13 April 2011

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.

12 April 2011

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: