You and the Ontario Political Parties

CBC is running Vote Compass again.

"Vote Compass is an educational tool developed by political scientists. Answer a short series of questions to discover how you fit in the Ontario political landscape."

You click on one of 5 boxes to say how much agree or disagree with about 30 statements. You can also answer, "I don't know." You do not have to enter your Riding or Postal Code to get started.

In the next section, you answer some questions about how you feel about the four parties and the four party leaders.

For these two sections, it helps to know what the leaders look like and the party logos. You drag and drop pictures onto a continuum.

The last set of questions are demographic questions about you and where you live.

When you are done you will see a chart with all the parties and you. Here is mine. I am always way out in left field :)

You can open up Learn More to find out how your compare to each of the party platforms question-by-question or compare all the party platforms. I found this section quite interesting. If you click on the "party rationale" links, the section expands and you can see a section of the party platform about that subject.

 If you try the Vote Compass, leave a comment below and let us know what you thought of it.


A note: Some users will find that their Vote Compass results do not match their personal sense of alignment with the political parties. The results are not intended to predict which party a user feels that she or he is most closely aligned with; rather it merely specifies how the user is aligned with each of the political parties on the basis of the questions included in Vote Compass.

Ontario Election 2011 Words

Welcome back! I hope that you all had a nice summer.

The big news in Ontario this fall is the provincial election. TV Ontario (TVO) has lots of good information about Ontario elections and voting here. (All links will open in a new window.)

Do you know who you are going to vote for? If you can't vote in THIS election, who would you vote for? Do you think it is important for people who live in Canada and cannot vote to think about this question?

Word clouds are a a way of analyzing a document. One way of making a word cloud is to paste the text into Wordle. Words that are used most often show up larger and brighter. It can give you an idea about the content of a document. Here is one I made from the lyrics of the song Summertime:

I couldn't get Wordle to work on my computer so I used TagCrowd. You can find other options here. Check out WordSift if you want to do word analysis as well. Very cool.

Here are the word clouds that Mark Brosens of TVO's The Agenda made from the election platforms of the 

Ontario Liberal Party,

Ontario New Democratic Party,

Ontario Progressive Conservative Party and the

Ontario Green Party.

Look at the 4 word clouds. Did you learn anything new about what each party thinks is best for Ontario? Do these word clouds help you decide which party best represents what you think?

What issues are most important to the people in your class? Type them out into a word document. If 5 people think that education funding is an important issue, type education funding 5 times. Copy and paste your document into Wordle. Post a link to your word cloud into the comments so we can see what is important to you.

Then check out what others in Ontario are thinking here: The Citizen's Agenda - Click on a polygon to see a video of the question and issue raised by people who attended the Agenda Camps around Ontario.

world water week

More than 2,600 humanitarians and policymakers meet in Stockholm next week to hash out ideas about how to tackle escalating problems surrounding water scarcity and access to sanitation, particularly in urban environments.

World Water Week delegates are seeking long-term sustainable solutions that will transform how water resources are managed. The goal is to try and improve the lives of almost 900 million people who lack access to safe water, and more than 2.7 billion who lack access to basic sanitation, according to United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) statistics.

Stockholm meeting to stir global water crisis debate by Julie Mollins, AlertNet

squaring the circles

Sir Ken Robinson talks about education in the 21st century:

Matt Damon on education vs training

Matt Damon talks to Piers Morgan about President Obama, audacity and the difference between training and education!

It seems to me that more and more we are choosing training instead of education for adult literacy learners. Is that true? Is it what adult literacy learners want?