970-1975', published as a book in 1978.

Jacob Holdt, who was nominated for this year's DeutscheBorse Photography Prize, has remained a key figure in Danish activist circles, despite having in the meantime more or less given up photography. His images of the America of the destitute of the seventies had great repercussions and to a large extent inspired the movies Dogville and Manderlay by Lars van Trier."

Housing competition

This is a link to a housing competition from a design blog in England.
www.creativereview.co.uk