We finally have the 10 minutes video that summarizes Tim Unwin’s talk at UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar. One of the most “fighting the digital divide” talks, focused on the development of the underprivileged countries through the use of ICT’s, but keeping a very interesting sceptic point of view of some things. http://unescochair.blogs.uoc.edu/video/unwin.flv
You can embed the video on your web site using this code.
Last month we made a break in the publication of the videos recorded during our Fifth International Seminar, but we had another good video instead: Jack Dorsey talked with us about possible educational uses of the tool Twitter. Now we have some more material to show. It’s an honour to present you Tim Unwin’s ICT4D conference (which is just a short way to express a larger tittle: Partnerships and post-constructivism education in development practive).
Unwin, who holds an UNESCO Chair in ICT4D in the University of London, came deep on the mainlines of collaboration with underprivileged countries and how ICT’s can help development but always keeping a very strong sense of critics on the mistakes done, the problems found and how to improve it all.
On this teaser, that announces the incoming of the conference video for Monday 8th June, Unwin gives us a key sentence: “I’m a passionate addict of technology, but in the back of my mind I think we may be causing a huge damage”:http://unescochair.blogs.uoc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/teaserunwin.flv
You can embed the video on your web site using this code.
Critic and writer Howard Rheingold has just coined a very interesting concept. The Twitter Literacy theory (”I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it”, says Rheingold) is motivated by the fact that Nielsen recently noted that 60% of new Twitter users fail to return on the following month. The author argues a series of issues that can help users to avoid the spam and find their own way to the real conversation:
Please, read the whole Rheingold’s article at SFgate.com for a complete vision of the story.
The New Media Consortium (NMC) and the Educause Association recently reported the results of the Horizon Project, “a long-running qualitative research project that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations”. The document (PDF, 368KB) analyses the context of new education and its relationship with technologies like mobiles, cloud computing, geo-localization, the semantic web applications or smart objects and describes key trends like:
This issue of Horizon report, which is the sixth annual report in the series, also alerts about critical challenges like:
In addition, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya has been collaborating with the New Media Consortium on the translation of the report onto Spanish (PDF, 401KB) and Catalan (PDF, 396KB) languages.
The New Media Consortium, an foundation world wide respected due to its expertise on education and innovation fields, include some names on its council that might be familiar tu us. I’m talking about Susan Metros, whose “Digital literacy in the age on the big picture” intervention at UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar video summary we published on this blog some weeks ago.
What seems to be a bit worrying is that, after reading the report challenges and conclusions, the Spanish Government plan (addresses to an article written in Spanish) of stablishing partnerships with editorial, technology and telecommunication services companies (links to a blogpost written in Spanish) in order to digitalize its teaching materials doesn’t seem to fit very much with the main ideas of the Horizon plan.
Jack Dorsey, CEO and founder of Twitter, toured Spain recently for several days. During his visit to Barcelona, we had the chance to share a conversation with him.
The idea was to make an open interview, based on the questions sent to us by Twitter users. After writing some questions of our own and selecting the most appropriate ones from the received ones, we met Jack Dorsey in a Barcelona Hotel on March 2nd.
Both sets of questions took as a premise the fact that Twitter is a very useful tool for educational purposes. During the documentation process for the meeting, we consulted some blog posts, lists of uses and articles analysing its educational uses.
The surprise came on the talk with Jack Dorsey. He is not specifically interested in education, and isn’t aware of the specific strengths or problems Twitter has in that field.
Alright, may be it is unsurprising for the CEO of such a valuable company. Even so, the rest of the story is on the video, please feel free to embed it on your web site using this code.
http://unescochair.blogs.uoc.edu/video/jackdorsey.flv
The UNESCO and the U.S. Library of Congress, in collaboration with another 26 institutions from 19 countries, have launched today the World Digital Library, a content repository that allows users around the world to consult search and browse features in seven languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
The idea of storing a wide number of historical documents (such as books, audio files, maps, pictures and videos) has been an aspiration for many people since the Internet was born. On my opinion that there were two important requirements on the development of this project:
Next steps on this way, says UNESCO, will be targeted to involve more institutions from all UNESCO member countries, increase the quantity and diversity of content on the WDL, forging mutually beneficial cooperation with other digital library projects and soliciting feedback from relevant user groups.
Despite of the fact that the content indexed on the WDL is copyright protected, its legal announcement recommends to consult copytight questions to each contributor partner. WDL is obviosuly an open educational resources project, but as long as it allows us the access to key and historical documents easy and freely, it’s importance and utility is not debatable.
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A new issue of RUSC (the e-Journal promoted by the Univeristat Oberta de Catalunya and its UNESCO Chair in E-Learning) has been published this week.
This issue opens a new phase of the journal, with two important changes. First, its periodicity has been modified: from the next issue, RUSC will be published every July and January, and numbers will include a monographic section and 5 or 6 additional articles each one. Secondly, RUSC has been adapted to the Open Journal System. All these changes are expected to improve the quality of the journal.
On this number we include, the monographic has been coordinated by Juan Freire and it’s titled “Digital culture and creative practices in education”, consisting on five articles by Enrique Dans, Alejandro Piscitelli, Tíscar Lara, Aníbal de la Torre and Brian Lamb and Jim Groom; they all analyse the impact that digital technology and Internet are having on education, understood as a process based on knowledge, communication and social interactions. Professors and students face drastic transformations with the emergency of digital culture, which may cause the need of changes in educational institutions’ role and organization. <(p>
Another five articles complete the issue; one of them (Aguado-López, E.; Rogel-Salazar, R.; Becerril-García, A.; Baca-Zapata, G.) analyses the universities’ presence in the Network and the digital gap between United States and the rest of the world; the second one (Ávila, L.A.; Miranda, A.; Echeverría, M.R.) analyses the best ways of sharing information in virtual platforms and how virtual communities are constructed for investigation. Another of the articles (Bozu, Z.; Imbernon, F.) studies a work experience among Catalan universities aimed to create communities of practice and knowledge. In a fourth article (Rodriguez, A.) a personal experience tells us how people with visual disabilities can learn data processing sciences. Finally, the last article (Hermes, E.) deals with the pedagogical and reflexive use of the new technological tools as one of the main factors for the creation of processes enable to respond to the needs of the Knowledge Society.
Please, visit http://rusc.uoc.edu for further information about the issue (articles are available for download).
Well, let’s just imagine that you have a chance to talk with Jack Dorsey, Inventor, Founder, & Chairman of Twitter, what would you like to ask him? Obviously, we are mainly interested on possible educational uses of this tool. Mature your thoughts, and once you find the great question, just leave it on the comments (remember, 140 characters maximum), because we are interviewing Jack Dorsey this week and want to count with your experience and interests. You can also send us (me, in this case) your questions via Twitter. Deadline for questions submission is wednesday 23:59.
Ronaldo Lemos is going to make a view of the present and a bit of the future of education. One of the most important things on today’s education is the change the cultural industry is going through. Again (like in Brian Lamb’s presentation), music industry is our driver to see how things are shifting to something different. After checking the change in the music and publishing industry, we have to obviously point our view to the digital production.
Ronaldo speaks always from the Brazilian side of the network, giving numbers of his country: there are more wikipedia entries in Portuguese than in Spanish, there is a Brazilian version of Youtube (videolog) which is older than the google’s video site.
There is a lot of innovation in Brazil, says Ronaldo. The idea of citicializing journalism works to emerge the Brazilian culture from the underground.
There is a tension between the traditional closed model and the new collaborative model. The first difference refers to the legal/illegal classic conflict, which take us to the so-called copyright: a very conservative model full of questions and problems that straightly affect the future of education:
The paradox of the copyright is that is sometimes just doesn’t work neither for users or producers.
Talking about education (at leasT), the only way to get access to the books a student needs for his studies (at least in Brazil) is to copy it. Actually, there is a Brazilian movement claiming the right to freely copy books.
Setting the eye on the future of education, the copyright issue is one of the biggest problem for the right development. You can’t remix educational content unless you have the rights, so the idea of the “legal commons”. Using CC we can recombine the process of work. Other way to get this “legal commons” is to reform copyright.
A new idea introduced by Lemos is the “social commons” (which is different to the “legal commons”), just projects not based on copyright, using CC and public domain but using social practices, that simply ignores intellectual properties (Tecnobrega is the great example of this).
Another example of “social commons” might be the lan-houses phenomena, local area network houses (computers connected to each other at home, usually to play games), but when the connection is enabled some other people that is not interested on video games are paying a very small amount of money to use the network. It is a down-up massive phenomena that works on Brazilian favelas, reaching the number of 90.000.
Disclaimer: before starting the talk, Brian shared all the material of his talk.
Brian’s beginning is amazing, he hasn’t started with a speech, he just asked everyone to show him their worst hate during 10 seconds so that he can record it on video and put on youtube. A teacher starts with a performance. Next step: watching a short documentary about copyright breaker DJ Girl Talk. Taking this as a beginning point, he talks about his three lines of speech:
In addition to the obvious issues of copyright, and we determine the ‘originality’ of an idea, let’s think about other ways that “the past” is asserting control over “the future”… and ways in which the essential properties of digital media are not understood by those who are making key decisions.
As shown above, the representation of the English language tags on the wikipedia makes obvious that all the wikipedia anonymous contributers, who are not paid or promoted, form the perfect example of what a well done collaborative work is.
Next step: he is mentioning the Murder, Madness and Mayhem course that inspired Jim Groom to create the term edupunk. Jon Beasely-Murray asked his students to write entries in the wikipedia about latinamerican literature “speaking” about dictators because the English articles about the topics were very poor: the result is that the topic became a huge success on the wikipedia, and some of the work groups where featured on the main page due to the quality of his work. All right, that’s edupunk.
Some other adventures in wikipedia:
The creators of these wikipedia articles are creating a very important source of knowledge. Quoting the original source:
Why does this work appeal so much?* fast, cheap, and out of control…
* augments traditional literacy with new media literacy
* results in genuinely useful public knowledge resources (perhaps the essence of open education resources)
* students will respond to tasks that are authentic
About the work with weblogs, it is very important for students to have their own platform. More examples, by chance held by the same professor running the wikipedia experiment:
After talking about the work of the students, comes the time about the cost of this educational model. The topic is simple: the cost is zero (personally, I’d say tending to zero): there is no cost on making blogs or creating wikipedia content.
This topics drive us to the concept of Open Education. Most people is working in Open Educational Resources (OER) search engines and lists. Again, the cost of sharing knowledge (educational content, in this case) is Zero. A very interesting thing in here are Mobile Course Discussions, that allows us learning anywhere and anytime with no cost. This technologies, combined with the use of RSS are the perfect fift for expanded education.
Quoting Cory Doctorow (Science Fiction Writer and one of the most famous Creative Commons supporter):
“If you blow your works into the net like a dandelion clock on the breeze, the net itself will take care of the copying costs.” — Cory Doctorow, Think Like a Dandelion
A simple explanation of what RSS is might be found (as usual) in one of the Commoncraft Videos:
Brian’s speech about edupunk is too well documented and authentic to be reproduced here, and even when it might be an abuse of the quotation rights, here it comes all his code related on the presentation:
What’s the deal with EduPunk?
My only cred on this issue is I was there when EduPunk was born. We talked about writing a punk-themed zine along the lines of Hackety Hack on how to run an ed tech operation for no money. (Later we did do something like that with a different theme, the survivalist-tinged Radical Reuse).
To me, and perhaps me alone, the great enduring value was in three posts Jim wrote right after that discussion.
- The Glass Bees – “Corporations are selling us back our ideas, innovations, and visions for an exorbitant price. I want them all back, and I want them now!”
- Permapunk – enter the idea of the learning party.
- Murder, Madness, Mayhem – discussed above.
It generated an ungodly number of blog posts, and garnered a surprising amount of attention outside the world of education.
The South by Southwest Panel
L-R: Jim Groom, Stephen Downes, Barbara Ganley, Gardner Campbell
- Audio here – revealed some strong divergences on the panel, some withering critiques from the audience backchannel…
Update 30/03/09
You can hear Brian Lamb’s talk in English here. Introduction was made in Spanish. No English version, sorry.
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