Monday Blurb: Today is July 5, 2010

I was at a loss for a title today, so we’re going with the obvious. I hope you had a wonderful weekend and had a quiet Monday and aren’t actually reading this until Tuesday!

There is something ironic about staying indoors (its climbing over 100 here) and holding a blazing hot computer on your lap.  Better to just focus on the content, so here goes …

The incredible Carol Rasco has posted the month’s end literacy and reading roundup for June. As always, she has packed it chock full of great stuff. She has some great links to science-related content (with a literacy bent) and tells you about a recent study on elementary science that surprised her. She floored me with news that the Department of Defense has never had a summer reading program … until this year. I am STILL stunned.

Speaking of news … did you know that there are 8.5 million children in Tanzania with limited access to formal education? Sesame Workshop, which produces Kilimani Sesame, the Tanzanian version of Sesame Street, has commissioned a study to see if media intervention can help. Researchers from the Bloomberg School of Public Health (Johns Hopkins University) in full collaboration with a Dar es Salaam-based research team, are assessing the impact (or not) of a six-week intervention delivering Kilimani Sesame content to 223 children in the rural district of Kisarawe and the city of Dar es Salaam. Do I dare say it? Stay tuned. (via AfricaContent.com)

I found this 40-minute video from Agenda, an Ontario, Canada-based program. The program explores the literacy revolution, which looks at reading and learning in the 21st century. There are four guests: Alice Robeson, professor of English at Arizona State University; Nicole Pinker, Director of Innovation, University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute; Mark Federman, researcher at Boise, the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education; Andrea Lunsford from Stanford University.  The discussions about how books have changed – visually, not just in format; how literacy goes beyond text consumption; and whether schools aren’t preparing kids or whether colleges haven’t kept up.