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The idea of storing a wide number of historical documents (such as books, audio files, maps, pictures and videos) has been an aspiration for many people since the Internet was born.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:

• Technology: some years ago it would have been impossible to compile an store such a big amount of information and serve it to a big audience. The born of new formats and the lower cost of technologies made this project feasible.
• Authority: not everyone has the moral and legal authority to compile and offer all this information to the users. UNESCO is the most indicated institution for this purpose, followed by a very respected library like U.S Congress, which is the main contributor to the 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 WDL is obviosuly an open educational resources project, but as long as it allows us the access to key and historical documents easy and freely, it’s importance and utility is not debatable.

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Elsa Corominas is Economist, Ph.D candidate in Sociology by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editorial Secretary of RUSC.

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).

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Roger Griset has a diploma in Library Science and Documentation from the University of Barcelona. He is currently working on the OpenCourseWare website at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC) where he forms part of the Learning Resources group. He also participates in innovation projects linked to the University’s teaching materials.

Starting point

Since it began, the UOC has always invested in creating and producing specific teaching materials that adapt to the UOC’s own distance education-oriented methodology. These materials are used in the teaching and in the UOC students’ learning process.

Where are we?

Since 2008, certain contracts for authoring and ceding usage rights include a clause that lets the University publish these materials under an open licence. Thanks to this authorisation, some materials have been published on the UOC’s OpenCourseWare website, which already holds hours of materials for around thirty subjects. We plan to expand the subjects currently on offer (and others) with new open content in the future.

Where do we want to go?

The UOC is currently working on a Director Plan for Learning Resources that is to set the guidelines for the coming years. As well as the obvious financial and sustainability aspects involved in this kind of open resource, the Director Plan is, inevitably, going to be influenced by two trends affecting the world of higher education: firstly, the movement to open-access scientific literature at universities, including educational resources; and secondly, the new educational trends (connectivism and social constructivism) and the reform of the European higher education system (EHEA), which bring a new focus on contents in the framework of teaching.

The two aforementioned trends have already had some effect, and have changed our way of thinking and working over the last three years. Since 2005, materials have been produced in XML – allowing us to reuse them. Thanks to this, in 2009, we now have a large amount of materials published in new formats: audiobook, videobook and ebook.

Upcoming challenges

We still have a long way to go before the UOC’s teaching contents can meet the full definition of OERs:

• Break down the contents into smaller units (teaching materials are currently over 200 pages long).
• Make production of materials more flexible, so that faculty can publish their own smaller resources more easily and more quickly, without doing away with the University’s centralised management that ensures the minimum quality standards.
• Create tools for collaborative production of materials within the University.
• Aid the production of materials in web formats: blogs and wikis.

We have made important progress by starting to open access to our contents. The rest will come with time and effort.

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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:

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The following text has been crossposted from Richard Stallman: Free Software and Beyond, liveblogged notes taken at the conference by Richard M. Stallman at the First International Conference Free Knowledge, Free Technology – Education for a free information society in Barcelona (Spain), 15 July 2008, on the production and sharing of free educational and training materials about Free Software.

The conference deals first with the concept of Free Software to then enter broader and deeper considerations about Freedom in the Information Society. The speaker reflects about how the pervasiveness of computers as tools implied in almost every socioeconomic aspect makes the debate about Free Software actually a debate about Freedom in general.

Richard M. Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation
Free Software and Beyond

Free Software is about giving freedom to the user and respecting the work done by the community of programmers.

The analogy with cooking recipes is clearly the best way to help people understand the four freedoms of Free Software.

Continue reading »

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It’s been a month since we started writing about Edupunk on this blog. During that time, the term has been spreaded among the Internet with different results depending on the area we look at. On the anglo-saxon www, for example, many influencers are speaking about the concept with very different focusses:

• The Guardian blogger David Cohen writes on motoboard: Nevermind the pedagogues, here’s edupunk in a clear nod to punk pioneer band Sex Pistols.
• Stephen Downes, one of the most important theorists on E-Learning, writes: The concept of Edupunk has totally caught wind, spreading through the blogosphere like wildfire.
• His colleague Brian Lamb, one of the speakers of UOC UNESCO Chair Fourth International Seminar, is also shaking the concept using titles like Another dirty edupunk is back on the streets… for his posts

On the spanish www, several experts have been writing about the topic, but only Juan Freire has gone deep into it. His post titled ¿Hacia una identidad edupunk? is highly recommended for spanish readers. Some of the most important ideas contained on the post are:

• Edupunk is not a technological change but a cultural change.
• The term gives identity to an older idea: the do it yourself on education, or how open source tools are chepaer, agiler and allows much more independence than propietary software.
• It is very important not to make the mistake of thinking that TIC are leading a revolution. It’s the people behind technology what allows the change.

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• A short fresh introduction to Edupunk

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Heather Ford (blog), director of the Icommons organization and one of the most active persons fighting for the Internet rights along Europe and America, created some months ago this Open Education Map that seems to be a very interesting project.

Maybe we should spread the information about this project so that anyone can add more institutions and projects. Anyone can edit the map, in fact I myself have edited the map to add UOC. Right now is the only place for OER in Spain (in this map, I mean). I’m sure that is not reflecting the reality so, go on… make your collaboration.

Via Tíscar Lara.

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Just a quick post to announce an interesting event. Free Knowledge, Free Technology will take place in Barcelona, Spain, from July 15 to 17. The idea is to debate the concepts around free culture (always understanding free as in freedom) and it’s particular application onto education processes. This year’s FKFT schedule includes speakers like Richard Stallman.

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As we announced some days ago, we are closing the program of the UOC UNESCO Chair in E-Learning Fith Seminar, Fighting against the digital divide trough education.

During the last days we have confirmed two more names. On one side, Security Architecture of the OLPC ex-director, Ivan Krstic, from Harvard University, will feature the low cost laptops for education Case Study. On the other side, we will count with Mr. Bakary Diallo, Rector of the African Virtual University to analyze the case of that institution.

Anyone interested on the topic can check the details on the Seminar’s web site or on the downloadeable program (on PDF).

Related entries:

• Fighting the digital divide throught education.

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We are working on the organization of the UOC UNESCO Chair Fith International Seminar, that will take place on Barcelona from November 12th to 14th. Altough we already have some names to be confirmed and we can’t make public the entire program, this weblog is a good place to announce that we will have some a good representation of several universities and institutions talking about the fight against the digital divide through education.

For example, we will listen to professor Tim Unwin about how ICT4D can help the fight. We will also count with Teemu Leinonen in representation of Wikiversity, a project that will allow us to open a very healthy debate about sharing academic knowledge.

On the same way, Bobbi Kurshan will present Curriki, an international network that offers free access to educational contents for pre-school and primary school levels.

On the other hand, Professor Sugata Mitra, from Newcastle University, will present his case “Hole in the wall”, where the concept Minimally Invasive Education comes from. There are some other topics to discuss during the Seminar that we will announce as soon as we have more confirmed speakers. Meanwhile, you can have a look at the seminar info on its web site.

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