Bill Gates just finished a flying tour of CS schools: Stanford,
U-Chicago, UT-Austin, CMU, and U-Waterloo.

He gave special mention to DG and DSH.

Check out the video/transcript of his talk at U-Chicago:
http://news.uchicago.edu/static/080220.gates.php

"There's wonderful examples of this taking place, for example, some
that our India lab, who's had access to what they call the bottom of
the pyramid, this bottom 2 billion, has
been a real theme of that lab. They've actually realized that DVD
players that can be carried in and battery operated are about as high
tech as you need in order to take things like farmers and show them
best practices.

So, what they do in a district is they have a contest of farmers
adopting best practices, they go in and film the ones who do it well,
so it's kind of like American Idol except this
is about not starving, but the level of interest and the desire to be
the one that gets picked to be videoed in these new practices is just
phenomenal.

And what we've seen is that where we use this DVD technology, carry in
the TV set and the DVD player, and show these smallholders who have
little farms these new practices,
the adoption rate is three times what it was when we weren't using
this approach, where we weren't spreading best practices by having
them listen to other farmers talk about how
you do it and where it goes.

We're doing a similar thing with digital study hall where we take the
best teachers and video them, make sure the right ones are picked, and
let other teachers either learn from that or use that as part of that
teaching experience."
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