Openness – anyone can join, and anyone can follow anyone else
Immediacy – You won’t get the sense of Twitter if you just check in once a week
Variety – political or technical argument, gossip, scientific info, news flashes, poetry, social arrangements, classrooms, …
Reciprocity – people give and ask freely for information they need
A channel to multiple publics – I’m a communicator and have a following that I want to grow and feed. I can get the word out about a new book or vlog post in second…
A way to meet new people – Connecting with people who share interests has been the most powerful social driver of the Internet since day one.
Community-forming – Twitter is not a community, but it’s an ecology in which communities can emerge.
A platform for mass collaboration – Twestival (online charity event) has raised over a quarter of a million dollars via Twitter, funding 55 clean water projects for 17,000 people in Ethiopia, Uganda, and India.
Searchability – the ability to follow searches for phrases like “swine flu” or “Howard Rheingold” in real time provides a kind of ambient information radar on topics that interest me.
Disclaimer: this post is an exercise of liveblogging. Even when the content remains forever, must be understood as juncture, with some imprecisions.
Lemos, on the left, talking about the future of education.
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.
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.
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!”
Disclaimer: this post is an exercise of liveblogging. Even when the content remains forever, must be understood as juncture, with some imprecisions.
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:
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…
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.
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…
Disclaimer: this post is an exercise of liveblogging. Even when the content remains forever, must be understood as juncture, with some imprecisions.
Image of the symposium room just before it gets filled of audience
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:
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
