• the reports have been translated into Spanish and Catalan by the Universidad Oberta de Catalunya;
• the Australian chapter of the project was launched in Melbourne last July;
• I am the first member from Latin America (hopefully more will follow as it is a darn responsibility and a bit too lonely to represent a whole continent)

It has been enlightening to contribute to and participate in this carefully constructed process (totally online and open). The experience , as Larry puts it,

is like a crash course in emerging technology, with the class made up entirely of very knowledgeable experts and futurists.

I also echo Scott Leslie’s words in his post “The Value of Openness - creating the Horizon Project, out in the open.

while I hope you do find the report useful when it comes out in late January 2009, you too can derive much the same benefit as I simply because the process to advise on the Report takes place ‘out in the open’ on this wiki. Indeed, I honestly find the raw materials gathered in the Research Questions (as well as the ongoing hz09 tag in delicious) to be ultimately the most valuable part of the process; inevitably, in order to create a ‘unified’ picture that can be summed up in a printed report certain details are lost, smushed together, improved upon, etc. But all of the raw materials are there for anyone who cares to dig.

Since my exposure to the Future of Learning in a Networked World series of unconferences and during this sabbatical year, I have taken advantage to open myself up to different local communities, participate in various national educational and cultural initiatives and meet the actors. This roaming exposure  (one is usually confined to a professional track, idea or a classroom) and free (but expensive) time has allowed me to observe, compare and reflect on the mores and cultural traits of the different groups locally and internationally.

Participating in the Brazilian Práxis community this year has been one of many such instructive insights. It introduced me to fellow colleagues in different institutions in São Paulo, who are in some way or another involved in the use of new technologies. Like the NMC,  Práxis aims at convening people around ideas and practice, catalyze dialogue, discussion and contributions to the field in the form of cases, papers, demonstrations and other related projects.

However, differently from NMC, an NGO which relies on paid membership and whose open initiative projects happen mostly online to include perspectives, discussions and research from organizations all over the US and abroad, the Práxis community activities are basically local and presential (São Paulo city) and supported/directed by the Bradesco Institute of Technology, which is in turn funded by the Bradesco Foundation.

In 2004,  a small group of K12 ICT coordinators and CIOs from the private school sector in São Paulo gathered at the occasion of an e-learning event to exchange ideas, practice and better get to know each other. In 2008, although most community members still represent these elite institutions, membership has opened up to encompass a variety of new people (who are selected through personal nomination), including technical schools, colleges, universities, edtech, e-learning businesses and big corporations. Membership is renewed annually by a public acceptance to follow at least 70% of the face to face  monthly meetings, during which practice/experience or products (100% proprietary until now) are demonstrated. The Moodle environment serves as a communication distributor, information archive and occasional discussion forum.

I have noticed there is a striking difference between the way innovation is envisaged and practiced. Is it this a result of a national or an organizational culture? Is it local, global or both?

Last night, during our last meeting of the year, Alexandre Zapparoli, from Gartner (Brasil) and Yang Sik Pak, from Daul Soft Brasil made their presentations.

Gartner Hype Cycle 2008

Now, although Gartner partners and networks with institutions and consultants to track breakthrough ideas and how they become established and part of general practice, it targets basically the corporate world business leaders in th etechnology/communications industry.  Its research process and methods are totally closed and the advice reports are delivered for a high fee.

I noticed that the data collected and the trends openly suggested by educators for the 2009 Horizon Report did not differ significantly from the ones presented in the graphic above. The focus and objective are a bit different, though.

Gartner recommends an open and free form adaptive structure, open to participation and modification, visible work in progress and create_organize_find_interact flow instead of rigid schemes, access rights, templates and costly infrequent change. Organization should reflect current use and needs and natural group formation should be based on activities and interests. Links, tags, ratings and usage are to determine importance and quality. One should find content through people links and people through content links. Interaction records reinforce personal and group identity, reputation and memory.

As for Daul’s authoring tool combo (TeachingMate and LectureMaker) , although it evidences progress over the ready-made one-size-fits-all software, it still operates in the closed environment model, centred on  transmission mode, which does not help transform the educational practice but perpetuates the sage on the stage, closed silos and expensive walled gardens.

Education, IMHO,  is much more complex than a linear series of events, a politician’s discourse /short-term policy or a measurable and defined pre-packaged product. Learning is a process of reactions and layers which lasts a life-time.

The age of information and knowledge has led education into the media and big business spotlight and  schools/colleges and universities have fallen into the vicious circle of student /teacher bashing. Will educational institutions and businesses ever understand that transplanting a foreign model, installing an LMS system, revamping a classroom with a whiteboard, or submitting and enforcing the use of new technologies will not automatically lead to change?  Focus on people rather than technology, enable and support processes and weave in connections and possibilities for empowerment.

As Natalie Udina (the organizer of the event in Moscow) and some of the presenters were not very familiar with the Elluminate platform in Learning Times, we set a number of rehearsal times for people to test and ask questions.

On the day of the event (October 24th) I almost missed the session because of the heavy traffic on the ring when coming back from the countryside, but fortunately I managed to arrive almost on time. Among the people present at the conference in Moscow, there was Dr. Anastasiya Atabekova, a representative from the culture section of the US Embassy in Moscow, some members of the local government, the University Dean, the pro-rector in science and other participants from different countries from Eastern Europe.

As my sound quality was poor and the wifi connection uneven, I have decided to record it again. While the original raw footage is archived and a bit difficult to retrieve inside  the Webheads in Action room at Learning Times, the polished and interactive recording is here for those who do not want to log in.

As a warm-up, we were asked to brainstorm on what instructional design means to us, deconstruct it and contribute to the forum with a non-verbal representation of how we see it.  We are allowed to use images, symbolic audio-visual material or daily and concrete images of our professional space.

This is how I represented my vision of Instructional Design using CC images I got by typing tags to Peter Shank’s  Flickr CC and uploading them to Flickr Toys Mosaic Maker. I could have used VoiceThread and some music…but then words are forbidden.

Not sure it makes much sense without explaining but maybe you would like to give it a try. How would you interpret it? Is there anything you do not quite understand or missing from your perspective?

What is an online community?

This is the first question in the FOC08 course and Leigh introduces the topic with a warning and some advice.

Most people use the phrase “online community” very loosely …and it is important that we try and develop an understanding of what exactly we are looking for, and techniques for looking.

According to Wikipedia, in biological terms, a community is a group of interacting organisms sharing an environment. From this perspective, an online community at its very basic would be people who share and interact in an online environment.

However, there is much more to it than meets the eye and it is important to question concepts and definitions we have grown used to and long taken for granted in our particular contexts.  In a period of change, when navigating uncharted territories and meeting new cultures, such general concepts must be questioned.

History changes, but so does the meaning of words. Depending on the situation, words like freedom and tyranny and faith have different applications and consequences. When does faith constrict freedom? When does freedom become a cover-up for tyranny? Most important, who has the power to define these words? (Source: NY TIMES  CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK : FREEDOM TWISTED BY CORRUPT REGIMES by Margo Jefferson January 13, 2004)

In the same way, the word “online community” has been used in so many situations by different people that the word does not stick to what it stands for. It is a loaded word, which may be used to manipulate people’s emotional needs for different purposes.

So again just observing and noting down the different layers of meaning I have noticed.

Differently from a traditional course during which the teacher and/or prescribed readings are the source of knowledge and impart it to others at a certain time and place, the starting point here are the participants themselves at their own places. They voice their points of view and perspectives arising from their own experience and check their assumptions against the readings suggested and what others have written.

Even though the initial required reading list and course framework/progression were not decided upon by the participants themselves and the interaction seems to be limited to the particular context of the course and the people who have enrolled, the platform used is a wiki, an open collaboration tool which allows others to add to it. It is a flexible structure which could be eventually modified. Participants are encouraged to post their own reflections on their own blogs and link to others not only through their blogroll but also when referring or quoting others. As posts are online and open, they may be “eventually”  commented upon and challenged by others who are not part of this specific context (provided their comment area is open and allows for this kind of interaction).

By posing the question “what is an online community?”, offering a number of articles from different professional fields (knowledge management, technology business, philosophy, sociology, education, research, politics) and by letting people show what they know, i.e., illustrate perceptions of community from their own context,  Leigh facilitates the explicit expression of knowledge.  By trying to define “an online community”,  the different individual answers reveal to others in turn what the initial common ground may be, where the intersections appear and where the differences (opinion, language, skills, netiquette or plain stubborness) may obstruct/impede communication and  make people remain silent, over-react, enter disputes, take diverging roads or quit.

The moderator´s role would be to perceive these moments, calm or encourage such behaviours so as to maintain the community´s harmony.

Therefore, the starting point is what each one of us already knows, how we represent it for ourselves and others, how this concept is used /understood and expressed by the different personae in their different fields of practice and interest.  

A second step, an observation of language, an awareness of worlds/behaviours different from our own (not only geographical but social, cultural, linguistic) are  paramount to examine recurring patterns, how these are transposed in different situations - which community avoids them,  which reinforces them and why.

“Eurocentrism, like Renaissance perspectives in painting, envisions the world from a single privileged point. . . . Eurocentrism bifurcates the world into the “West and the Rest” and organizes everyday language into binaristic hiearchies implicitly flattering to Europe: our ‘nations,’ their ‘tribes’; our ‘religions,’ their ’superstitions’; our ‘culture,’ their ‘folklore’; our ‘art,’ their ‘artifacts’; our ‘demonstrations,’ their ‘riots’; our ‘defense,’ their ‘terrorism.’ ” Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism. Routledge. London and New York, 1994. p.2 “

Individuals, communities, groups, networks…language and critical literacy are paramount.

Some people trying to understand how all this happens but do not manage to follow as they expect,  feel they are not included.

Lynne’s “breathing-in-and-breathing-out-in-foc” title for this post is a metaphor for calming down when  in distress and also describes what you do at childbirth to alleviate the pain. She is overwhelmed by the experience, feeling out of breath and at loss by not being able to follow. “I am getting that left out feeling that I recall so well from grade school when being the last one picked to play on the soft ball team… But Debs’ comment on being overwhelmed too and Illya encouragement gave me my feet back and reminded me to breathe.”  Like in support groups, finding out and meeting other people who struggle or have faced the same problem, sharing and lending a hand helps those involved to overcome or move “beyond” their condition/experience.

Sarah muses over and reflects on the process and architecture of a blog workshop she gave and what she imagines the best sequence might be: “The week before, we talked a lot more about concepts and I don’t know if that was quite as interesting for participants - they were still focusing on the blog technology. I am wondering now if we would have been better off concentrating on setting up the blogs in the first two weeks, and then in the third week looking at commenting and following blogs in a reader.”

People learn differently through different means and feel stimulated through different environments.

Nellie, for instance, is more attuned to the synchronous moment and is very active urging people to experiment and attend the conferences she organizes on different platforms.

Others, like Dolores in this post, may prefer to ground their experience in theory.

Illya may express some of her concepts through pictures or finding points she connects to in other posts, Greg has been actively representing his thoughts through graphics, while Andrew has started a concept map “to make better sense of the learnscape”.

Some, when taken out of their comfort zone, question the validity of the whole concept.

Trish “what is this for…? I am just contributing to millions of other egos that bumble spewed thought into an endless virtual world? Does publishing this ‘out there’ define me, leave my mark?”

I’d say it does…I see it as the beginning of our social and cognitive presence online, a way we can relate to what and who surround us in this new environment.

Russ wonders how this diffuse, fuzzy learning can occur. “What is learning anyway? Is it that I learned a certain amount of content or is it that I grew in my understanding, knowledge and social skills related to a field of knowledge that actually networks with people’s attitudes, knowledge and actions?”

Kay looks back, incorporates the Zen spirit and let’s it flow. She starts understanding that learning should not be a battle to control time, processes, content or people or respond to assumptions or fit roles. “I am no longer worrying about currently being a lurker … postings are being read and considered. I am reflecting and trying to let go of starting with the end in mind, realizing that it’s OK to not know where my learning will lead, relax and enjoy the journey.”

So I ask - have we ever listened to or read about our own learners’ experience about learning? Do we manage to read behind the lines, check the stories and metaphors used? Have we been able to visualize and map how they are going about their learning so as to help them get better in the process?  Can we relate and feel their angst when they understand what to do but can’t figure out how to do it best? Do we let them be and become or do we impose our ways and views of learning?

I started posting first in the email forum, which is easier and a more immediate way of establishing contact than a blog. The curious being in me lurked for some time, trying to get the gist of the flow, observe people’s moves and interventions:  some making contributions, others asking for help and some directing the conversation. I read the reactions/approaches and , malgré moi (something I still need to control), flamed (reacted to some too strongly). I have finally started posting and will try, from now onwards to link, thread, weave in and discuss the various posts or comment on the blogs.

Note on the side: for the coders out there, it would be wonderful if someone would come up with a widget or plugin which would automatically send all the posts we make in other forums to our blogs (like twitter does). This would bring together all the data we have dispersed around the web into our own portfolio.

I also went over some material I had stored and contributed to the course wiki in the extra readings area. This recording of a presentation made by James Farmer to the 2005 EVO Session on weblogging took me some time to convert into an ogg file but is worth listening to. I hope I can recover the slides - I must have them in some back-up file in my old computer. Anyway, James talks about facilitating a community of inquiry using blogs and message boards, the topic of this week - I am a bit behind in some areas and advanced in others :-)  If you are more visual that aural and have some time for reading, then you can also have a go at in more detail in his paper.

As I joined late, I had a certain difficulty in finding who the other people from the course were for there was  little interaction with them in the first phase. There is an introduction thread in the discussion area of the wiki but this, from what I gather,  served mostly for people to connect to Leigh (cannot access it from outside) so he could add participants to the Google group list. Although I could catch up with what was going on through posts to the google groups and read blogs that quickly summed up events and synthetized reactions (threading conversations and summing up what is happening in a distributed and horizontal environment helps a lot)

I missed the interaction or socialization phase (phatic talk) before people starting posting on the message boards and their own blogs.

Last year when moderating Social Media in ELT,  we invited Charles Cameron to animate the opening and ending of the session with games. It’s a fun ice-breaker and forces people in a certain way to find out about new participants in other ways than just the common interest of the course.  Self-disclosure and conversations, like Jeffrey Keefer experienced (even though it was a one to one Skype conversation),   remove the distance, build more trust, develop trust and establish an online identity and help us remember each other in a different way.  It also avoids the flood of standard introduction type emails or grouping ( chums only) in separate forums that characterize this phase. It is a difficult task to meet, place the name and connect to new people.  This is why I also enjoy other visual clues, like a photograph or avatar I can relate to and tend to be suspicious of people who do not provide details about their context or whereabouts. I feel it is important to establish not only a cognitive presence but also a social one.

I have now aggregated most blogs (please check if I have missed yours) in Gregarius but again find it difficult to follow who is posting what. First, because many people have used the same title for their blogs so it is difficult to distinguish one from the other and second,  because the person’s name does not appear together with the posts. (still playing with tool so there may be a plugin or something which can help me do that) . Another way of remembering people’s names would be for them to add to their signatures their blog address in the Google Groups - this would make it easier to relate name to blog and facilitate connections.

Next post probably end of the afternoon - rushing to the dentist.

As I had not first planned to participate and joined late, the beginning was chaotic. Fortunately the course allows for plenty of time for people to digest the concepts and react .  I was enjoying the freedom of my sabbatical year to go to conferences, museums, exhibitions and get together with people from different walks of life and professional areas. More and more, I have been trying to engage with non-homogeneous groups of people. After having spent 35 years enclosed inside a classroom, interacting with the same crowd and doing the same things, I have an imperious urge to know what is happening out there and learning from the world around me.

Acknowledging and interacting with this diversity of cultural, linguistic and professional personal backgrounds, assumptions and motivations is IMHO a key competency not only f2f  but even more so when one is online, where physical cues are almost nonexistent.

Leigh says:

facilitation is a rare and valuable skill to have. It is a service that is often used in conferences, debates, panels and tutorials, or simply where groups of people are meeting and need someone to help negotiate meaning and understanding, and to keep everyone engaged and on task.

* Good facilitation depends on good communication skills.

* Good online facilitation depends on good online communication skills.

* Facilitating online communities… what does that involve?

Courses like this one, however, rely mostly on written text, so the language used / the educational perspective and jargon may be an important barrier for expression of those from a non-Anglo-Saxon culture, non- academic background or different literacy practices.

Non-native speakers have the double trouble of negotiating meaning  and weaving their tacit knowledge of another background with the explicit learning of the technical knowledge and skills about the nature and practice of the particular skill or competency being acquired in a language different from their own - English (Beyond Communities of Practice - Language, Power and Social Context”, Cambridge University Press, 2005, page 151).

I am in ELT (secondary school) but, in spite of all my practice and exposure on the web, I am finding increasing difficulty in communicating my thoughts in different contexts where a particular language/jargon is used (same for the other languages I speak - French , Polish and Portuguese) if I am not constantly exposed to them and do not practice it. I am permanently chasing for the different meanings of words and collocations so as to negotiate their impact and try not sound inarticulate or inappropriate. Also, are the online facilitation skills that come from an Anglo-Saxon culture the same for the French, Brazilian, Polish, Spanish cultures or do we accept them as being so because they have not been developed in our online contexts?

I am a self-directed learner -most of what I know comes from observing, experiencing and putting myself in situations where the skills I wish to acquire are required. I also test my possibilities, watch for reactions and try to learn from my mistakes. So although I have already facilitated/moderated/taught online courses and belong to different online communities this time, I decided I would record the process from an intercultural angle.

Next topic: First Steps

Pure joy to spend a leisurely weekend with your parents on the coast and not have to drive back in the Sunday night traffic but sleep over and make it on Monday morning late. Fantastic to host friends coming from abroad, visit the latest exhibitions and show them around town.

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. I have finally managed to upload all the recordings I made of the Fortaleza Hornby Forum to Podomati and although I have also enrolled (somewhat late) for Leigh Blackall’s open online workshop on Facilitating Online Communities and keep trying to answer the assignments in my mind, I have fallen behind in the posts and comments.

This week and next lots to digest and will have to put on my thinking and creative cap - tomorrow a workshop and discussion on CmapTools with Dr. Alberto Canãs, Associate Director of the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. Next week, a series of presentations and debates at the 3rd Communication and Mobility Symposium, featuring a stelar list of national and international speakers. On Wednesday 27th, an invitation to join a discussion with Peter Weill, Director of the Center for Information Systems Research & Senior Research Scientist at MIT Sloan School of Management and the last weekend of August will be devoted to Blogcamp SPaulo.

Somehow I feel I cannot miss the opportunity of this overview of seemingly different but converging fields, capturing the energy of these f2f events and interacting with those who are present. I will try to record this blend of online and real experiences in writing when I can.

Prof. Kwanyoung KIM represents the International Cooperation and Research Center of Korea Education and Research Information Service (KERIS) with which the Bradesco Foundation has just partnered for Educational Games). He first exposed participants to the Korean Education Ministry projects through an institutional video showing the South Korean effort not only to integrate cutting-edge technologies into schools so as to lower the educational gap between rich and poor districts but also to promote learning by involving the students’ senses (”see, hear and feel”) and by moving the learning experience to places outside of the classroom- the so called u- learning (ubiquitous learning).

The presentation was delivered in Korean with constant reference to the data-loaded slides. Fortunately, those were in English (although translation was provided in Portuguese and English, my headset went mute after 5 minutes) and they showed the Education Reform initiatives expressed in three phases or Master Plans aimed at creating the technological infra-structure, educational environment and knowledge needed for its citizens to operate in the “global market”.

The figures showed a spectacular increase in the college enrollment ratio in the last 30 years (27,2% in 1980, 65% in 2000 and 82.8% in 2007), the country excelled in the Pisa assessment. However, paradoxically, in spite of all this, Prof. Kim pointed out that there has been a decrease in the satisfaction level of the students in education and an increase in the number of students who leave the country to study abroad: 10.498 in 2003; 16.446 in 2004 and 20.400 in 2005.

Sonia Handa, from India and head of Educomp Solutions, highlighted the enormous disparities in Indian education, the lack of infrastructure in rural areas, the lack of interest of children in rote learning, the teachers’ lack of technology skills and the government’s increased expenditure in education and alliances with the private sector. After referring to some of Prof David Hargreaves’ “Education in the 21st Century” concepts, Sonia introduced the Millenium School, one of the educational products her company developed and markets and how this has brought enthusiasm, motivation and creativity back to the classrooms where it is being used. I also found out they are the company behind WiZiQ, the online platform which some teachers have been using for presentations lately.

The meeting yesterday was more personal and the answers to the questions revealed a bit more of the presenter behind the slides/institution or product sold . Although there was no time for a more prolonged discussion on the different themes that emerged, I am sure that those who were there will remember Prof Kim’s 3 M’s , in English this time - Messenger, Method and Message; Prof Ishihara’s illustration of how teachers can encourage curiosity, development and potential of each student (example of the Egyptian students with hearing disabilities who excelled in Maths) and Sonia Handa’s impassioned (but debatable) statement that children become motivated to learn when they are given what they like and want - technology and games. She also mentioned her pleasant surprise at the warm spontaneity and informality of Brazilian participants.

Some photos on Flickr