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:

• Dr. Mashup: or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix (aka Dr. Strangelove, or how to stop worrying and love the bomb, Stanley Kubric film, 1964)
• Taking a Walk on the Wiki Side (aka Take a Walk on the Wild Side, Lou Reed, 1972).

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…

• And some more, just see how he inspires others. In this case is Jim Groom, creator of the term edupunk, writing:
  

  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.

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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.

Continue reading »

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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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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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It’s curious to see how a well done thing can be inspiring.

Networked teacher, by Alec Couros on Flickr.

Wendy Drexler is following the Connectivism and connective knowledge on line course promoted by Stephen Downes and George Siemens.

She had the idea of following the commoncraft videos style to explain in a simple way the concepts of networked student, inspired one more time by the networked teacher concept by Alec Couros.

The child voice and draws belong to Drexler’s son, and the video is becoming a success due to its simplicity and its timely idiosincrasia. Because we needed a simple way to understand what a networked student is. Via Nodos ELE.

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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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S-Learning. The S stands both for Sugata Mitra, on the picture, and for Self-Organized Systems. More UOC UNESCO Chair pictures on Flickr.

E-Leaning is now not only contructivist. Constructivism is a theory developed in another time, in another context, and the time for fitting e-Learning into old concepts has passed.

Use of the internet in education has led to new trends that have developed into new theoretical concepts. You simply have to look at this blog to see how concepts such as mobile learning, e-Learning 2.0, connectivism or edupunk are emerging forcefully. All these new concepts or neologisms, as they would be classified in the Wikipedia, look to define what is new in that offered by e-Learning; for example, they look to respond from different points of view to the question: what does the use of technology in education offer people?

Mobility and overcoming geographical barriers; being able to share and link materials, opinions and, in short, people’s ideas to create knowledge, or being able to offer more independent learning than that traditionally available by allowing for communication and information searches over the internet and under the premises of “do it yourself”, all aspects which are closely linked to constructivism, are some of the answers to this question. Thus, all the neologisms are actually constructing a theory of e-Learning, but, as with all theories, they are, by definition, constantly changing and being revised.

We can’t lose sight of the usefulness of neologisms emerging from empirical practice and the new uses that users make of future technological developments, but we have to call for innovation, as we have to continue to invent new concepts and ideas in the field of pedagogy and social sciences with the aim of improving education, which can, or cannot, be developed technologically at present.

Recent history has shown us the importance of this. For example, who would have said to the pioneers of “constructivism” that a technology called internet would so greatly strengthen its application?

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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.

Related posts:

• 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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