Going back to school in February just confirmed once again that change just does not seem to happen in closed environments.  Same conversations in the teachers’ room, same unsolved problems from 25 years ago and endless meetings, during which there is more red tape than a decision to act.

School more than ever feels like prison with its tight unvarying schedule, routine and very little room for emergence, creativity and “organized chaos”. Focus is on discipline and control so students’ inventiveness and ingenuity are proven by subverting it. Teachers drone, kids get bored by looking at the nape of the same neck for hours and cannot sit still. With instructional technology alone, the difficulty in staying on task – they connect to social sites, message their friends, play games. Same problems as ages ago, just “enhanced” by educational technology. Kids will be kids.

In March, visits, new acquaintances, conversations, exchanging ideas and practices in different areas and levels: Lumiar school, Papagallis, The Hub, VivoEduca and some fun creative play online with Inkscape in a remix challenge.

The phrase “read/write web” in today’s sense first appeared in Edd Dumbill’s blurb for his site writetheweb.com in 2000. In 2001, Dave Winer built a website called The Two Way Web, which articulates a vision of publishing where the “content and the editing environment (are) totally integrated”. Richard MacManus (2003) connected the phrase with Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of an easily and intuitively editable Web. Dan Gillmor then used it as a chapter heading in his We the Media ⁠(2004), complete with the quasi-attribution to Berners-Lee. This quasi-attribution got cemented in the title of a BBC interview in which Berners-Lee validated blogs and wikis as forms of web authoring that reflect his original vision. In a podcast interview for IBM,  Tim Berners-Lee described the term “Web 2.0″ as a “piece of jargon.” “Nobody really knows what it means,” he said, and went on to say that “if Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.” (text script)

Berner’s Lee campaigned straight from the beginning for browser makers to build editors into their software rather than just make browsing clients. He failed getting this wish past the Mosaic people in 1993/94, who came up with the first widely popular Web browser, and from there on out the idea of an editing/browsing client has been a losing proposition. The W3C came out with a proof-of-concept browser named Amaya, but the W3C has always been funded by big Internet companies such as Microsoft and Netscape –so it couldn’t possibly compete in the browser market with its own financial backers.

In 1999 , my students and I published on a web that was already a “free” platform and connected schools.  Highwired Network, Inc. ended up as the finalist of the Moot Corp in 1998 for having created “an intuitive, web-based tool that allows high school teachers and students to publish customized, on-line school newspapers at zero cost.” Watch mpg (rm file) announcing the product.  In 2000,  HighWired.com achieved to raise a second round of financing ($30 million) in venture capital and while Don Young, president and CEO at the time  announced confidently “HighWired.com is well positioned to stay at the forefront of the industry”, the company collapsed in 2001 like many others of the dot-com bubble. Before it did, however,  I managed to retrieve the work my students had published online for their classroom newspaper, The Classmate since 1999.  In 2003, they started blogging . I only gathered up courage a year after in January 2004. (5th anniversary this month!)

The mega event,  sponsored by Futura Networks and Telefonica, was first launched in Spain and  is now yearly organized in Brazil, Colombia and Ibero-America. It covers  12 different areas:  Astronomy, Blog, Games, Modding, Robotics, Simulation, Design, Photography, Music, Video, Development e Open Source. Last year’s creativity session was split up into Design, Photography and Video, so as to better mark the event as a cultural happening.

Like last year, I will also be part of the blogging area. I was invited to participate in a round table on “Blogs in the Classroom” together with Eric Messa (FAAP), Luiz Biajoni (Instituto Macuco), Claudir Segura (PUC-SP)  on Wednesday 21st at 16:35.  The panel will be moderated by Bob Wollheim (Sixpix Content). Rafael Bucco (editor of Results On magazine)

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web and Pau Garcia-Milà (eyeOS) are some of invited stars and you bet I will be tweeting, photographing and reporting on the event.