{ Categories archive }
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.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has just published a monograph studying the demography of education. Under the title “Higher Education to 2030″, this 300 pages document (read only document) summarizes the next tends:
As regards students:
- student participation will continue to expand and will in most cases be evident from grown in the size of higher education systems. Contraction will affect only a small number of countries;
- Women will be in the majority in the student population;
- The mix of the student population will be more varied, with greater numbers of international students, older students and those studying part-time, etc;
- The social base in higher education will probably continue to broaden, along with uncertainly about this will affect inequalities of educational opportunity between social groups;
- Novel students and assumptions regarding access to higher education will emerge and be more concerned with real student attainment, reflecting trends in access policies for students with disabilities;
- Changes will occur in issues and policies relating the access the flight to reduce inequality, as well as some broadening and changes among the groups concerned, depending on the particular country.
As regards teachers:
- The academic profession will be more internationally oriented and mobile, but still structured in accordance with national circunstances;
- The activities of the profession will be more diversified and specialised, and subject to varied employment contracts;
- The profession will be more gradually away from the traditional conception of a self-regulated community of professionals, and towards a model of consensus to be based on fresh principles.
Via Tim Unwin blog.
http://unescochair.blogs.uoc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/sm0109.flv
The video above is our first feature. It was recorded during Sugata Mitra’s conference at UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar: Fighting the Digital Divide Though Education. We wanted it to be long enough to allow our readers understand all Mitra’s ideas (wich are great, by the way) and the overall philosophy of the conference. At the same time, we know how valuable is people’s time when they are on line, so we needed the video to be short in order not to abuse of them.
Please, don’t hesitate to leave your comments on this post, we want to start a discussion about Sugata Mitra’s ‘Hole in the Wall’, Self Organized Learning Systems, etc. If you want to embed the video in your web site, you can get the code here
Update (02/02/09)
Finally, if you would like to watch the whole conference video, please wait until Monday February 2nd.
Those of you who have already seen the 13′ video and are willing to watch the entire conference you can do it at our Sclipo.com virtual academy. Please notice that it’s a 87′ video of the whole conference and contains some silences and things that might be unconfortable for online viewers.
This might be a little bit off topic, but worths some lines. Some of you might have already watched Slumdog Millionaire, the award winning and serious Oscar candidate film directed by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan.
The film is an adaptation of Q and A, a novel by indian diplomat Vikas Swarup whose success, like many times happens, came as a chain of casualities. Wikipedia explains it perfectly:
A BBC radio play based on the book won the Gold Award for Best Drama at the Sony Radio Academy Awards 2008 and the IVCA Clarion Award 2008. Harper Collins brought out the audio book, read by Kerry Shale, which won the Audie for best fiction audio book of the year. Film Four of the UK had optioned the movie rights and the movie titled Slumdog Millionaire, directed by Danny Boyle has been released in the US to great critical acclaim. It won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival and three awards (Best Film, Best Director and Most Promising Newcomer) at the British Independent Film Awards 2008.What almost nobody seems to know is that Vikas Swarup got the inspiration for his novel from Sugata Mitra’s ‘Hole in the wall experiment‘, even when there is no explicit mention to the indian professor neither in the film or in the novel, Self Organized Learning Systems are the only explanation possible to an indian poor kid strongly prepared and with deep knowledge that allows him to win the Who wants to be a millionaire? tv quiz.
Luckily, the indian writer is fairy recognizing Sugata Mitra’s work: “I was inspired by the hole-in-the-wall project, where a computer with an internet connection was put in a Delhi slum,” he told India Express. “When the slum was revisited after a month, the children of that slum had learnt how to use the world wide web.”, said to Times Online. We would be proud of an Oscar award for the film.
Related posts
UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning is proud to start the dissemination of its audiovisual knowledge campaign. Sugata Mitra is the first character of a series of videos that will be published monthly. Today’s piece is just a short preview of the two full length videos that will be out on Friday january 30th. From now on, we will be able to watch a teaser before enjoying a 10-15 minutes version of each conference plus the complete recording done during the chair’s Fifth International Seminar, held in Barcelona on 12-14 November 2008.
Both this and all the forthcoming videos are by-nc-nd Creative Commons licensed. Please, feel free to use the embed code to copy or distribute the video anywhere. Enjoy and stay tuned.
Shantanu Narayen (1964, Hyderabad, India) is managing director of Adobe, the second software company in the world. Products like Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign or PDF have been created on their laboratories.
The sentence above is the main conclusion from an interview published on January 1st on Spanish newspaper El País (spanish text, sorry).
Some of the Narayen ideas are very interesting:
Just a quick post to announce that we have already uploaded all the pictures from UOC UNESCO Chair in E-Learning Fifth International Seminar: Fighting the Digital Divide through Education to our Flickr account. We will upload more seminar content during the next days, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, a slide of the seminar pictures:
Note: this was mostly written last Friday, and I only write here a small fraction of what I wanted… But I do not want to hold this post hostage until I get it right.
I do not have the time, bandwidth (technological, cognitive), or battery life to properly respond to this week’s sessions at the UOC’s Open EdTech and UNESCO Chair in E-learning Fifth International Seminar: Fighting the Digital Divide through Education conferences. Though again, I am pleased to point you to Ismael’s incredible liveblogging performance - and I believe the video archives will soon be available.
I will say that I was as provoked and moved by Dr. Sugata Mitra’s session on his Hole in the Wall project (also here) and subsequent work as by any session I have ever attended. I won’t attempt a synthesis, but will suggest that watching his TED Talk will be twenty minutes very well spent.
And two sets of related questions that I can’t get out of my head:
Finally, thanks to the scale and intimacy of this week’s events, I (and members of my family) had the privilege to spend time interacting socially with Dr. Mitra in a casual environment. He was unfailingly kind, generous, irreverent and immensely amusing, evidently more or less devoid of ego… Funny how so often the most impressive people I meet in this field seem to share those attributes.
Hopefully I’ll have more reflections on this remarkable week in future posts.
Digital Divide
Education and culture
Events
ICT4D
Research
Resources
uocunescoseminar2008
Comments Off
Notes from the UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar. Fighting the Digital Divide through Education)
The real fact of the digital divide
Importance of the “digital” issue
ICT4D
Community
ICTs and Education
Digital literacies
What’s next? (VI Seminar 2009)
I would personally like to thank the speakers — for their collaboration — and the audience — for their engagement and participation.
This is the academical weblog of the UOC UNESCO Chair in E-Learning. Please feel free to leave a comment on any of the entries or contact us if you have any doubt. Suggestions will be kindly accepted.
uocunescoseminar2008