walidghaleb

Colombia, not Columbia

Dubai is a city built on the backs of maltreated migrant workers. There is little glamour for these mainly South East Asian workers who earn $1 a day. The difference in lifestyles between the labor camps these workers live in (people literally living out of massive shipping containers) and the fast cars, over-sized houses that expats own couldn’t be any greater. The companies that bring the migrant workers over have been accused of purposely forcing them to stay in the UAE by misplacing their passports and delaying salary payments. The UAE has also had its human rights record heavily criticized by the UN and human rights organizations. So despite lavish expat lifestyles and impressive urban growth, there are plenty of non-economic reasons why Dubai is an example of how not to build a city.

Agreed. This might be premature for sites like Twitter. Integrating lessons with Wikipedia, blogs etc... could be quite useful, however. Chances are that children already use all these tools to complete their homework assignments, so "teaching them" technology probably shows how out of touch education authorities are with the average primary school child. Children certainly don't need to be taught how to use a spell checker!

I don’t think anyone reasonable can argue the merits of integrating computers and technology into school curriculums, however this plan by the schools inspection authority in England has the potential for parents to incorrectly point the finger at technology as the main reason why kids won’t be taught traditional subjects:

“One curriculum theme - "human, social and environmental understanding" - combines history, geography and religious education. Schools can decide which two periods of British history children study, allowing them to drop traditional features such as the Victorians and the Second World War.”

The proposal to lump subjects into themes, giving schools leeway to choose what subjects or topics within those subjects to drop, has nothing to do with the integration of technology into the curriculum. The backlash will undoubtedly link the two and say that children in schools are not learning WWII history in favour of learning how to blog or use Twitter.