Published by Gazeta.kz

Education system in Kazakhstan as well as ministers who “cares” about it and change themselves carrying out this duty more than often are highly debatable by journalists who every time asks regardless from proposed innovations: “Will this make increase knowledge creation in students’ heads?”

This time is not an exception. It is about directly proportional dependence between new school uniform for students and teachers and the quality of education and gotten knowledge that are supposed to fill in the cranium: will pupils of South Capital wearing ties with state flag symbols and blue “scouts” hats smarter than a year before?

And will teachers wearing standards such as “business styled clothes presuming “modest styled suits, made of one-color or poor ornamental material”, middle length skirts and “trouser suits similar to man’s” admitted by the Almaty State Department of Education actually teach better?

May be officials think that because of “preferable color spectrum such as grey, blue, brown, dark brown, beige” knowledge in the heads of pupils will duplicate itself, divide and change its character for strengthening? And pink, bordo, red, yellow and some tones of green will make knowledge disappear somewhere?

However that may be, we wish teachers be strong and patient, informal or uniformal, and pupils – willing to know more regardless of what they wear.

Photos of the new uniform for pupils are available here.

Published by neweurasia.net

City Day is a special celebration when happiness, warmth and good mood come into your house just beyond the reasons.

Because your city has a holiday, and one may want to celebrate it, congratulate and relax spending time with friends and relatives in best, clean for this occasion places, smile and enjoy great weather and smiley faces around.

This is exactly the day of Almaty city celebrated on September 20th, 2009, seen by blogger ankona, that she shared with our readers in the frames of “Kazakhstan seen by bloggers” publications’ series.

“Kazakhstan seen by bloggers” is a publication series done by neweurasia.net/ru in Russian and English about a home country, where bloggers and citizen journalists share their views and feelings of the country with people, readers and guests of the country and abroad.

If you want to join this publication’s series, simply send your texts, photos and links to videos to the editor Yelena Jetpyspayeva via yelena@neweurasia.net

We start our permanent publication series called “Kazakhstan seen by bloggers”.

How everyone of us sees the country? How do we see and feel people, cities, country side, rivers, roads, sky and animals – a world around us?

We will gather unique shots, videos, texts from all over the net for our readers that are about our country and were made/written by bloggers.

Let’s look at our country differently and see what seemed to be impossible to see before.

Do you want to join or publication series called “Kazakhstan seen by bloggers” and share what is private to you with the others? Send all your shots, videos and texts to yelena@neweurasia.net. We would be more than happy to publish it!

Let’s all together talk a story of our country, the country we see!

Photo (сс) Nurgeldy

On the shot you can see a girl called Makpal, and how Nurgeldy writes: “I was told that Makpal is the only one ‘berkutchi’ girl in the world. But i do not know exactly”.

Published at neweurasia

Far away from noisy cities and overflowed streets with cars stocked in morning traffic jams, from fuss and eternal run ahead another Kazakhstan stretched it out, spacious, endless and edgeless..

This Kazakhstan was seen by blogger rustem.

Published at neweurasia

According to the statistics provided by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan, more than 2,5 million boys and girls went to school this year. 297 thousands 584 children opened doors to the first grade, and 54% went to country side schools. Comparing ministerial statistics from 2008 with this year, quantity of scholars did not change. But what about quality?!

Answers to these philosophical questions will be available to every family, whose child joined school, during the school year. However visible changes, at least in the school uniform for the South capital, Almaty, are present: school uniform got one more additional thing – forage caps and ties colored in to the national flag color, with yellow edging on the caps and mini-copy of the national flag’s symbol on the tie.

Looking with an irony on such a change, one may want unintentionally alter an old Soviet song into the new one: “Not pioneers we are, nor scouts, and we don’t have any bitter regrets for it..”

Photos (сс) ankona

Published at neweurasia

This post was recently published on Gazeta.kz RU/ENG.

Continental Europe is exactly that piece of the Universe that has no objection to experiment and unite. Especially for money purpose.

Europeans were the first to invent collective money and mint the first coin in German Hansa city by the end of 14 century. Five centuries later they started to set up a lot of monetary unions: Austro-Hungarian, Scandinavian, Latin, further on – European union of payment, “currency snake in a tunnel”, European currency system, and finally – Economic ad Monetary Union (EMU).

Despite of the fact that historic and economic logic was suggesting long time ago to set up finally one single firm economic area with its currency and a single Pan-European financial body, that is the best and beneficial business-decision (European countries are trade partners of each other, their economics are based on import-export relations with each other, and exchange rates always cause difficulties), but it came true only few years ago.

“ECU”, a synthetic currency existed for few years and was created using exchange rates of European economics with its currency rate on December 31, 1998, transformed on January 1, 1999, into a single “euro” currency that united 11 European states – Austria, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Finland and France – into the most powerful economic and political standing behind it block ever.

There are about 16 countries in Eurozone now, and most of them are members of the European Union. With time ‘euro’ became not simply the biggest financial experiment in a human history, but more a peculiar strength test for the economics. Today “the test” celebrates its 10th anniversary that happened to be in 2009.

On the photos you find the most important EU financial center and the head-quarter city for the European Central Bank – German city of Frankfurt-am-Main. European Central Bank building has a small “?(c)afe” inside where you can not only drink tasty coffee, but discover the whole “euro” history, and buy as a souvenir a “brick” of compacted cut on pieces German currency (DM).

Photos and text (c) Yelena Jetpyspayeva

Passing by flowers outlets, standing by many kiosks on flowers bazaar or just outdoors where you can see a lot of grandmas standing with their buckets along the fence and selling simple, ‘home-grown’, garden flowers, it became possible to sink in diversity and got lost in flower types even in Almaty.

Here you can see roses as roses, and tulips as tulips, but with unchangable prefix countable in some hundreds of KZT per item.

Here we don’t have flowers «for everyday» and «to make flat look more comfortable» but we have flowers for anniversaries and big holidays, for first dates or just to observe the decencies.

This may be a reason why you do not pay attention on the fact that absolutely without any ceremony you can find among flowers brought from overseas those that are in the Red Book of Kazakhstan. Namely there are a Greig tulip аnd a Kaufman tulip, that can be found on the territory of Aksu-Jabagly resevre and inside its buffer zone. They grow up exactly in our region, but when spring comes people pluck them out armful, and this was even available on the picture.

Visiting this spring the world-known royal park of flowers in the Netherlands called Keukenhof located close to the Schiphol airport in the small city of Lisse, I accidentally saw pictures of Central Asian tulips.

It is obvious that during 2 months a year, that the park is open to the public, they need to show more than 4,5mln of planted tulips of more than 100 different types, but also gather the most interesting thematic expositions from all over the world.

For instance, this dedicated to the tulips from Central Asia where you can see not only alive flowers covering beautiful mountainside, but also cruelly cut off flowers. Ones that are in the Red Book of Kazakhstan.

This post was recently published on Gazeta.kz as a photo-report (Russian), and on NewEurasia.net RU/ENG.

Many foreign bloggers write about Central Asian journalism and state system from their point of view being inside ’stan’ countries, living here or just visited. It is not enough sometime to understand the issue at the fullest.

We at neweurasia.net decided to ask our contributor Musafirbek, a journalist from Uzbekistan, write a story about what is journalism in Uzbekistan.

At the end we have got almost a book, so we cut it into pieces and logical chapters.

Here are some links:

Hell Hides Behind Paradise: The Unreality of Journalism, Part 1.

Our Youth Must Be Happier Than Us: The Unreality of Journalism, Part 2.

Who Decides the Truth: The Unreality of Journalism, Part 3.

Translation of the publicist’s post, originally posted on neweurasia.net

How would Kaznet develop after the notorious amendments to the Law on internet are adopted? Yesterday there was the attempt to answer this question taken in MediaNet, the International center of Journalism, where the research on the economic after-effects of the mentioned amendments was carried out by polling over 60 professional web-market players.

According to the majority of the respondents, the prime cost of the internet business in Kazakhstan will increase by over 10%, which would negatively affect its competitiveness. At that, the group of high risk web-projects that can either loose their positions or disappear at all includes Web 2.0 resources, interactive projects with user-generated content (such as: forum, blogs and social networks).

It also became clear that 95% of the internet providers and 98% of website owners, which took part in the poll, had not been asked for the opinion when the amendments to the law were prepared. According to MediaNet the draft of the law meets neither the demands of the local market, nor the international legal standards, and, moreover, it even contradicts the state concept of uniform information space.

Translation of my post at neweurasia.net

roose, the blogger from YVision.kz blog platform in Kazakhstan, has posted [ru] a letter from the government to the principals of schools and colleges of the country containing recommendations to use KazTube.Kz video portal, which was created in February, 2009 at the expense of the state budget. In particular, the principals are urged to post videos about “significant events taking place in their institutions on a regular basis.”

akost has associated [ru] this “marketing approach” with the one that had been applied back in the Soviet times, when “people were forced to work on subbotniks (area clean-ups), and nowadays people are forced to upload videos to inferior video portals”. bakha has suggested [ru] that the reason for that is that “the authorities have dumped a lot of money into that project and now they are looking for the ways to justify it by administrative increase of traffic”. At the same time, Kimberly jokingly notes [ru] that “fun” is the most popular tag on KazTube.

Against the background of the notorious amendments on Internet regulation and their adoption by the Parliament, one may readily suppose that such approach can become a regular practice in the near future. Kazakhstan may deliberately hinder the development of web 2.0 with its user generated content and replace it with the “approved by the government content”.

Kuanyshbek Yesekeyev, the head of IT and Communications Agency, who initiated these amendments, is worried [ru]:

“Internet has to be regulated to some extent. If it flows naturally, then there is a possibility that the events similar to those in Moldova (when popular uprising was organized via Internet) will take place in Kazakhstan.”

So far no criticism has taken due effect. Roundtables held by rights advocates, letters addressed by journalists and politicians to the Parliament, and even the strong criticism of the OSCE and other international organizations failed to stop adoption of this online censorship law. OSCE Representative for the Freedom of Media Miklos Haraszti has said that this law would become a step backwards and asked president Nazarbayev to veto it.

Is Kazakhstan going to remain the country with positive contemporary history, which voluntary abandoned nuclear weapons and put forward various integration initiatives, or is it going to spoil its image and give a green light to censorship despite protests of local and international community? The Parliament of Kazakhstan has already passed the amendments and submitted them to the president for signing.

Also posted on Global Voices