Guest author: Rubén Díaz

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.

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Zemos98 collective and Juan Freire are working on Expanded education, a symposia aimed to “search new educational models” that will take place on Sevilla (Spain) on March 22nd and 29th.

The introduction to the event, as they wrote in Spanish, goes like this:

Education can happen on any moment, any place. In and out of the academical institution frontiers. This proposal aims to reflect about the idea of remeaning education in order not to limit it to the academical and institucional scope”.

It is very interesting how to idea of the education beyond the university is now on the mind not only of the pedagogues, but of everyone that reflects about new social models and trends too. In this case, the idea of edupunk trascends the academical space and gets deeper into the different social layers:

Educommunication -as a concept that goes beyond of education, refounded from social communication- merges with science and creativity creating a third net culture with new paradigsms like: the design thoughts, the laboratory as a workspace, how the frontier between amateur and professional work vanishes, innovation as knowledge driving force and common spaces as a tool for research and interconnection.

Brian Lamb, Jesús Martín-Barbero and Ronaldo Lemos will speak during the event, but we will try to follow the previous and post dicussion.

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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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Guest author: Jordi Sánchez Navarro
Lecturer at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC)

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.

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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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Guest author: Jonatan Castaño Muñoz
Lecturer at Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3)
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Jonatan has a degree in Political Sciences and in Administration from Barcelona University (2003), he has studied for a Master’s in Applied Social Research Techniques at Barcelona University and at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and he is studying for a PhD in the Information and Knowledge Society at the UOC.

In the educational field he had worked as a researcher with the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3-UOC), in the field of analysis of universities of the Project Internet Catalonia (PIC) and is one of the authors of the book La universidad en la sociedad red (Ariel 2008).

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Based on the idea of democratising education and free knowledge, and in line with the thinking on e-learning 2.0 and social networks, an innovative idea has emerged which is gradually gaining force as an educational platform: Supercool School.

The idea, as with many good ideas, is simple but effective. This Facebook application works by connecting people interested in learning about a subject with people willing to teach it. It provides them with the virtual environment needed for the classes when a minimum number of students have come together and at least one person or teacher is able to offer their knowledge to them.

Supercool School allows for “live” classes and is currently based in Facebook, which allows for the creation of the social networks. The arrival of the new website is planned for January 2009. Indeed, what better than to hear one of the project leaders in their own words?.

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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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• Low cost laptops for education
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• Fighting against the digital divide through education
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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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“Punk is dead, punk is everything“, by Bryan Ray Turcotte, documents more than 30 years of punk aesthetics with a clear idea: punk is dead as a music movement, but you can find its inheritance anywhere in our society.

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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I first came to the concept of edupunk through a line dropped by Max Senges, researcher at Stanford University and occasional collaborator of this UNESCO chair, on his Twitter. The sentence went like this: “let’s join the educational revolution through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edupunk“.

As you can read on Wikipedia, edupunk is “an ideology referring to teaching and learning practices that result from a do it yourself (DIY) attitude”. Alltough it can be an eccentric assotiation, the connection between this way of managing and spreading knowledge, typical from the 2.0 age, and the punk art and music scene from the 70’s & 80’s, where the term DIY became most popular, is undeniable. In this sense, and speaking in a complete personally way, I think edupunk is a right term.

The word is so new that anyone can ensure its permanance. It was first used by Jim Groom (on the picture), from the University of Mary Washington, on his blog on May 25. After its first appearance, some authors started the process of adoption that motivated me to write this post. A good example of edupunk is the course Murder, Madness, and Mayhem: Latin American Literature in Translation, from the University of British Columbia, that aims to be an experiment on creating articles on wikipedia “(having) one’s students as partners and peers”.

We can find other evidence of its soon adoption on a video clip produced by Tony Hirst at the Open University in the UK on 8 June 2008, created as an introduction to the term. Some unresolved questions about this are: Is edupunk a proper term? How long will it last? Is it too little serius for eduworld? What do you think of it all?

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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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