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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.
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“An institution’s internet presence is the sum of all of the actions that the different players carry out on different parts of the web. Internet strategy does not end with the design of the official website. The digital environment needs to be managed.” This concludes and sums up the Network society: management and monitoring presentation that Genís Roca offered in March to nearly a hundred professionals from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC), as part of the working sessions with the Student Services Area and the Student Incorporation and Monitoring Area.
It was made clear in the session that brand presence on the internet can only be managed if there is a strategy in place that takes into account an organisation’s own activity on the web and its digital environment: other institutions and individuals who maintain and share web presence linked to our own.
There is now the possibility for anyone’s opinion about a brand to appear on the first page of Google’s search results when we look for information. This means we have to reflect on the fact that an organisation’s digital identity is not based on the messages it sends out. Instead, its web presence is the sum of its own activities and those generated in relation to it on the internet by other institutions and individuals in a range of settings and formats.
An organisation’s digital identity is built by what is said about it on the web, in the digital press, in blogs and on social networks. Thus, organisations need a web presence model and strategy that encompasses what they do, but also what the other players on the internet do in this respect.
Managing digital identity means managing complexity. It requires the designing of a web presence model that takes into account a range of possible scenarios. Specifically, according to Genís Roca’s model, we need to pay attention to the nine variables resulting from the intersection of the sources of activities on the internet (own, other and shared) and the owner of the platform where this activity takes place (which again can be own, other or shared).
This web presence paradigm involves both what is taking place in our domain and that taking place beyond this. It highlights the complex combination of our own and others’ actions taking place in each of these settings. Management of all this is what is involved in managing our identity on the web and this is why organisations have People, Information and Technology.
Managing an organisation’s web presence means managing People, Information and Technology and what happens when these intersect: attitudes, tools and skills.
With respect to attitudes, organisations have to be able to adapt and balance the way businesses and technologies are understood by pre-1970s generations (a minority with great decision-making powers and most of the positions of responsibility) and the way businesses and technologies are understood by the new generations (a growing majority that is skilled and knowledgeable in the web, but underrepresented in the organisation’s power structure).
In terms of tools, the web is rich in open environments, collaborative sites, platforms for communication and discussion, solutions for sharing documents or jointly managing projects. An organisation has to know what tools can provide value and make the most of their being available, flexible and free.
Finally, as far as skills are concerned, an organisation has to focus on knowing how to find, read and listen on the web. These monitoring tasks require the prioritising of what needs to be found on the internet so as to ensure that the most appropriate search methods and environments are used in each case to retrieve relevant results.
To read on the internet, an organisation has to take advantage of the features offered by RSS and be able to order, or even customise, the diverse range of sources of information offered by the web so as to retrieve the most pertinent and up-to-date information in their areas of interest.
To listen to the web, an organisation has to be aware of what is being said about it globally. It needs to track its appearances in the headlines and know which blogs are talking about it and which sites aren’t. It has to monitor trends and search habits on the web, links and any mentions in the blogosphere, the web conversations that are most closely linked to its aims, and its position (and that of the competition) in the internet’s benchmark rankings.
In short, an organisation’s web presence management is the result of managing people’s attitudes in terms of the potential offered by social information systems and technology, exploiting certain online tools to help meet objectives and the skills needed to listen and develop appropriately on the web.
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.
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:
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.
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…
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:
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.
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.
The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya has recently created the eLearn Center, a new office that reunites all the e-Learning related initiatives of the institution. Both research projects and diffusion activities will be now marked with the new Center anagram.
UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning will also be incorporated on the eLearn Center structure.
The new Center is being presented today at Barcelona Support Center with interventions from Imma Tubella, Rector of the University, Begoña Gros, Vice Rector of innovation and Paul Kirschner, Director of Research of Lifelong in the Professions, Netherlands Laboratory for Lifelong Learning (NeLLL), Open University of the Netherlands. Afterwards, there will be a roundtable with Ramón Capdevila (Universia), Jordi Vivancos (Education Department, Generalitat de Catalunya) and Luis Collado (Director of Google Book Search), the three of them will debate about Innovation and research networks creation.
Live notes from the eLearn Center presentation:
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.