Punters pant for MoMA's De Kooning retro

NEED an excuse to visit New York this year? Look no further than the eagerly-awaited Willem De Kooning (1904-97) retrospective at MoMA opening in this September. Incredibly, this is the first major museum exhibition to encompass the full scope of De Kooning’s sixty year career, bringing together more than 200 works from public and private collections, starting with early academic works made in his native Holland in the early 1920s, to his final abstract paintings of the late 1980s painted in his East Hamptons studio.

Essay: One Laptop per Pacific Child

An innovative global project to bring low-cost, low-powered laptops to children in developing countries is tackling the growing digital divide, writes Michael Hutak.

"As the world grows smaller, our common humanity will reveal itself."
Barack Obama, Inauguration Speech, 2009

If they are lucky enough to attend school, today’s six year olds will graduate in twelve years, in 2023. Yet, the pace of technological change is so astounding, how can we know what 2023 will even look like? Consider for a second life twelve years ago. In 1998, internet access in global terms was slow, narrow and novel. Today it is fast, broad and approaching potential ubiquity. In education, how do we prepare children for a world we cannot predict? What should education be when information is just a few clicks away?
Here are some things we do know about the school leavers of 2023:

One Laptop per Pacific Child

Closing the ICT Gap in Australia's Aid Program

Closing the ICT Gap in Australia's Aid Program: Bridging the Digital Divide in Aid Delivery

Speaking engagement, Australian Institute of International Affairs, Glover Cottages, Sydney, 29 March 2011

From the perspectives of humanitarian aid, human development and human rights, contributing to global efforts to bridge the digital divide should be an urgent and central priority of Australia’s aid program. 

There is a gap in equitable access to the digital domain between rich and poor countries, and between the rich and the poor within all countries. The “digital divide” has several dimensions: those who use computers and the Internet and those who do not; those with access to broadband networks and those without; and those groups within society such as the poor, uneducated or disabled who are denied access to 21st century skills such as “information literacy”.

Progress towards bridging these gaps is now widely accepted as a key indicator of human development within and among all countries. With bipartisan commitments to double Australia’s foreign aid program by 2015, Australia needs urgently to scale up its capacity and investment in Information & Computer Technology (ICT) for development.

Bridging the Digital Divide in Australia’s Aid Program delivery

Submission to Australian Government Independent Review of Aid Effectiveness

By Michael Hutak, Regional Director, Oceania, One Laptop per Child Foundation

From the perspectives of humanitarian aid, human development and human rights, contributing to global efforts to bridge the digital divide needs to become an urgent and central priority of Australia’s aid program.

Information and computer technology (ICT) is facilitating an era of unprecedented social, political and economic change across the globe, profoundly impacting the international system and both developed and developing countries. Innovations in ICT such as the internet, the personal computer and the mobile phone are breaking barriers and breaching borders, sparking an explosion in information and communications, changing forever the way we interact as individuals, communities, and organisations.