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Finland Eyes Programming Classes for Elementary School Students

http://mashable.com/2013/11/16/finland-tech-education-schools/?utm_cid=mash-prod-email-topstories&utm_emailalert=daily&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily

Finland Eyes Programming Classes for Elementary School Students

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Beyond Mindcraft: Games That Inspire Building and Exploration

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/11/beyond-minecraft-games-that-inspire-building-and-exploration/

1. Garry’s Mod 

garryscreenshotGarry’s Mod (GMod) is a sandbox game like Minecraft but instead of building and exploring, students use a fun physics engine that simulates things like gravity and mass. They also use a virtual toy box of assets from Valve Software’s popular games. The tool is a step up in complexity from the elegant simplicity of Minecraft, but with Garry’s Mod,students are exposed to physics concepts while having madcap fun.

2. Kerbal Space Program

kerbal_screenshotKerbal Space Program has a robust physics engine too, but it’s more focused than Garry’s Mod. Players purchase rocket parts, put them together, and then see if they can get a ship into orbit, to one of two moons, or even to another planet. These aren’t easy tasks, so play is focused on trial and error testing, and, like Minecraft, seeking help from the community is part of a successful strategy.

3. Sound Shapes 

soundshapes_screenshotSound Shapes is a visually stunning platform puzzle game set to a rich musical soundscape. Even better: students can create and share their own levels – like interactive sheet music — using sounds and objects unlocked by playing the platform game. It’s an accessible entry point into musical composition as well as game design, and provides an experience that builds on the creativity of Minecraft while offering something wholly unique for music lovers.

4. DIY

DIYFor creative kids who want to get their hands dirty, check out DIY, a site where students can find things to build, instructions for how to build them, and ways to share their creations with others. All projects are aligned to 50 skills that run the gamut from outdoors to indoors, and feature various challenges to complete and cool badges to earn and display.

5. STENYCIL

screen568x568Computer programming is a great next step for students who love to mod Minecraft or toy around with the redstone resource (which simulates basic logic and circuitry). One solid entry-level tool is Stencyl, a game creation program focused on codeless, cross-platform game making. By snapping blocks of code together, students can create games that can be published and played on a variety of platforms including mobile phones.

6. CODECADEMY

Screen Shot 2013-11-18 at 3.31.05 PMCodecademy is a web-based, self-paced site that teaches actual industry-standard languages like PHP, Javascript, Python, Ruby, HTML, and CSS. While students don’t create publishable games like they would in Stencyl, their learning is purpose-driven and contextualized, e.g. JavaScript for web development or Ruby for app development. And students do get to see their code’s output directly onscreen.

Minecraft has introduced a lot of youth to games as well as the critical thinking, problem solving, and creation skills necessary for self-motivated learning. The games and sites on this list have the potential to extend that learning, providing fresh outlets for self-expression in the digital world and beyond.

VR after conferences cancellations

VR Takes The Stage As Conferences Cancel

https://www.forbes.com/sites/charliefink/2020/03/11/vr-takes-the-stage-as-conferences-cancel/

Katie Kelly, Program Owner at AltspaceVR. “I did a rough estimate and factoring in the travel time and CO2e estimates that would have been spent. This summit took about 9 thousand cars off the road for the week of the summit and saved attendees around 5 million miles of travel. So whether we’re combating a global outbreak, climate change or remote work – there’s a lot that AltspaceVR and other VR platforms can do to help.”

HTC is moving its annual Vive Ecosystem Conference (VEC) in China to a virtual world built by Engage, a product of Immersive VR Education.

The crisis has put new wind in the sails of the first virtual world, Second Life, which continues to thrive. “We are seeing increased interest in Second Life as it is a safe place for people and organizations to socialize and work during this time of great anxiety and social distancing,” said Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab, which created and operates Second Life.

VictoryXR is an AR & VR school curriculum provider that also uses the Engage platform. They are now in the process of becoming accredited in Iowa and California to become an online virtual reality school (as opposed to a virtual school on a platform like Second Life, which is PC based).

Exp Realty is a virtual, cloud-based real estate brokerage founded nearly a decade ago, similar to Second Life. It is also optimized for PCs and laptops. The virtual real estate company has more than 27,000 agents who they log on to “eXp World.” The technology is provided by VirBELA, which also builds virtual tools for universities and virtual classes like Coursera.

Glue, based in Helsinki, Finland, today introduced significant upgrades to its virtual world platform, Glue Team Space. Team Space is immersive 3D environments optimized for teams of up to twenty people.

Spatial.io, a new remote conferencing system that works with every device and creates convincing avatars who can collaborate in the virtual space where participants can share whiteboards, post-its, videos and 3D models.

 

 

PISA Estonia China US

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/17/chinas-education-system-produces-stellar-test-scores-so-why-do-students-head-abroad-each-year-study/

Education scholars have already critiqued PISA as a valid global measure of education quality — but analysts also are skeptical about the selective participation of Chinese students from wealthier schools.

Second, Chinese students, on average, study 55 hours a week — also No. 1 among PISA-participating countries. This was about 20 hours more than students in Finland, the country that PISA declared to have the highest learning efficiency, or reading-test-score points per hour spent studying.

But PISA analysis also revealed that Chinese students are among the least satisfied with their lives.

Students look overseas for a more well-rounded education

Their top destination of choice, by far, is the United States. The 1.1 million or so foreign students in the United States in 2018 included 369,500 Chinese college students

hostility in U.S.-China relations could dampen the appeal of a U.S. education. Britain, in fact, recorded a 30 percent surge in Chinese applicants in 2019, challenging the U.S. global dominance in higher education.

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https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/12/03/us-students-gain-ground-against-global-peers.html

Immigrant students, who made up 23 percent of all U.S. students taking PISA, performed significantly better compared to their native-born peers in the United States than they did on average throughout the OECD countries.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/finance/news/pisa-rankings-2019-four-chinese-regions-top-international-student-survey/ar-BBXGCZU

The survey found that 15-year-old students from Beijing, Shanghai, and the eastern provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang ranked top for all three core subjects, achieving the highest level 4 rating.

Students from the United States were ranked level 3 for reading and science, and level 2 for math, while teens from Britain scored a level 3 ranking in all three categories.

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Looking for Post-PISA Answers? Here’s What Our Obsession With Test Scores Overlooks

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-12-03-looking-for-post-pisa-answers-here-s-what-our-obsession-with-test-scores-overlooks

By Tony Wan     Dec 3, 2019

Andreas Schelicher, director of education and skills at the OECD—the Paris-based organization behind PISA wrote that “students who disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement ‘Your intelligence is something about you that you can’t change very much’ scored 32 points higher in reading than students who agreed or strongly agreed.”

Those results are similar to recent findings published by Carol Dweck, a Stanford education professor who is often credited with making growth mindset a mainstream concept.

“Growth mindset is a very important thing that makes us active learners, and makes us invest in our personal education,” Schleicher states. “If learning isn’t based on effort and intelligence is predetermined, why would anyone bother?”

It’s “absolutely fascinating” to see the relationship between teachers’ enthusiasm, students’ social-emotional wellbeing and their learning outcomes, Schleicher notes. As one example, he noted in his summary report that “in most countries and economies, students scored higher in reading when they perceived their teachers as more enthusiastic, especially when they said their teachers were interested in the subject.

In other words, happy teachers lead to better results. That’s hardly a surprising revelation, says Scheleicher. But professional development support is one thing that can sometimes be overlooked by policymakers when so much of the focus is on test scores.

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https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/
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more on Estonia in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=estonia

required books

Required reading: The books that students read in 28 countries around the world

Dec 7, 2016  + 

Required reading: The books that students read in 28 countries around the world

Afghanistan

Quran
Albania

Kronikë në gur (1971) by Ismail Kadare
Chronicle in Stone

Australia

Tomorrow, When the War Began (1993) by John Marsden

Austria

Faust (1787) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Bosnia; Serbia

Na drini ćuprija (1945) by Ivo Andrić
The Bridge on the Drina

Brazil

Morte e vida Severina (1955) by João Cabral de Melo Neto
The Death of a Severino

Bulgaria

Under the Yoke (1894) by Ivan Vazov

Canada

The Wars (1977) by Timothy Findley

Chile

Sub Terra (1904) by Baldomero Lillo

China

Analects by Confucius

Colombia

Cien años de Soledad (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez
100 Years of Solitude

Cyprus

The Murderess (1903) by Alexandros Papadiamantis

Egypt

The Days (1935) by Taha Hussein

Finland

Seitsemän veljestä (1870) by Aleksis Kivi
Seven Brothers

Germany

Tagebuch der Anne Frank (1947)
The Diary of Anne Frank

Ghana; Nigeria

Things Fall Apart (1958) by Chinua Achebe

Indonesia

Laskar Pelangi (2005) by Andrea Hirata
Rainbow Troop

India

Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth (1927-1929) by Mohandas K. Gandhi

Iran

Poems by writers such as HafizSa’AddiFerdowsiRumi and Khayyam

Ireland

Ice Man: the Adventures of an Irish Antarctic Hero (2010) by Michael Smith

Italy

I Promessi Sposi (1827) by Alessandro Manzoni
The Betrothed

Pakistan

The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) by Mohsin Hamid

Philippines

Noli Me Tangere (1887) by Jose Rizal
Touch Me Not

Russia

War and Peace (1869) by Leo Tolstoy

US

To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee

Vietnam

Truyện Kiều (1820) by Nguyễn Du

The Tale of Kiu, the poem

 

universal basic income experiment

Germany embarks on three-year universal basic income experiment

12:49 FEBRUARY 28, 201

Germany embarks on three-year universal basic income experiment

€416 a month allowance for 250 people over a three year period.

The pilot programme emulates the two-year experiment by Finland’s Social Insurance concerning Universal Basic Income which ended in January.

The broad conclusion in Finland is that the programme bettered the general quality of life of its participants without achieving a major boost to their employability or social standing.

The German experiment, however, has significant differences. Unlike what was rolled out in Finland, Germany’s planned programme – referred to as Harz Plus – is a private initiative by the Berlin-based non-profit organisation Sanktionsfrei.

Unlike normal “job-seeking” allowances, the so-called Harz Plus payment will not require that an individual provide proof that the beneficiaries are seeking employment. The German experiment will provide a safety net and the participants will be regularly interviewed to document the effect of the allowance.

 

schools in Estonia

Q&A: School success in Estonia

Rebecca Vukovic Oct 11, 2018

https://w

Use of students’ mobile phones during the lesson, when instructed properly, can be an effective tool when learning foreign languages and many other subjects.

Santiago, P., et al. (2016), OECD Reviews of School Resources: Estonia 2016, OECD Reviews of School Resources, OECD Publishing, Paris, http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264251731-en.

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more on Finland Phenomenon in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=finland+phenomenon

blockchain and refugees

blockchain for refugees

As Norwegian Refugee Council research found, 70 percent of Syrian refugees lack basic identification and documents showing ownership of property.

The global passport

Host nations certainly has a share in the damage, as they face problems concerning the accessibility of vital information about the newcomers — dealing with the undocumented refugee, the immigration service can’t gain the information about his/her health status, family ties or criminal record, or verify any other vital data that helps them make a decision. Needless to say, this may lead to the designation of refugee status being exploited by economic migrants, fugitives or even the war criminals that caused the mass displacement to begin with.

Another important issue is data security. Refugees’ personal identities are carefully re-established with the support of clever biometric systems set up by the U.N. Agency for Refugees (UNHCR). UNHCR registers millions of refugees and maintains those records in a database. But the evidence suggests that centralized systems like this could be prone to attacks. As a report on UNCHR’s site notes, Aadhaar — India’s massive biometric database and the largest national database of people in the world — has suffered serious breaches, and last year, allegations were made that access was for sale on the internet for as little as $8

Finland, a country with a population of 5.5 million, cannot boast huge numbers of refugees. For 2018, it set a quota of 750 people, mainly flying from Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. That’s way less than neighboring Sweden, which promised to take in 3,400. Nevertheless, the country sets a global example of the use of effective technology in immigration policy: It’s using blockchain to help the newcomers get on their feet faster.

The system, developed by the Helsinki-based startup MONI, maintains a full analogue of a bank account for every one of its participants.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2018, the billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros revealed that his structures already use a blockchain in immigration policies

In 2017, Accenture and Microsoft Corp. teamed up to build a digital ID network using blockchain technology, as part of a U.N.-supported project to provide legal identification to 1.1 billion people worldwide with no official documents.

a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with blockchain platform IOTA to explore how the technology could increase efficiency.

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more on blockchain in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=blockchain

AI and China education

China’s children are its secret weapon in the global AI arms race

China wants to be the world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030. To get there, it’s reinventing the way children are taught

despite China’s many technological advances, in this new cyberspace race, the West had the lead.

Xi knew he had to act. Within twelve months he revealed his plan to make China a science and technology superpower. By 2030 the country would lead the world in AI, with a sector worth $150 billion. How? By teaching a generation of young Chinese to be the best computer scientists in the world.

Today, the US tech sector has its pick of the finest minds from across the world, importing top talent from other countries – including from China. Over half of Bay Area workers are highly-skilled immigrants. But with the growth of economies worldwide and a Presidential administration hell-bent on restricting visas, it’s unclear that approach can last.

In the UK the situation is even worse. Here, the government predicts there’ll be a shortfall of three million employees for high-skilled jobs by 2022 – even before you factor in the immigration crunch of Brexit. By contrast, China is plotting a homegrown strategy of local and national talent development programs. It may prove a masterstroke.

In 2013 the city’s teenagers gained global renown when they topped the charts in the PISA tests administered every three years by the OECD to see which country’s kids are the smartest in the world. Aged 15, Shanghai students were on average three full years ahead of their counterparts in the UK or US in maths and one-and-a-half years ahead in science.

Teachers, too, were expected to be learners. Unlike in the UK, where, when I began to teach a decade ago, you might be working on full-stops with eleven-year-olds then taking eighteen-year-olds through the finer points of poetry, teachers in Shanghai specialised not only in a subject area, but also an age-group.

Shanghai’s success owed a lot to Confucian tradition, but it fitted precisely the best contemporary understanding of how expertise is developed. In his book Why Don’t Kids Like School? cognitive Dan Willingham explains that complex mental skills like creativity and critical thinking depend on our first having mastered the simple stuff. Memorisation and repetition of the basics serve to lay down the neural architecture that creates automaticity of thought, ultimately freeing up space in our working memory to think big.

Seung-bin Lee, a seventeen-year-old high school graduate, told me of studying fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, for the three years leading up to the Suneung, the fearsome SAT exam taken by all Korean school leavers on a single Thursday each November, for which all flights are grounded so as not to break students’ concentration during the 45 minutes of the English listening paper.
Korea’s childhoods were being lost to a relentless regime of studying, crushed in a top-down system that saw them as cyphers rather than kids.

A decade ago, we consoled ourselves that although kids in China and Korea worked harder and did better on tests than ours, it didn’t matter. They were compliant, unthinking drones, lacking the creativity, critical thinking or entrepreneurialism needed to succeed in the world. No longer. Though there are still issues with Chinese education – urban centres like Shanghai and Hong Kong are positive outliers – the country knows something that we once did: education is the one investment on which a return is guaranteed. China is on course to becoming the first education superpower.

Troublingly, where education in the UK and US has been defined by creativity and independent thinking – Shanghai teachers told me of visits to our schools to learn about these qualities – our direction of travel is now away from those strengths and towards exams and standardisation, with school-readiness tests in the pipeline and UK schools minister Nick Gibb suggesting kids can beat exam stress by sitting more of them. Centres of excellence remain, but increasingly, it feels, we’re putting our children at risk of losing out to the robots, while China is building on its strong foundations to ask how its young people can be high-tech pioneers. They’re thinking big – we’re thinking of test scores.

soon “digital information processing” would be included as a core subject on China’s national graduation exam – the Gaokao – and pictured classrooms in which students would learn in cross-disciplinary fashion, designing mobile phones for example, in order to develop design, engineering and computing skills. Focusing on teaching kids to code was short-sighted, he explained. “We still regard it as a language between human and computer.” (My note: they are practically implementing the Finland’s attempt to rebuild curricula)

“If your plan is for one year,” went an old Chinese saying, “plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees. If your plan is for 100 years, educate children.” Two and half thousand years later chancellor Gwan Zhong might update his proverb, swapping rice for bitcoin and trees for artificial intelligence, but I’m sure he’d stand by his final point.

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more on AR in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=artificial+intelligence

more on China education in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/01/06/chinas-transformation-of-higher-education/

Finnish Government Scholarships

The Finnish Government Scholarships 2018-2019

Deadline: 15 February 2018
Open to: candidates with a Masters-level degree
Benefits: full scholarship

Description

Finnish Government is pleased to offer a range of scholarships to students of high academic ability for 2018 entry. Students of Australia, China, Cuba, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Mongolia, Namibia, Republic of Korea, Turkey, Ukraine and the USA are eligible to apply for these scholarships to undertake 3-9 months for doctoral level studies and research.

The Finnish Government Scholarships are available for 3-9 months for doctoral level studies and research at Finnish Universities or Public Research Institutes.

Eligibility

In order to be considered eligible to apply, you must fulfill all of the following criteria:

  • have established contact with the Finnish receiving institution before applying (see section ‘Doctoral Admissions’);
  • have a letter of invitation from the academic supervisor in Finland; the invitation should also explain the commitment of the host institution to the project;
  • have earned a Masters-level degree before applying;
  • intend to pursue post-master’s level studies as a visiting student, participate in a research project or teach at a university or public research institute in Finland; priority will be given to doctoral studies;
  • not have spent already more than one year at a Finnish higher education institution immediately before the intended scholarship period in Finland;
  • be able to give proof of sufficient skills in speaking and writing the language needed in study/research;
  • be a national of one of the eligible countries listed above.

Benefits

  • A monthly allowance of EUR 1500;
  • The allowance is sufficient for one person only;
  • Expenses due to travel, international or in Finland, are not covered by the program;
  • Scholarship recipients are recommended to make arrangements for sufficient insurance coverage for their stay in Finland;
  • Please see the section ‘Practical matters‘ for information on the practicalities of coming to Finland as an international student/researcher.

Application

Applications for the Finnish Government Scholarship Pool funding should be made to the appropriate authority in the applicant’s country. The scholarship authorities in each country are invited to present applications for up to 10 candidates for the Finnish Government Scholarship Pool. The announcements for the opening of the annual application round are usually sent out from CIMO at the end of September annually. Documents required for an application:

  • A completed and signed application form;
  • Curriculum vitae;
  • Copies of latest diplomas;
  • Two letters of recommendation;
  • Study/research plan (2-5 pages, including a statement of motivation, goals, work plan, work method, expected results);
  • Invitation/expression of interest and motivation for cooperation from the hosting academic supervisor in Finland;
  • Language certificate (Finnish, Swedish or English) or other indication of sufficient language skills – please see above, in the section ‘Eligibility criteria’.

http://www.edu-active.com/phd/2017/aug/22/finnish-government-scholarships-2018-2019.html

http://www.studyinfinland.fi/tuition_and_scholarships/cimo_scholarships/finnish_government_scholarship_pool
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more on Finland in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=finland

weaponizing the web RT hybrid war

Fake news and botnets: how Russia weaponised the web

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/02/fake-news-botnets-how-russia-weaponised-the-web-cyber-attack-estonia

The digital attack that brought Estonia to a standstill 10 years ago was the first shot in a cyberwar that has been raging between Moscow and the west ever since

It began at exactly 10pm on 26 April, 2007, when a Russian-speaking mob began rioting in the streets of Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, killing one person and wounding dozens of others. That incident resonates powerfully in some of the recent conflicts in the US. In 2007, the Estonian government had announced that a bronze statue of a heroic second world war Soviet soldier was to be removed from a central city square. For ethnic Estonians, the statue had less to do with the war than with the Soviet occupation that followed it, which lasted until independence in 1991. For the country’s Russian-speaking minority – 25% of Estonia’s 1.3 million people – the removal of the memorial was another sign of ethnic discrimination.

That evening, Jaan Priisalu – a former risk manager for Estonia’s largest bank, Hansabank, who was working closely with the government on its cybersecurity infrastructure – was at home in Tallinn with his girlfriend when his phone rang. On the line was Hillar Aarelaid, the chief of Estonia’s cybercrime police.

“It’s going down,” Aarelaid declared. Alongside the street fighting, reports of digital attacks were beginning to filter in. The websites of the parliament, major universities, and national newspapers were crashing. Priisalu and Aarelaid had suspected something like this could happen one day. A digital attack on Estoniahad begun.

“The Russian theory of war allows you to defeat the enemy without ever having to touch him,” says Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. “Estonia was an early experiment in that theory.”

Since then, Russia has only developed, and codified, these strategies. The techniques pioneered in Estonia are known as the “Gerasimov doctrine,” named after Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian military. In 2013, Gerasimov published an article in the Russian journal Military-Industrial Courier, articulating the strategy of what is now called “hybrid” or “nonlinear” warfare. “The lines between war and peace are blurred,” he wrote. New forms of antagonism, as seen in 2010’s Arab spring and the “colour revolutions” of the early 2000s, could transform a “perfectly thriving state, in a matter of months, and even days, into an arena of fierce armed conflict”.

Russia has deployed these strategies around the globe. Its 2008 war with Georgia, another former Soviet republic, relied on a mix of both conventional and cyber-attacks, as did the 2014 invasion of Crimea. Both began with civil unrest sparked via digital and social media – followed by tanks. Finland and Sweden have experienced near-constant Russian information operations. Russian hacks and social media operations have also occurred during recent elections in Holland, Germany, and France. Most recently, Spain’s leading daily, El País, reported on Russian meddling in the Catalonian independence referendum. Russian-supported hackers had allegedly worked with separatist groups, presumably with a mind to further undermining the EU in the wake of the Brexit vote.

The Kremlin has used the same strategies against its own people. Domestically, history books, school lessons, and media are manipulated, while laws are passed blocking foreign access to the Russian population’s online data from foreign companies – an essential resource in today’s global information-sharing culture. According to British military researcher Keir Giles, author of Nato’s Handbook of Russian Information Warfare, the Russian government, or actors that it supports, has even captured the social media accounts of celebrities in order to spread provocative messages under their names but without their knowledge. The goal, both at home and abroad, is to sever outside lines of communication so that people get their information only through controlled channels.

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24-hour Putin people: my week watching Kremlin ‘propaganda channel’ RT

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/nov/29/24-hour-putin-people-my-week-watching-kremlin-propaganda-channel-rt-russia-today

 Wednesday 29 November 2017 

According to its detractors, RT is Vladimir Putin’s global disinformation service, countering one version of the truth with another in a bid to undermine the whole notion of empirical truth. And yet influential people from all walks of public life appear on it, or take its money. You can’t criticise RT’s standards, they say, if you don’t watch it. So I watched it. For a week.

Suchet, the son of former ITV newsreader John Suchet and the nephew of actor David Suchet, has been working for RT since 2009. The offspring of well-known people feature often on RT. Sophie Shevardnadze, who presents Sophie & Co, is the granddaughter of former Georgian president and Soviet foreign minister Eduard ShevardnadzeTyrel Ventura, who presents Watching the Hawks on RT America, is the son of wrestler-turned-politician Jesse Ventura. His co-host is Oliver Stone’s son Sean.

My note; so this is why Oliver Stone in his “documentary” went gentle on Putin, so his son can have a job. #Nepotism #FakeNews

RT’s stated mission is to offer an “alternative perspective on major global events”, but the world according to RT is often downright surreal.

Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, about Putin’s Russia, and now a senior visiting fellow in global affairs at the London School of Economics, was in Moscow working in television when Russia Today first started hiring graduates from Britain and the US. “The people were really bright, they were being paid well,” he says. But they soon found they were being ordered to change their copy, or instructed how to cover certain stories to reflect well on the Kremlin. “Everyone had their own moment when they first twigged that this wasn’t like the BBC,” he says. “That, actually, this is being dictated from above.” The coverage of Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008 was a lightbulb moment for many, he says. They quit.

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more on Russian bots, trolls:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/11/22/bots-trolls-and-fake-news/

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more on state propaganda in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/11/21/china-of-xi/

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