{"id":206,"date":"2015-02-17T08:41:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-17T08:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jodilis.wordpress.com\/?p=206"},"modified":"2015-02-17T08:41:00","modified_gmt":"2015-02-17T08:41:00","slug":"what-is-black-and-white-and-red-all-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jodilis.com\/index.php\/2015\/02\/17\/what-is-black-and-white-and-red-all-over\/","title":{"rendered":"What is black and white and \u201cred\u201d all over?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remember this joke as a kid?\u00a0 It was a silly one.\u00a0 The answer is a newspaper. \u00a0‘Red’ is \u00a0‘read’ said in the past tense.\u00a0 A newspaper is black and white.\u00a0 That is the \u201ccorrect\u201d answer.\u00a0 In the past week I had two interactions where people wanted to know what the correct answer was.\u00a0 In both cases there was no correct answer, but they kept pressing for one.\u00a0 Is everything black and white?<\/p>\n

A friend who recently started to become involved in international development wrote me an email and referred to the third world.\u00a0 I replied to his email and told him that if he ever referred to countries as third world, I would \u201cshoot\u201d him.\u00a0 I explained that the terms, first, second and third worlds, have not been used for years to describe the differences in levels of income and development among countries.\u00a0 It is politically incorrect and insulting.\u00a0 Many people use developing and developed worlds.<\/p>\n

NPR\u2019s \u2018Goats and Soda\u2019 did a nice post recently entitled \u201dIf you shouldn\u2019t call it the third world, then what should you call it?\u201d.<\/a> They went through a list of terms: developing\/developed, global south, majority world, low and lower-middle-income countries, fat\/lean.\u00a0 For each term, as you think, there are those people who accept and use them and those who vehemently disagree.<\/p>\n

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NPR says it tries their \u201c\u2026best to use the right terms for the right stories\u201d and \u201caim for specificity\u2026\u201d in their stories.\u00a0 Fair enough.<\/p>\n

My friend\u2019s response: \u00a0What term do you use?\u00a0 That is the point. Use the term most appropriate in the context that you are describing.\u00a0 It is not black and white.\u00a0 The world constantly shifts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What do you use?<\/p>\n

In the second interaction, I was again asked what is the correct answer.\u00a0 I shared a poll taken by Jane Hart asking \u201cwhat is blended learning?\u201d<\/a> with my colleagues.\u00a0 The poll had three possibilities and a space for other.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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750 people responded. They choose out of the three possibilities which they thought best defined blended learning:<\/div>\n
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