Linda G. Roberts was kind enough to send us some more information about the Curriki project she will present us during our Fifth International Seminar: Fighting the Digital Divide through Education.

The first of the documents I want to share is an article titled OER Models that Build a Culture of Collaboration (PDF, 204kb) where Barbara Kurshan explores “the impact that Open Educational Resources (OER) can have on eliminating the Education Divide“. There is an opportunity, Kurshan says, “to build a sustainable community that empowers teachers that want to teach and students that want to learn with high-quality open source educational resources at no cost”.

There is another PDF to complete this post. The Curriki Fact Sheet (PDF, 135kb), where the image above has been taken out from, explains the model the community is based in. A successful model, judging by the two important awards they’ve recieved already and by the number of participants they count with indeed: 19889 resources, 48114 members and 278 groups.

For further information, please visit Curriki homapage.

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Guest author: César Córcoles Briongos
Lecturer at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC)

César Córcoles is a lecturer at the Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunication Department at the Open University of Catalonia, where he teaches the scientific subjects of the Multimedia Grade.

His interest areas are the use of multimedia and interactive tools (motion, 3D visualization) for the teaching of sciences, with a special interest on Mathematics and Physics.

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Maybe it is true that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but while attending the European Ecommerce Conference (held in Barcelona on october 21) I couldn’t help relating the three talks I liked best to current interests in the world of e-Learning…

Chris Anderson talks in NYC on may 08, picture by Robert Scoble on Flickr under CC License

• First, there was Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, and quite famous because of his The Long Tail book (and website). He is currently about to finish his next book, Free, which should be out next year and deals with, unsurprisingly, business models implying free products and services. While ‘free’ has been around for a long time, the new ‘bit economy’ makes it much more important. One of the basic ideas is ‘you shouldn’t be selling goods that stopped being scarce’ (and thus easy to charge for), e.g. digital music… or any kind of digital content, actually. Which leads to think about OER as a good idea to promote Universities’ services and certifications around them.
• Then there was Gavin Potter (of Netflix Prize fame, and featured in Wired magazine) talking about recommendation engines for on-line shops (and personals sites!)… that is so close in so many aspects to the personalization of learning itineraries that some of my colleagues are working on.
• And finally we’ve had the pleasure of listening to David Recordon, founder of OpenID and currently Open Platforms Tech Lead at Six Apart, talking about the use of OpenID and a few other open APIs that one could/should use to build an open stack for web applications… and which could be recycled to talk about personal learning environments.

It’s strange how can someone think so much about e-Learning at an e-commerce conference…

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Please let me introduce a matter that might be half off topic. You should agree that it’s a must for everyone to defend or at least respect the human rights on everything we do in our lifes. Especially in education, all the professionals involved must be very carefull with the topic, and of course electronic learning is not that different on this way.

Maybe it’s because during the last years some goverments seem to have forgotten the basic human rights that Seth Brau and Andy Poncher created this animation video remembering us every single human right on the UNESCO declaration.

It’s not hard to imagine the video director wondering “how can we make the human rights declaration so attractive that no one will be able to resist the temptation of clicking play?”. The answer is obvius: using and attractive and creative information aesthetics we can renew an old and maybe monotonous message and make it brand new and hot for the audience.

I humbly think this video is a proof of how success can that strategy be and that we should start thinking on using it on the production of e-Learning materials, don’t we?

More educational videos:

• Google reader in plain English
• Social media in plain English
• One hundred reassons

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Guest author: Jordi Sánchez Navarro
Lecturer at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC)

Jordi Sánchez-Navarro is a lecturer at the Information and Communication Sciences Department at the Open University of Catalonia, where he teaches on screen studies, and is Academic Director of Postgraduate Studies. He achieved a PhD in Film Studies (Universitat Ramon Llull) with a dissertation about the concepts of authorship, crisis of the genres and cultural recycling in post-modern media.

He is currently researching into how video games work as educational tools, and in the formal aspects of video games, approaching both issues to the more general field of screen studies. Among other activities, he collaborates with the research groups SPIDER (Smarter People through Interactive Digital Entertainment Resources) and Technology and Conmmunication.

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Between 16 and 17 October, the European Conference on Games-Based Learning (ECCBL 2008) reunites researchers, academics and professionals from the games and education areas to come together to listen, discuss and present their research, points of views and knowledge. This is the 2nd year of the conference and it is hosted by The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) in Barcelona and held in the Silken Diagonal Hotel in Barcelona.

The conference addresses elements of both theory and practice of all aspects of Games-Based Learning, and offers an opportunity for academics, practitioners and consultants involved in the field to exchange ideas. The programme for the event will include an extensive range of peer-reviewed papers, including keynote presentations from leaders in the field, such as Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen and Ben Sawyer.

Over the last ten years, the way in which education and training is delivered has changed considerably with the advent of new technologies. One such new technology that holds considerable promise for helping to engage learners is Games-Based Learning (GBL).

The Conference’s papers will cover various issues and aspects of GBL in education and training: technology and implementation issues associated with the development of GBL; use of mobile and MMOGs for learning; pedagogical issues associated with GBL; social and ethical issues in GBL; GBL best cases and practices, and other related aspects.

In addition to the main conference, the Conference has three mini tracks: Game Based Collaborative Learning; Game Based Learning for History, Heritage and Politics, and User-centered Learning Game Design.

For further information please visit: http://www.academic-conferences.org/ecgbl/ecgbl2008/ecgbl08-home.htm.

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Today, October 14, its the day the Open Access movement has choosen to claim their aims:

Open Access is a growing international movement that uses the Internet to throw open the locked doors that once hid knowledge. It encourages the unrestricted sharing of research results with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement and enjoyment of science and society.

This first Open Access Day should make us think about how we are sharing our knowledge, how many unnecesary frontiers we are establishing between the knowledge that we would like to share and our potential target.

Despite of the fact that this celebration is very scientifically oriented, one of the interesting things the Open Access day organizers have been promoting is the next questionnaire:

• Why does Open Access matter to you?

One of the UOC UNESCO Chair in E-Learning areas of activity is the “Open access systems in the use of learning materials and free software technological models”.

• How did you first become aware of it?

Via Otro Blog Más (in Spanish), weblog of one of the UOC lecturers.

• Why should scientific and medical research be an open-access resource for the world?

By adopting open access modelds, the world of medical research will evolve in a collaborative way, like in the case of software development.

• What do you do to support Open Access, and what can others do?

We should ask the public administrations to adopte the free knowledge philosophy. Maybe we should ask them to read Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture as well.

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From left to right: Sir. Tim Berners-Lee, Dr. Manuel Castells and Inma Tubella. Picture by Toni Bofill.

Mr. Manuel Castells, Chair of the University’s Research and PhD Scientific Committee and patron of the new honorary doctor has introduced Sir Tim Berners-Lee reminding us the importance of the www invention. After reading his resume and most important honours, Castells has finished his introduction with a very emotive sentence: “Without you, Sir Tim Berners-Lee we wouldn’t be here, on this university, and we wouldn’t count with 45.000 on line students”.

After Castells intervention and the investiture photo, Ravid Goldschmidt has delighted us with a musical break playing the piece Novetats de Nova Zelanda on the hang. The delicious musical notes introduced the honoured speech.

Now, some quotes from Berners-Lee’s intervention:

• The Web is just a platform for people to do new things
• Lots of things that happen on the web are there just because someone else let them happen, and let people go on with their ideas… just like the Web, that in a first draft was dubbed as vage… but exciting.
• Keeping one web is important, securing that computers still speak the same language, the same protocol, one to each other.
• Why does the web work? Because one person puts a link, and somebody else follows it. So, understanding people is (or should be) the first step in computer science and, indeed, in designing and developing the Web of the next years. This is the aim of Web Science, to gather under the same roof computer scientists, who know about computers, and other disciplines, the ones who know about people. Web Science is about bridging the people that understand technology and people that understand people. Technology is created for the sake of Humanity, not the other way.

Thanks a lot to Ismael Peña for compiling the quotes at Ictlogy.net.

Update (13/10/08)

The act videos are already available here.

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This is just a quick note to announce that Sir Tim Berners-Lee will be tomorrow at UOC heardquartes to be invested with an honorary doctorate. In addition to the www founder, the act will count with Imma Tubella, UOC’s Rector and Manuel Castells, Chair of the University’s Research and PhD Scientific Committee and patron of the new honorary doctor.

Upade (10/10/08 12.06h)

UOC IT department has enabled a streaming system for the honorary doctorate act. If you are interested, you can follow it here.

In addition, I will be publishing notes about the conference during the morning.

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Guest author: Jonatan Castaño Muñoz
Lecturer at Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3)
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Jonatan has a degree in Political Sciences and in Administration from Barcelona University (2003), he has studied for a Master’s in Applied Social Research Techniques at Barcelona University and at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and he is studying for a PhD in the Information and Knowledge Society at the UOC.

In the educational field he had worked as a researcher with the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3-UOC), in the field of analysis of universities of the Project Internet Catalonia (PIC) and is one of the authors of the book La universidad en la sociedad red (Ariel 2008).

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Based on the idea of democratising education and free knowledge, and in line with the thinking on e-learning 2.0 and social networks, an innovative idea has emerged which is gradually gaining force as an educational platform: Supercool School.

The idea, as with many good ideas, is simple but effective. This Facebook application works by connecting people interested in learning about a subject with people willing to teach it. It provides them with the virtual environment needed for the classes when a minimum number of students have come together and at least one person or teacher is able to offer their knowledge to them.

Supercool School allows for “live” classes and is currently based in Facebook, which allows for the creation of the social networks. The arrival of the new website is planned for January 2009. Indeed, what better than to hear one of the project leaders in their own words?.

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One of the most curious and historic experiments on educational technology is Sugata Mitra’s Hole in the wall. The idea was to left a computer embedded into a wall in an Indian slum, where children were allowed to access the Internet in a free way.

As a result of the experiment, the kids learned by theirselves how to use the computer and the Internet. The Minimally Invasive Education concept, that results from the experiment, has gone beyond the anecdote and remains as a basic concept on educational technology. On the next video, Professor Sugata Mitra talks at one of the TED conferences about his experiments and the self-teaching theories. We are looking forward to listen him live on the UOC UNESCO Chair Fifth International Seminar:

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