We have seen in recent years a growing prevalence of online contests. Here are three recent contest efforts that have impressed us.

Ban Ki Moon added his voice to those of other world leaders in condemning the conviction of Aung San Suu Kyi. 
“The Secretary-General is deeply disappointed by the verdict in respect of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi,” his spokesperson said in a statement. “The Secretary-General strongly deplores this decision.”

Absolutely, a critical point. On a related (and perhaps somewhat tangential) note: I do wonder about the cognitive effect of early stage attention to keyboarding, at the expense of writing by hand. Learning to write by hand is difficult. Might this difficulty may be important in some way to the develop of certain skills associated with literacy? (I am admittedly way out of my area of competence here, and I suspect it shows!) When learning Chinese (for example), the manual repetition required to learn each character is considered fundamental to the understanding of the meaning of each character and to learning the language.

It would be nice to think of a unified and high-quality content broadcasting rather than interactive for the developing countries. Though cell phone is available and provides connectivity there are many pitfalls using cellphone in classroom (school) environment. Economically also it is not viable to teach individual student with centralized content and individual devices (whether cell or laptop)... the connectivity charges will make it nonviable. Think of uplifting the classroom rather than individual kid. Single device for a classroom of 20-40 students is more realizable than thinking of individuals.

We started our second week of computer camp today. We had planned to spend some time with the kids exploring Maze (surprisingly enough, an activity where you go through a maze), and then finally have a small Maze tournament with the children racing each other to see who could complete the maze the fastest. However, the power at the school went out about 10 minutes after all the kids got settled.

Unconnected computers limit the places children can go. Unconnect them and you don't have to worry about porn or political speech. Simplistic, but often the choice.

Internet access in the developing world is truly a challenge given the limited availability, aside from bandwidth and transmission speed. In some of the remotest island provinces in the Philippines, TV broadcast either via satellite or cable coupled with mobile communications such as SMS and MMS as a response mechanism to make learning programs interactive are other options that ICT experts can assess impact of such convergence which addresses problems in reach and content delivery.

One more comment, Mike. You mentioned keyboards. Let's keep in mind the critical importance of learning to write well. While not so important in the earliest grades, communicating with others is a critical component of a quality basic education. In today's technology that means sooner than later students need to graduate from paper and pencil to a connected keyboard. Which makes me think that we should be thinking about diffierent kinds of technologies for different stages of learning.

Mike, I am surprised about your comment that "connectivity" is considered a negative by many teachers. It is true that I have seen teachers, at the univeristy level as well as in the lower grades, require their studnets to shut their laptops during their lectures. (They may simply seem to be taking notes.) But un-connected laptops can be nearly as diversionary as connected ones. My general impression is that teachers in the developing world,as well as students, highly value connectivity. Rwanda, for example has promised to bring broadband to every one of its schools by 2011.

Former Bush Administration official John Bellinger has an interesting WaPo op-ed on the prospects of the United States joining the International Criminal Court. In the main, he's probably right: the United States is not likely to join the Court in the immediate future. But the argument with which he chooses to conclude his piece is deeply misleading: