INSIDE OUT PROJECT

JR exhibits freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people who are not typical museum visitors. In 2006, he created Portrait of a Generation, portraits of suburban "thugs" that he posted, in huge formats, in the bourgeois districts of Paris. This illegal project became "official" when the Paris City Hall wrapped its building with JR’s photos. In 2007, with Marco, he made Face 2 Face, the biggest illegal exhibition ever. JR posted huge portraits of Israelis and Palestinians face to face in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities. 

In 2008, he embarked on a long international trip for Women Are Heroes, in which he underlines the dignity of women who are often the targets of conflicts, and created The Wrinkles of the City. In 2010, his film Women Are Heroes was presented at Cannes. 

In 2011 he received the TED Prize, after which he created Inside Out, an international participatory art project that allows people worldwide to get their picture taken and paste it to support an idea and share their experience - as of December 2012, over 120,000 people from more than 108 countries have participated.

The INSIDE OUT project has traveled from Ecuador to Nepal, from Mexico to Palestine, inspiring group actions on varied themes such as hope, diversity, gender-based violence, climate change.

​I participated in one of JR's projects a few years ago with a picture of my daughter, that ended up on a house in a favela outside Rio :)

INSIDE OUT: The People's Art Project TRAILER from SOCIAL ANIMALS on Vimeo.

School in the Cloud

Our education system was constructed hundreds of years ago, and educators made some assumptions based on the technology that was available. 

Some years ago did Dr. Sugata Mitra an odd experiment. He placed a PC inside a wall behind a plastic shield in a New Dehli slum. Connected to the internet with a mouse, Mitra simply powered it up and left it behind. “I left it to the wolves, knowing that it would be smashed, opened up and and sold,” Mitra says. “I left it, just to see what would happen.”

When Mitra came back after 2 months he found the kids playing games and browsing the Internet. One kid sauntered up to Mitra and said, “We could use a better mouse and a faster processor.” And there was a small complaint. “You’ve given us a machine that only works in English, so we had to teach ourselves English.”

What Mitra envisions are “schools in the cloud,” classes of 24 students in actual brick-and-mortar spaces managed in person by his volunteer grannies. The grannies ask the questions, offer the encouragement, everything else happens remotely, the lights, heating, and locks are all manipulated via the cloud.

But still access to technology is a huge limitation, we don't need to get an iPad for every child. It could be a $200 refurbished PC for every 6 kids.

Apple announced last Thursday that more than 1 billion items have been downloaded from Apple's online educational catalog, iTunes U. Approximately 1 200 universities; including Yale, MIT and Oxford host more than 2 500 public courses between them.

Or like Salman Khan who is the founder of Khan Academy, a not-for-profit that hosts more than 3 800 free educational videos online.

Today I follow a workshop from Stanford University on my iPad and a course from MIT Media Lab via videoconferencing…

Dr. Sugata Mitra is the winner of this year’s $1 million TED Prize.