Andy Carvin
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Andy Carvin is coordinator of the Digital Divide Network, an online community of more than 8,500 activists, policymakers, business leaders and researchers in more than 135 countries working to find solutions to the digital divide.
Andy is the author of the pioneering online education resource EdWeb: Exploring Technology and School Reform, launched in 1994. Named by NetGuide magazine as “One of the Top 50 Places to Go Online,” EdWeb was one of the first websites to advocate the use of the World Wide Web in education. Andy is the founder and moderator of WWWEDU, the Internet's oldest and largest email forum on the role of the Web in education, and DIGITALDIVIDE, the Internet's premiere discussion group for examining digital divide issues. He also served as creator and moderator of SEPT11INFO, one of the most successful online communities created in the hours following terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Andy has been featured in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Harvard Educational Review, Education Week, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Village Voice, Wired, San Jose Mercury News, The Industry Standard and the second edition of The Internet Unleashed, published by Sams/MacMillan.
In December 2001, Andy was named by District Administration magazine as one of America's top 25 edtech advocates. Andy received similar honors from eSchoolNews in 1999 when they named him a member of its Impact 30 list of edtech leaders. He is a former member of the board of the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), which advocates policies advancing the role of information technology in schools. From 1999 to 2001, he served on the Board of Directors for the Asia/Pacific Center for Justice and Peace, a consortium of NGOs that promotes democracy, freedom of speech and freedom of religion across Asia.
Andy holds a bachelor of science in rhetoric and a master of arts in telecommunications policy from Northwestern University, where he received the prestigious Annenberg/Washington graduate fellowship. While living in Illinois, he was co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Chicago-area arts weekly, Art+Performance. Andy has traveled extensively around the world and has written about his adventures in popular online travelogues. In January 1999, Andy premiered From Sideshow to Genocide: Stories of the Cambodian Holocaust, a virtual history of the Khmer Rouge regime and collection of survivor accounts. More recently, Andy has been reporting on his travels through stories, podcasts and video on his popular blog, Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth.
Latest posts by Andy Carvin
20 August 2005
12 August 2005
U.S.A.
In the city of Denver, Colorado, there's an ugly fight breaking out over whether public libraries should provide books and other materials in Spanish. Anti-immigration groups argue that publicly funded libraries should be English-only, while library supporters retort that curtailing Spanish-language content is discriminatory and doesn't reflect the ever-changing population demographics of the United States.
Image from Thailand
Two hilltribe girls in Mae Sai, Thailand, standing along the Thai-Myanmar border, by Andy Carvin.
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Chad
Human Rights Watch's news blog is reporting that six henchman of Chad's former dictator Hissène Habré have been ousted from positions in government.
“The Chadian government’s move follows a report last month by Human Rights Watch naming these six and 35 other leading Habré-era figures, many accused of torture and killings, who still hold key posts in Chad. Those dismissed include the powerful director of the Judicial Police who was deputy director of national security under Habré; a surveillance chief who was the director of Habré’s dreaded political police, the Documentation and Security Directorate (DDS); and a man described by a Chadian truth commission as one of Chad’s ‘most feared torturers.' It is believed that more sackings may be forthcoming.”
Trinidad & Tobago
Taran Rampersad posts an update about this week's bombing in Trinidad. “It seems that a suspect has been held in the explosion on George St. here in Trinidad, but with so many copycats in Trinidad and Tobago, it's difficult to say that this is also a suspect for the initial bombing,” he writes.
Launch of the Mobcasting Developers Forum
Because of the positive feedback I've received around the creation of a low-cost, open source strategy for recording and receiving podcasts over mobile phones, I've set up a new email list and Web community for people interested in making this happen. There are already free tools like audioblogger and audlink that will let you post podcasts from your phone, but both require a long-distance phone call to the US, and neither let you listen to podcasts from your phone. I want to develop a tool that can be installed anywhere in the world, so all of this can be done on a local phone call. To learn more about mobcasting, please visit this blog entry I wrote last January, entitled When Mobile Podcasting Leads to Mobcasting to see where this all got started. The email list will be focused solely on this project; people who join the list should be interested in mobile phone podcasting and be willing to help us make this project happen. To join the list, please send an email to mobcasting-subscribe [[at]] yahoogroups . com, with the spaces and brackets removed. Or, you can visit the Mobcasting list homepage. Meanwhile, I've also created a DDN community that we can use as a workspace. The workspace has bulletin boards, document sharing and blog posting. Group members are welcome to post web resources, blog entries or files to this public page. We can also add news, events and feature stories to the site if they become useful at some point. Looking forward to making this happen! -andy
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Next time we will be there again :)