The CommonCraft Show is what I call a good idea. Aimed to explain the Internet phenomenas in the easiest possible way, every single video they produce is a complete success. Preceded by other popular videos like Blogs in plain English, Podcasting in plain English and a large amount of didactic audiovisual pieces, this Social media in English finds a fun metaphor, how a litle american town because famous due to their citiziens passion for making ice cream, to explain how social media are changing our society:

You can also watch the video with English or Spanish subtitles.

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Guest author: Ismael Peña-López Lecturer Public Politics for Development and ICT4D Universitat Oberta de Catalunya His main field of interest is twofold. On one hand the aspects related with Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D): e-Readiness, the Digital Divide, e-Inclusion, etc. On the other hand the aspects related with e-Learning and empowerment: digital capacity building and literacy, e-Portfolios, Open Access, etc

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Stephen Downes, on the left, and Richard Stallman in Barcelona, date July 16th 2008. The picture has been published by Stephen Downes on Flickr.

The following text has been crossposted from Stephen Downes: The Future of Education, liveblogged notes taken at the conference by Stephen Downes at the First International Conference Free Knowledge, Free Technology – Education for a free information society in Barcelona (Spain), 17 July 2008, on the production and sharing of free educational and training materials about Free Software.

The conference deals first with the concept of public goods and public education, and their relationship with Freedom. Then the speaker shifts towards the specificities of digital content and digital skills, how these both have changed the landscape of Education, in particular, and Communication in general, and, hence, what is the role of public education to empower individuals with tools and competences that will make of them free citizens in a free society.

Stephen Downes, Institute for Information Technology’s Internet Logic Research Group
The Future of Education

The Public in Public Education

Public education, education for everyone, is an important concept not for the “education” part, but for the “public” part, as its impact goes far beyond the acquisition of knowledge, but the shaping of the whole society.

Stephen Downes presents gRSShopper. Besides the most evident uses of the tool as a resource harvester, the main purpose being connecting the different resources amongst them, to link one to each other different pieces of content scattered around the Internet. This is a personal learning environment, more than a social software intended to build community; an personal environment but headed to openly being a part of the network of people and content.

Continue reading »

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Guest author: Julià Minguillón Alfonso
Professor, Computer Engineering, Multimedia and Telecommunications
Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) Assistant Director
UOC UNESCO Chair in E-Learning
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Julià is professor at UOC since 2001. He has been teaching programming, statistics and data mining, graphical computing and learning technology. His research interests are modelling students’ behaviour on virtual learning environments, the development of tools for learning process’ support and its personalization and the accesibility, mobility and usability topics related.

He is directing the PERSONAL(ONTO) project, about Personalizing the Learning Process in Virtual Environments by means of Adaptive Formative Itineraries based on Reusable Learning Objects and Ontologies. He was also involved in the OLCOS project about open educational contents.

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Richard Stallman as a FSF evangelist at FKFT 2008 (photo by baldiri)

I would like to complement the previous entry about Richard Stallman’s talk at FKFT 2008. Stallman tried to convice us about being free and exercising our rights: free to use a certain piece of software whenever and wherever (i.e. in any computer) we like, free to read and learn from the software (its source code), free to modify it in order to adapt it to our needs and, finally, free to share and distribute it amoung our friends and colleagues. These statements are what Stallman defines as freedom with respect to software. Proprietary software is evil, as it refrains users from exercising their freedom.

Of course I agree with this idea about freedom, but despite Stallman’s vehement defense of his positions, there is something weak in this reasoning, in my humble opinion. Stallman compared computer programs to recipes, a very good metaphor indeed, as everybody is able to cook any recipe if all the ingredients are available and there is also a well equipped kitchen. A minimum of cooking skills are required, obviously. Stallman was asked whether making medicaments is also a valid metaphor or not, and he said that yes but the quality control checks should be very strict, obviously.

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Guest author: Ismael Peña-López Lecturer Public Politics for Development and ICT4D Universitat Oberta de Catalunya His main field of interest is twofold. On one hand the aspects related with Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D): e-Readiness, the Digital Divide, e-Inclusion, etc. On the other hand the aspects related with e-Learning and empowerment: digital capacity building and literacy, e-Portfolios, Open Access, etc

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The following text has been crossposted from Richard Stallman: Free Software and Beyond, liveblogged notes taken at the conference by Richard M. Stallman at the First International Conference Free Knowledge, Free Technology – Education for a free information society in Barcelona (Spain), 15 July 2008, on the production and sharing of free educational and training materials about Free Software.

The conference deals first with the concept of Free Software to then enter broader and deeper considerations about Freedom in the Information Society. The speaker reflects about how the pervasiveness of computers as tools implied in almost every socioeconomic aspect makes the debate about Free Software actually a debate about Freedom in general.

Richard Stallman on Zeuux 2008 (on May 31st 2008, China) by Shizao on Flickr

Richard M. Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation
Free Software and Beyond

Free Software is about giving freedom to the user and respecting the work done by the community of programmers.

The analogy with cooking recipes is clearly the best way to help people understand the four freedoms of Free Software.

Continue reading »

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“Punk is dead, punk is everything“, by Bryan Ray Turcotte, documents more than 30 years of punk aesthetics with a clear idea: punk is dead as a music movement, but you can find its inheritance anywhere in our society.

It’s been a month since we started writing about Edupunk on this blog. During that time, the term has been spreaded among the Internet with different results depending on the area we look at. On the anglo-saxon www, for example, many influencers are speaking about the concept with very different focusses:

• The Guardian blogger David Cohen writes on motoboard: Nevermind the pedagogues, here’s edupunk in a clear nod to punk pioneer band Sex Pistols.
• Stephen Downes, one of the most important theorists on E-Learning, writes: The concept of Edupunk has totally caught wind, spreading through the blogosphere like wildfire.
• His colleague Brian Lamb, one of the speakers of UOC UNESCO Chair Fourth International Seminar, is also shaking the concept using titles like Another dirty edupunk is back on the streets… for his posts

On the spanish www, several experts have been writing about the topic, but only Juan Freire has gone deep into it. His post titled ¿Hacia una identidad edupunk? is highly recommended for spanish readers. Some of the most important ideas contained on the post are:

• Edupunk is not a technological change but a cultural change.
• The term gives identity to an older idea: the do it yourself on education, or how open source tools are chepaer, agiler and allows much more independence than propietary software.
• It is very important not to make the mistake of thinking that TIC are leading a revolution. It’s the people behind technology what allows the change.

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• A short fresh introduction to Edupunk

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Heather Ford (blog), director of the Icommons organization and one of the most active persons fighting for the Internet rights along Europe and America, created some months ago this Open Education Map that seems to be a very interesting project.

View Larger Map

Maybe we should spread the information about this project so that anyone can add more institutions and projects. Anyone can edit the map, in fact I myself have edited the map to add UOC. Right now is the only place for OER in Spain (in this map, I mean). I’m sure that is not reflecting the reality so, go on… make your collaboration.

Via Tíscar Lara.

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The next presentation is the guide Peter Bihr followed last tuesday during the Web 2.0 workshop at UOC. Obviously, not all the content is reflected on the slides, but it’s a very good synthesis of the things we learned.

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Update (11/07/08):

Peter is blogging some links about the topics we talked about on the Workshop: tools like Google Reader, Summize or del.icio.us and articles about web 2.0 and social media.

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Just a quick post to announce an interesting event. Free Knowledge, Free Technology will take place in Barcelona, Spain, from July 15 to 17. The idea is to debate the concepts around free culture (always understanding free as in freedom) and it’s particular application onto education processes. This year’s FKFT schedule includes speakers like Richard Stallman.

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As the main speaker of last week’s Data Mining conference, Sebastián Ventura left us a very interesating presentation. My proposal: let’s check the slides again (in Spanish, sorry) and try to compile some important questions about Data Mining in E-Learning. To be continued:

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Related entries:

• Some Data Mining presentations
• How can we measure the students behavior in a digital environment?

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One of the problems of technology is the degree of assimilation the people have. For the last two years, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya has organized several roundtables and events where social media and web 2.0 were very important topics. The discussion about web 2.0 was always between the staff members interested on the idea of a useful social web, which is not a very big percentage of all the University staff.

This year, the UOC UNESCO Chair assumed the commitment of providing this knowledge to those UOC teachers and researches interested on web 2.0 that didn’t have the time or the chance to surf the net and start using social media.

We are on the middle of that action right now. The picture above was shot about 15 minutes ago, during the celebration of the Web 2.0 Workshop at the UOC. Please, excuse the low queality of the pic, it’s a mobile one.

Right now we are listening to Peter Bihr, consultant on social media, and we will start using some of the most popular web 2.0 services in some minutes, after a very short theoric contextualitation and a very interesting public discussion.

As soon as the workshop finishes, I’ll try to publish Peter’s slide on this blog. Stay tuned.

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