Technology may not be a magic wand, but innovative technology programming can genuinely help children become adept at navigating our increasingly wired world while also helping them develop deductive reasoning, math, and other vital literacy skills. One of the simplest and most powerful tools for technology-based public library programming is called Scratch. It's a free, easy-to-use programming language that can be used to create everything from 3-D animation and graphics to music-enhanced presentations and games. This book * Explains how to use Scratch, and how it has already been used in libraries around the country to create technology workshops for youth * Guides readers through workshop planning, focusing on targeting youth ranging from teens to younger elementary students * Presents advocacy tools so that organizers can make the case to their insitution's managers, administrators, and other stakeholders * Provides reliable and field-tested techniques for time management, locating and training volunteers (teen and adult), and identifying and working with community partners * Includes workshop templates as well as sample participant evaluation checklists Storytimes for the digital age, technology-based workshops are important opportunities for supplementing and complementing education for all youth; this book fosters a different kind of thinking about what literacy in the 21st century really entails.

This provocative new volume focuses on the economic features that make Third World social formations distinctive and on non-property characteristics such as religion, ethnicity, and culture, that are central to the survival of these societies. Specifically, the authors look at the significance and revolutionary potential of peasant majorities, who take limited advantage of capitalist modes of production and often manage to maintain their cultural and economic identity and a degree of independence in the process. Following the editors' introduction, which explains the conceptual framework for the study, the historical and structural causes for the weakness of the basic capitalist classes in the periphery (the underdeveloped national regions) are examined. The next several chapters deal with the evolution of classes and institutions in the periphery, the articulation of peasantries within capitalist and socialist societies, and the reasons for the resilience of peasant modes of production. Other topics discussed are the role of the state--capitalist of socialist--in class formation, the relationship between the socialist state and the peasantry, variables in social transformation in the periphery, and the place of the urban poor in Third World development.