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:

• Increasing globalization continues to affect the way we work, collaborate, and communicate.
• The notion of collective intelligence is redefining how we think about ambiguity and imprecision
• Experience with and affinity for games as learning tools is an increasingly universal characteristic among those entering higher education and the workforce
• Visualization tools are making information more meaningful and insights more intuitive
• As more than one billion phones are produced each year, mobile phones are benefiting from unprecedented innovation, driven by global competition.

This issue of Horizon report, which is the sixth annual report in the series, also alerts about critical challenges like:

• There is a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy
• Students are different, but a lot of educational material is not
• Significant shifts are taking place in the ways scholarship and research are conducted, and there is a need for innovation and leadership at all levels of the academy
• We are expected, especially in public education, to measure and prove through formal assessment that our students are learning
• Higher education is facing a growing expectation to make use of and to deliver services, content, and media to mobile devices

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.

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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.

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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:

• copyright applies automaticly
• controls almost every content
• it is very difficult to get permissions for remixing content

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.

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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:

• Article: El Señor Presidente
• The FA Team
• WikiEducator.org, Wikiversity

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:

• Portal: North of the Rio Grande, Survey of Spanish-American Literature to the 1820s – each contributing blog is on the student’s choice of platform.

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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This post is egocentric, I’m really sorry about that. But let me continue, you might find some useful information though.

I have to introduce Brian Lamb this evening at Zemos 98 Festival, so I have decided to organize my ideas about him in this post as a previous exercise to my spoken introduction.

I completely agree with novelist Vladimir Nabokov: one of his biggest reasons in order not to give live interviews was that he was much better writer than speaker, so why should he speak about his novels? I feel in a similar way every time I have to speak to an audience. That’s why I have decided to write this post, I prefer to put my ideas on a text before communicating them in a talk.

I heard about Brian Lamb many times, all of them by some of my colleagues telling wonderful things about how this professor innovates in the use of learning technologies. Everybody was speaking about him in such a good way that in my mind he became like a untouchable pope with miles of distance between me. That image soon felt when I met him personally. It was during UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar, where he assisted as part of the audience: dressed up with a black shirt with big white music keys in. To me his image was near to one of those Nudie country suits. Weird for a Canadian teacher, isn’t it? I thought the same.

After this first impact I started to talk with him and to me he seemed a really nice person, he was actually trying to speak some Spanish so that I could feel more comfortable with him. We didn’t talk about e-Learning, neither about technologies or mash-ups, we spoke about his son and family, for at that time he was a visiting professor at UOC and had his family (including his girlfriend’s mom) with him.

The rest of the things I know about him I learned from his weblog:

He is an expert on social learning and open education, formerly Emerging Technologies Discoordinator with UBC’s Office of Learning Technology.

A fast look to his weblog give us very interesting information: his very innovative idiosyncrasy as learning professional is accompanied by a very acid and fun sense of humour. Some of his most famous articles are titled making funny (and atractive for the audience) winks to cultural stereotypes and myths. For example:

• Dr. Mashup: or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix (aka Dr. Strangelove, or how to stop worrying and love the bomb, Stanley Kubric film, 1964)
• Taking a Walk on the Wiki Side (aka Take a Walk on the Wild Side, Lou Reed, 1972).

Brian is also a very valuable speaker. Let me summarize some of the ideas he recently expressed on an interview published at UOC’s web site:

• About educator refusing technological innovation:
  

  There are a lot of really legitimate grounds to feel insecure, but I believe that if the university addresses those challenges head on it can actually thrive in a more open, disaggregated knowledge environment, really actively engaging the wider community.

• About Web 2.0 uses in education:
  

  My approach is to look at what is working out in the Web 2.0 and try to see what lessons we can learn. And it seems like the projects that are successful there have an invitation to participate as a big part of that. It is the idea that individuals doing the things that they want to do can nonetheless be part of something bigger. The opportunity to offer feedback, the idea that a piece of media once created can be replicated, adapted and mixed with other pieces of content…

• And some more, just see how he inspires others. In this case is Jim Groom, creator of the term edupunk, writing:
  

  The ability for Brian to simultaneously challenge and embrace ideas may be facilely discounted as contradictory or incongruous. But, in fact, it is this faculty that made this talk so deeply inspiring, it wasn’t only unbelievably gripping as performance, it was also deeply evocative as a means to elegantly problematize while affectionately living within some of the basic tenets supporting the infra-structural ideas of educational technology. Brian’s final slide sums it up even more eloquently…

These are just some examples of Lamb’s value as a educator and speaker, but there are many more. Some of them will be shown today at his talk, some of them will be appearing on his weblog. The rest of us should just sit down, open our mind (as Jimi Tenor says, they should be like open books, so that we could read some others mind easly) and let him inspire us.

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Martín-Barbero talks about a very strategic topic for the all the societies in the world, which are living a process of expanded education. Two ideas on this way: a mention to “Las ideas fuera de lugar” (Ideas out of place), a text from Roberto Schwarz, Brazilian thinker, that talks about how strange is the mix that makes our society: how European ideas emerging from the French revolution work differently in Latin American. Those ideas where out of place, as education is much out of the institutions. The other idea he wants to mention is this popular sentence: “everything we know is something we know collaboratively”.

Once the concept of collective intelligence has been introduced, we must ask ourselves:

What changes are affecting the school?

Most of the institutions have yet to understand that the educational communication model has nothing to do with the social communication model: the scholar model is still based on the book (left-right, top-down) and is very old fashioned if we look on how the society has based its communication model.

To understand that change, the difference between both models is not related with a crisis of the educational institution, but with a crisis that affects the whole society, including the family structure and all the social institutions.

Not even the Internet seems to be strong enough to attack the “dictatorial” line model of communication of the school, says Martín-Barbero. This scholarship system has not its own vitality, and it will only have one the day that education becomes the strategic place of interaction between languages, cultures and writings we can see in the society.

We can’t be citizens without being active in our role, without our own voice: how can we ask for citizens voices when the most part of the time we spend on the school we are repeating the teacher’s words? We need both to read and to write: we need to learn how to write our own history.

A definition of expanded education: the one that, assuming the knowledge society (including all its risks), also assumes that the are other ways of knowing. If we don’t benefit of this crisis of the old-school values we are going to continue using knowledge to exclude, dominate… and what is pending on the scholarship system is training citizens: we have to be educated to live with the different, with our opposites…

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I’m writing from Sevilla, where the Expanded Education Symposium (which is part of the Zemos98 festival on its 11th Edition) is about to start. As one of the festival slogans says: “everything is left to do”.

Being honest, the event has already started. Right now we are listening to Gonzalo Frasca’s speech about how video games can help us on the learning process and in creating our own critical opinion, but the symposium opening is going to happen in some minutes.

Jesús Martín Barbero, academic communicator and counsellor of Cultural Policies for UNESCO, is going to open the seminar with a very interesting topic: “The educational city: from a society with an educational system to a knowledge and learning society”.

As Ruben Díaz, one of the organizers of the event, announced some days ago on this blog, there are three big conferences/lines of discussion on Expanded Education Symposium.

After Martín Barbero’s intervention, Brian Lamb will speak on Tuesday about the need of an open education (he will presumably answer to such interesting questions like: “How many copyright violations can we make on a public presentation?”, “What is data literacy?”, “Has the web 2.0 bubble already exploded?”). The UOC UNESCO Chair is actually collaborating on this conference (I will myself introduce the speaker to the audience and moderate the post-intervention discussion).

On Wednesday Ronaldo Lemos will speak about social and economic changes that will be influencing the future of education.

This conferences and some more content will be liveblogged until Thursday. Stay tuned, Martín Barbero in some minutes…

Useful links about the Expanded education symposium:

• Twitter: @Zemos98 & @Tiscar
• Video streaming of the event (all the speakers are using Spanish, so far)
• Official pictures of the event: Julio Albarran on Flickr.

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http://unescochair.blogs.uoc.edu/video/smetroslarge.flv

Susan Metros presented at UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar her particular point of view of how Visual Literacy should be done in what she calls “the age of the Big Picture”. Now that images (of any kind: still, motion, print, digital, etc.) are running the world of communication, it’s sad to check how the youngest are used to decode visual messages but barely know how to create them. Susan Metros conference, now summarized on this video, is a great guide to visual literacy. Don’t miss it.

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Susan E. Metros (University of Southern California) also visited Barcelona on November 08 to attend UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar. Her expertise areas combine graphic design, e-Learning and visual literacy.

Her conference, entitled “Visual literacy on the age of the big picture”, was a theorical session about how can we define visual literacy, a discipline everybody has asumed as a very necessary one. However, visual literacy doesn’t have its own theories, it borrows from several other disciplines. All about the topic on Susan Metros’ extended video, to be published on Monday March 23th.

Meanwhile, if you want to embed this teaser on your website you can use this code.

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Rubén Díaz is a graduate in Audiovisual Communication (University of Seville, 2003), has studied a year away in the Department of Hispanic Studies in the University of Birmingham (UK, 2001) and has completed postgraduate studies in Digital Journalism (CEA, 2004). He is currently studing a second degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology (University of Seville).

He is a member of ZEMOS98 Gestión Creativo Cultural, responsible of International Festival ZEMOS98. ZEMOS98 has been projecting activities and research in the area of education and communication since 1998. Rubén Díaz has been an editor of the publications “Creation and General Intellect” (2005 – download PDF), “Television does not film that” (2006 – download PDF), “Digital Culture and Participatory Communication” (2006 – download PDF) and “Control Panel. Critical interrupters for a society under close surveillance” (2007). He has also coordinated a new publication by ZEMOS98 and Mar Villaespesa: “Código Fuente: la remezcla” (2009) and is responsible (together with Juan Freire) for the Symposium “Expanded Education”. He has been in charge of cultural research and educational projects of different kinds, such as seminars, workshops, conferences, exhibitions, courses, screenings and concerts.

The 11th ZEMOS98 International Festival (22th – 28th March | Seville, Spain) focuses on the search for new forms of education that respond to the social and communicational processes arising from the Internet. New digital culture is characterised by networked organisation, collective work, convergence culture, copyleft, etc. The fact that most of these processes haven’t been incorporated into conventional educational systems means that new forms of education aren’t taking place only – or even mainly – within formal schooling, and they are not being led by educational institutions. There are now countless artistic, scientific, communicational and educational projects of a cultural, social, digital and audiovisual nature, and these make up the cutting-edge of 21st century education – an expanded form of education that goes beyond the narrow, traditional institutional, thematic and methodological boundaries.

Continue reading »

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