Promoting an online educational platform could be viewed as part of the national defense industry and as a way to counter Chinese “united front” tactics if all children in China could learn from the platform, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said yesterday.
Ko made the remark at a panel with Minister Without Portfolio Audrey Tang (唐鳳) at the Education For Sustainable Development Forum in Taipei.
As the theme of the session was about how cooperation between society and the public sector can foster educational innovation, Ko cited as examples the Taipei CooC Cloud, the city’s online learning platform, and the process of improving connectivity in schools.
Photo: Chang Chia-ming, Taipei Times
Receiving an education used to be a tool for social class mobility, but as the Internet became popular, it is now people without access to online resources who lose their competitiveness, so the Taipei City Government has allocated NT$1.6 billion (US$52.3 million) to accelerate the process of improving connectivity in schools, Ko said.
A total of 236 schools in the city are to be equipped with high-speed fiber-optic Internet connections, all classrooms are to have wireless Internet connectivity and all students from the third grade up are to have a tablet device to enhance digital learning, he said.
The city government in 2016 also established the Taipei CooC Cloud, which offers a variety of e-learning and teaching resources through a cloud-based database, Ko said, adding that teachers are encouraged to upload their course videos so they can be shared with students and teachers nationwide.
The Taipei CooC Cloud is a demonstration of the nation’s soft power, he said.
“It could be considered part of the national defense industry, because if we allocate NT$10 billion to develop interactive education and all children use the platform, this would counteract Chinese ‘united front’ tactics,” Ko said.
Excluding China, there are about 60 million people who use the Chinese language, including Taiwan’s 23 million people, he said.
If the central government used just 10 percent of the national defense budget to promote online interactive education, such soft power could be even more powerful than direct arms development, he added.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching