520R - Journal #5 -- Impossible.. is nothing !

Art is a really favorite topic of mine. Although I'm not a fan of visiting museums, I enjoy watching various kinds of arts on my laptop screen :) I know it's such a weird thing, but I almost always lost in contemplation while staring into any fine piece of art on my laptop screen. The good thing about that is I can note down my thoughts easily without disturbance, I can find answers to any question that might raise in my head by searching the Internet, and I can save all these things together along with the image in one place on my computer for my personal record. 

Moreover, one of my beloved hobbies is graphic designing. I used to make designs for several purposes since 1999 using programs like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Image Ready. That's why I'm a big fan of Adobe too :).

Today, I brought you an amazing paintings that I found on the Internet. Those paintings might seem ordinary, but there are two points that I believe have made them extraordinary. The first point is that they are painted using pencils only, and the second point is about the artist but I prefer to leave it until I show you some of his paintings:

The most amazing part about those paintings, more than they are extremely good and well detailed, is that they have not been painted by hands, but by mouth!!

The artist is Doug Landis, a self-taught artist who lost a lot of his abilities after a high school wrestling accident that left him quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down. He was spending a lot of time in front of the TV which made his brother, Monte, to concern a lot about him. Once Monte challenged Doug to draw and placed a pencil in Doug's mouth. Doug practiced and with time and patience mastered his unique skill. And now, his style known for its fine intricate detail, and emerged figures.

I see the story of Doug Landis is very inspiring. As I always believed, no power can supersede the power of human willingness. And our life is mainly shaped by our thoughts of ourselves and of what we believe we are capable of.

For more information: http://www.mouthart.com/mouthart/frame_story.html

520R - Journal #4 -- Creating a World Without Poverty

I remember the first time I knew about professor Muhammad Yunus. It was around 3 years ago, when I read about Grameen Bank experience in Bangladesh. After that, Muhammad Yunus had been given the Nobel Peace Prize for the year 2006 shared with the Grameen bank which he has invented. At that time, I made a small informative presentation about Muhammad Yunus to my friends and colleagues in Riyadh. And now, I would like to share with you some of the information that I had collected, to let you know why I'm inspired by all the work that Muhammad has done.

First of all, Muhammad Yunus was born in Chittagong, Bangladesh in June 28, 1940. His father was a jeweler and his mother, Sofia Khatun, was the main person who has influenced Muhammad's life. She was always kind to the poor and hungry people who used to come to their house asking for money or food. This story tells us how important is the role of a good mother who raises her children. She actually presents the world's most admirable leaders and she is a main contributor in shaping history for the coming generations.

In 1965, he earned a scholarship to study Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1972 he returned to Bangladesh as the head of the economic department at the University of Chittagong. After observing the famine of 1974, Muhammad became involved with poverty reduction and established a rural economic program as a research project. While he was giving lectures about fancy economic theories, people were dying at the street. He said describing his feelings: "I was teaching in one of the universities while the country was suffering from a severe famine. People were dying of hunger, and I felt very helpless. As an economist, I had no tool in my tool box to fix that kind of situation". So, he decided to change his teaching method to be more practical. He used to give his students a practical projects on the field, in the village of Jobra which is close to the university where he is teaching, to keep them observing the actual needs of poor people and find them appropriate solutions from the economical prospective.

Once, Muhammad was talking to a poor lady who makes chairs from bamboo wood, which comes from a common tree in Bangladesh. That lady was borrowing money from someone who was taking high interest from her. She was working 12 hours a day to pay back the money with all the interests and almost nothing left for her to live a better life, or to save some, or even to expand her business. That way, which conflict with the basic notion of the islamic financial system, was one of the main reasons that kept the poor people poor and made the rich people more rich. While the islamic financial system aims to encourage the productivity of the market and never permits people to gain more money just by lending them to people and take it back with interests just as a matter of time without any production. With the aid of his students, Muhammad had inspected the situation of 42 villages around the city and decided to lend small amounts of money from his own pocket to some worker women with no interests nor guarantees, and without pointing a due date to pay the money back. That experience showed back that it works perfectly, and poor women situation is getting better and they all paid back the money. Later on, Muhammad had tried to convince the central bank and the commercial banks to adopt his idea, but they replied that poor people are not eligible for taking loans and there is no guarantee that they can pay the money back.

At the year 1976, Muhammad took a personal loan from the bank to start his project and prove his theories. Consequently, during three years of experience, he succeeded in improving the situation of 500 families of poor people in Bangladesh. That turned to be a bright sufficient prove for the central bank to decide in 1979 to support the new project "Grameen Bank" which means: the bank of the village. In 1981, the Grameen Bank expanded to cover 5 more territories. Moreover, it shows in each stage the efficiency of the successful application of micro credit. 

In 1983, the Grameen Bank was serving more than 59000 clients through 86 branches. At that level, Muhammad had decided to end his academic career and pursue his dream with the Grameen Bank, the dream of creating a world without poverty.

520R - Journal #3 -- Do you know Jane Goodall ?

I was looking in our textbook trying to find an interesting article for my journal this week. I was running over the book when I was attracted by a picture of a dressed chimpanzee trying to kiss a cute little girl. The picture is quite funny, but it has been perfectly chosen to illustrate the title of unit 6: The World of Man and Animals.

The first thing that jumped into my mind about chimpanzees is the announcement that I have read on last Thursday morning in The Vancouver Sun; it was about a lecture in Vancouver's Centre for the Performing Arts, titled: Reason for Hope, presented by Dr. Jane Goodall. Dr. Goodall is an English UN Messenger of Peace, and she is well-known for her 47-year study of chimpanzee social and family interaction. Her study was held in the heart of Africa, specifically in Tanzania. In 1977 she sat up the Jane Goodall Institute To Careful Endangered Chimps. This organization have offices around 23 countries, one of them is Canada ( http://www.janegoodall.ca ).

Dr. Jane Goodall at The Centre for the Performing Art, Vancouver (Oct. 30, 2008)

Honestly, I didn't know that chimpanzees are endangered until I get to know more about Dr. Goodall and what she is doing and what she has done through all these years to spread awareness of chimpanzee extinction. I was shocked when I knew that chimpanzees might become extinct in 30 to 50 years only! Furthermore, there are only 400,000 great apes left in the world today comparing to 2,000,000 were there in the 1950's.

For more inforamation about Dr. Goodall's mission, check out this interview on CBC The Hour show:

http://www.cbc.ca/thehour/videos.html?id=739209587

520R - Journal # 2 -- The Internet, and the digital divide

"Despite the technological progress that the Internet brings, one must be wary of the "digital divide" that it might creates"

This subtitle is written on a book that I saw yesterday behind the window of a small bookstore. It has attracted my attention while I was waiting at a bus stop in Vancouver downtown. There are no doubts that the Internet has made a big revolution in the world of knowledge and communication, but what about the new problems that Internet has brought to our lives? and how are we going to overcome it?

Let me first describe the term "digital divide" for you: it means that the world can be divided into people who do and people who don't have access to the Internet, whether it was a matter of how industrially is the nation developed, or how capable are the people to use it. However, the existence of the digital divide is not universally recognized, because they think it should soon disappear in any case, and the knowledge of computers will become less important as they get smarter and easier to use. Therefore, people will not need high-tech skills to access the web. But the main issue here is: when this is going to happen? and how can we overcome this problem while computers get smarter? same thing applies for all other drawbacks of this important technology.

One of the practical solutions was the OLPC Association. It stands for "One Laptop Per Child", it is a non-profit organization established in the U.S. to oversee the creation of cheap and affordable educational devises to be used in the developing world. Furthermore, one of the brave solutions is supporting the open source software industry, which is considered as a highly appreciated contribution from computer developers to the world. It is about developing high-performance mandatory software (e.g. operating systems, word processors, antivirus programs, etc.) and distribute it on the Internet free of charge in order to achieve the goal to overcome the digital divide. Also, it is good to know that open software are not only free to use, but also they are free to develop and improve by other programmers around the world, so it is a win-win strategy for everyone.

OLPC pilot Thailand - Ban Samkha - hiking, 2007

In conclusion, there are still a lot of obstacles ahead that we must deal with to spread the knowledge and limitate the abuse of the Internet in every place around the globe.

520R - Journal # 1

In this short journal I would like to shed some light on Creativity different definitions and how can we combine between them. Also I am going to talk about interesting differences between the word Creativity and one of its widely used synonyms. 

Today, I have read a very interesting article about Creativity: Method or Magic?

The author, Stevan Harnad, has introduced his article asking about how can we define "creativity" ? can we just say that it is a cognitive trait or an occasional state ? or it is defined in different ways depending on different usages "creativity is as creativity does" ? 

So, those are the three main notions about creativity, and I hardly can say which one is right and which one is wrong.

Creativity can be a trait, because it is a statistical fact that some people exhibit it frequently. But it is also a state, because people sometimes get to be creative once in their lives, or they become creative in certain fields more than another. ٍSo, I would rather to say: both of them are correct.

There is another thing that I was thinking of regarding the word "creativity", I was always using it as a synonym for "Innovation". But when I was googling around for the word "creativity" I found an interesting information at Wikipedia about distinguishing between the two words "creativity" and "innovation". It says that "creativity" is the act of producing and generating newideas only, while "innovation" is wider and it covers generating new ideas and applying them too.

For example, Amabile et al. (1996) suggest that while innovation "begins with creative ideas,"

"...creativity by individuals and teams is a starting point for innovation; the first is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the second."

Other interesting difference between creativity and innovation the author thinks, so do I, that the word "creativity" is preferred in art contexts whereas "innovation" is preferred in business. And I have seen this true in the practical life, I have seen the word "innovation" was widely used in my working place and it is always about deliverables to clients and how to exceed their expectations. While I have always been reading about creativity in art books and topics.

Hopefully I have added something new to your information about Creativity. 

See you soon on my next blog.

Bassam

Hi Everyone ^_^

Salam Alikum (Arabian greeting),

This is my first blog in english. I used to write blogs in arabic before I come to Canada, but this is a new experience to me.

I named it "The Smiler" because it is the meaning of my name in arabic :-)
It is an adjective, and it describes a person (male) who smiles all the time ^__^
The female form of my name is (Basmah), it means "a smile" in arabic.
And by the way, Basmah is my older sister and she is studying at the ELI with us :-)

Anyway, I would like to say that I really like this way of learning english, or generally I like to learn anything aided by technology, like social networks which is the trend of nowadays time. I feel that I am doing something that I really like which is blogging, while I am doing my reading class homework at the same time!

Thanks to our creative reading class teacher Eilidh for this creative idea.

See you soon on my next homework... I mean blog :-)

Bassam