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.

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In the same line of the ideas expressed by Wendy Drexler on The Networked Student video, Bill Farren explains in Insulat-ed how the educational model has changed from a straight unidireccional structure to a new frame where peers are equal and share knowledge and are organized on a multishape system. Highly recomended: ed4wb.

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The sentence above is the title choosen by Javier Martín to open a very interesting articled featured yesterday on El País, one of the most important Spanish newspapers.

On his piece, Martín speaks about the use of videogames as a learning tool, which was the main topic of the ECGBL 2008 Congress, announced on this blog by one of his organizers some weeks ago.

The article also features some of the most interesting opinions of Professor Sugata Mitra and, of course, an explanation of his “Hole in the wall project”. The main novelty of the article for the readers of this blog might be the list of competences announced by the MacArthur Foundation as result of the study “Media education for the 21st century“:

1. Play: experiment with the context
2. Act: adopt different identities
3. Simulation: interpret and build dynamic models from the real world.
4. Appropiation: assuming ideas and rebuild them onto multimedia materials.
5. Multitask: scan the context and change the target if it is needed
6. Distributive knowledge: interact with tools in order to distribute our knowledgement
7. Collective intelligence: gather information and share with others in order to achieve a common target
8. Common sense: evaluate the credibility of the different sources
9. Transmediatic: follow the trace of stories and informations through different methods
10. Connection: search, summarize and distribute
11. Negotiation: move between the different groups respecting multiple perspectives.

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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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César Córcoles is a lecturer at the Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunication Department at the Open University of Catalonia, where he teaches the scientific subjects of the Multimedia Grade.

His interest areas are the use of multimedia and interactive tools (motion, 3D visualization) for the teaching of sciences, with a special interest on Mathematics and Physics.

Maybe it is true that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but while attending the European Ecommerce Conference (held in Barcelona on october 21) I couldn’t help relating the three talks I liked best to current interests in the world of e-Learning…

• First, there was Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, and quite famous because of his The Long Tail book (and website). He is currently about to finish his next book, Free, which should be out next year and deals with, unsurprisingly, business models implying free products and services. While ‘free’ has been around for a long time, the new ‘bit economy’ makes it much more important. One of the basic ideas is ‘you shouldn’t be selling goods that stopped being scarce’ (and thus easy to charge for), e.g. digital music… or any kind of digital content, actually. Which leads to think about OER as a good idea to promote Universities’ services and certifications around them.
• Then there was Gavin Potter (of Netflix Prize fame, and featured in Wired magazine) talking about recommendation engines for on-line shops (and personals sites!)… that is so close in so many aspects to the personalization of learning itineraries that some of my colleagues are working on.
• And finally we’ve had the pleasure of listening to David Recordon, founder of OpenID and currently Open Platforms Tech Lead at Six Apart, talking about the use of OpenID and a few other open APIs that one could/should use to build an open stack for web applications… and which could be recycled to talk about personal learning environments.

It’s strange how can someone think so much about e-Learning at an e-commerce conference…

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Jordi Sánchez-Navarro is a lecturer at the Information and Communication Sciences Department at the Open University of Catalonia, where he teaches on screen studies, and is Academic Director of Postgraduate Studies. He achieved a PhD in Film Studies (Universitat Ramon Llull) with a dissertation about the concepts of authorship, crisis of the genres and cultural recycling in post-modern media.

He is currently researching into how video games work as educational tools, and in the formal aspects of video games, approaching both issues to the more general field of screen studies. Among other activities, he collaborates with the research groups SPIDER (Smarter People through Interactive Digital Entertainment Resources) and Technology and Conmmunication.

Between 16 and 17 October, the European Conference on Games-Based Learning (ECCBL 2008) reunites researchers, academics and professionals from the games and education areas to come together to listen, discuss and present their research, points of views and knowledge. This is the 2nd year of the conference and it is hosted by The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) in Barcelona and held in the Silken Diagonal Hotel in Barcelona.

The conference addresses elements of both theory and practice of all aspects of Games-Based Learning, and offers an opportunity for academics, practitioners and consultants involved in the field to exchange ideas. The programme for the event will include an extensive range of peer-reviewed papers, including keynote presentations from leaders in the field, such as Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen and Ben Sawyer.

Over the last ten years, the way in which education and training is delivered has changed considerably with the advent of new technologies. One such new technology that holds considerable promise for helping to engage learners is Games-Based Learning (GBL).

The Conference’s papers will cover various issues and aspects of GBL in education and training: technology and implementation issues associated with the development of GBL; use of mobile and MMOGs for learning; pedagogical issues associated with GBL; social and ethical issues in GBL; GBL best cases and practices, and other related aspects.

In addition to the main conference, the Conference has three mini tracks: Game Based Collaborative Learning; Game Based Learning for History, Heritage and Politics, and User-centered Learning Game Design.

For further information please visit: http://www.academic-conferences.org/ecgbl/ecgbl2008/ecgbl08-home.htm.

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One of the most interesting topics of the UOC UNESCO Chair Fifth International Seminar is how a community aimed to share and remix teaching materials like Curriki can combine the succes of the project with a creative commons licencse. Curriki will be (probably) presented by Barbara Kurshan on the seminar, but it’s not the only one supporting this idea.

Connexions also works to approach teaching & learning materials to all the educational grades in a free way. To carry out that objetive, they have organized the content on flexible modules that can be re-organized as courses, books, reports, etc. In addition, anyone can both view the content or contribute to the project. Via Microsiervos.

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One of the most attractive aspects of the Conectivism and Conective Knowledge on line course, more thanthe two so-called teachers running the whole thing, is the just the concept behind it.

I am glad to know that I’m not the only curious about “conectivism”. Famous blogger Robin Good has just interviewed George Siemens for Robin Good TV in order to put things clear: What is conectivims?

The result (in the video above, 30 minutes), is one of the most interesting conversations about new paradigms of education

The video is highly recommended for everyone, even though, and just to summarize, here is a firsrt definition of conectivism by George Siemens:

We learn by forming connections with other people: social (face to face), technological. Because knowledge is connected, then learning is the ability to form connections and networks.

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The one above is the title of the on line course that right know is being driven by e-Learning pioneers George Siemens and Stephen Downes. The idea of the course, offered through University of Manitoba, is not only to allow enrolled people to use the material, but to allow their access to anyone connected on line.

This way, we can check the course wiki , blog or enjoy the on line massive openning act (video, in English).

But let’s go deeper on the course idiosincrasy, for I guess I’m not the only curious about the method. As they explain on the wiki:

This course will be a different type of learning experience. Learners from around the world will be participating, creating an opportunity for peer-to-peer learning and feedback. While facilitators will be active in the conversation, and will provide feedback to the work of students who have enrolled in the course for credit, the number of participants makes it impossible for traditional teacher-centric instruction to work well.

I believe it is a good idea to follow the course, so meanwhile it goes, this post is to be continued…

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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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