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).

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.

A series of quick 30-minute talks has been scheduled, during which each entrepreneur will present their projects and plans. It is also the launch of the special edition of the ResultsON Startups highlighting the best 2008 startups and entrepreneurs, some of whom I have befriended during blogcamps and barcamps. Edney (Interney and Pólvora) invited me for a round table on educational blogs at the next Campus Party in January 2009 and promised to give this poor educator some tips on how to survive in this Brave New World.

The event is being supported/sponsored by Sebrae, Senac and Nokia.

Agenda

14:30 Opening
15:00 Fiore Mangona (Nokia) - Innovation and (R)evolution
15:30 Alexandre Thomé (Endeavor) - Why venture out now?
16:00 Luiz Colombo (Motiv) - Digital signage
16:30 Emerson Calegaretti (MySpace) - Web business
17:00 Edney Souza (Pólvora) - Social Media
17:30 Intervalo
18:00 Franco Lazzuri (Cietec) - Let’s invest
18:30 Ariel e Mackeenzy (Videolog / TiVi) - Creating new businesses
19:00 Daniel Heise (Customer First) - Innovating
19:30 Manoel Fernandes (Bites) - The meeting of 2 worlds: blogs and businesses
20:00 Alexandre Fugita (Startupi) - The art of starting up
20:30 Johny Carvalho (PontoMobi) - Opening new markets
21:00 Aleksandar Mandic (Mandic) - The entrepreneur: a black sheep?
21:30 Launch ResultsON Startups
21:45 Cocktails and night out

After an explanation of the work conducted at the Open Society Institute and a brief outline of the history of the Open Education movement and initiatives,  Melissa pointed to The Cape Town Open Education Declaration, which is

at once a statement of principle, a statement of strategy and a statement of commitment… meant to spark dialogue, to inspire action and to help the open education movement grow.

1741 individuals (1742 now that I have added my name) and 177 organizations have signed the declaration. Pilot countries comprise Poland, Australia and Brazil.

Some open repositories (which do not require a subscription fee) : Arxiv, DOAJ, Dspace, PubMedCentral, OpenDoar, Eprints Soton, Scielo Brazil, Hindawi, Public Library of Science, Springer Open Choice, Bioline International.

While Connexions founder Richard Baraniuk was discussing OER at the Berlin Online Educa,  Joel Thierstein, Cnx’S executive director, showed us (here in São Paulo) how their open source platform allows professors and teachers to  “Create Globally, Educate Locally” by giving them the possibility to create, collaborate, build/share custom collections. Users and authors can find content on a page by page basis through an interconnected repository (400+ textbooks, 7000+ lego modules from students, teachers, professionals  worldwide) and remix it for their needs. Authors retain copyright and license it via open access licence to share, copy and transmit the content. Hard cover copies of personalised textbooks created by mashups of different content were passed around.

Differently from the States and other developed countries, in Brazil, information and expertise are still scarce, which reinforces the educational gap between the haves and have-nots. Ironically, state funded  and  free higher-ed ( like the University of São Paulo) cater for the higher middle-class who paid for their studies in private secondary schools and preparatory courses to succeed in the university entrance exam. The federal campuses are usual far from the city centre and transport difficult for those without a car. As a result of this, the most needy have to pay high tuition for overcrowded “one size fits it all” night classes at private commercial institutions, many of which of doubtful standard. In formal or vocational education, there is no recognition of prior and experiential learning, which further restricts the entry of qualified people to help out as facilitators, guides or curators.

OERs and open education should be more than “a blip on the educational radar”.  It is important to have access not only to broadband and resources but also peers and experts who help learners filter, discuss, re-mix, create and make this content personally and contextually meaningful.

I hope these first steps will allow Brazilian educators from all extractions find a way to collaborate and partner in networks beyond their schools and universities - across the river in the city of knowledge as Gilson Schwartz  put it and share instead of just “planning to share” so that more people and initiatives follow to open access to meaningful and dynamic education in our country.

• 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.

This was a challenge I set out for myself . It was the first time I sent my work to a Brazilian university . Ironically, what I have been doing at school was first shown and recognized abroad instead of inside my own organization (school) - which does not even know about this paper…so closed it is inside its own processes.  The web and networking was an outward movement.  I am now coming back and trying to find my place in the local educational environment. Not easy.  Second challenge (minor and fun), believe it or not  - I had never made an academic poster before.  Incredible how fussy some people can be over standard, form and norm and how anxious you can get for fear of not being accepted if you do not “conform”.

I had already written about my experience in Portuguese for Praxis (a 30-page ) but needed to condense it twice  - first for the submission paper: “Ferramentas Sociais, Redes e Interação”  (webcurriculo - (thanks Neli for lending me a hand) and then later for the poster. In spite of my lack of experience in this field, I managed to make one after after a quick search on the web. It was a good exercise in synthesis and visual distribution/impact.  Once it was printed, and hung,  I immediately realized I should have done it totally different.  This how one learns - set yourself a challenge, go for it, do your best, verify results, adjust, lather, rinse and repeat…or is it the other way round? 

As I listened to the various presentations, I compared the reactions to mine and was reminded of the steps I have made these years towards trying to find a balance in my courses. At the language institute I first worked,  I was just an instructor, training people to develop their communication and linguistic skills in a foreign language, not really engaged in any reality but the service I was delivering.  However, when I moved to the secondary school, although the job profile was the same as before, I increasingly became an educator and as such, gradually much more aware of the social engineering  we are subjected to through the uniform, over-structured, inflexible and centralized programs imposed . While trying to implement these new technologies in the classroom , I was constantly confronted with the unresponsive wall of institutional bureaucracy.

While writing this post, I dug up this drawing made by the Time Project team and compared it to a sketch late Lee Baber asked me to check some time ago. There is so much talk about different curricula.  Education surely involves some amount and  quantity - skills and competencies -  but I’d say it is mostly about quality - values and a better understanding of action and knowledge in time - Chronos and Kairos. How do you achieve it on the Web?

1. Core Subjects and 21st Century Themes

2. Learning and Innovation Skills

* Creativity and Innovation Skills
* Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Skills
* Communication and Collaboration Skills

3. Information, Media and Technology Skills
* Information Literacy
* Media Literacy
* ICT Literacy

4. Life and Career Skills
* Flexibility & Adaptability
* Initiative & Self-Direction
* Social & Cross-Cultural Skills
* Productivity & Accountability
* Leadership & Responsibility

and four 21ST CENTURY SUPPORT SYSTEMS:

1. Standards and Assessment of 21st Century Skills
2. Curriculum and Instruction
3. Professional Development
4. Learning Environments

]]> http://beespace.net/1st-web-curriculo/feed/ http://beespace.net/the-influent-blogueuse/ http://beespace.net/the-influent-blogueuse/#comments Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:57:00 +0000 Barbara Dieu http://beespace.net/?p=473 Vile gueuse! Des biens étranges affaires… From Loic Le Meur’s blog, a hilarious parody (in French) on navel gazing blogging. Delicious. À croquer.  Just one of the many different communities and ways of seeing the world on the web. Food for thought coming from the many conversations overheard on the “miss-influences” and behaviour of the local blogosphere at the blogcamp this past weekend.

Annabelle, 26 ans, blogueuse influente from Bobby Freckles on Vimeo.

Yesterday afternoon, I gave a short introduction on Connectivism and showed the open models for learning happening at the Facilitating Online Communities course on Wikieducator and the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) about to start.

Juliano Spyer introduced me to Walter Fontoura and Helton Kuhnen from Coworkers, Manoel Fernandes from Bites.  I had also the pleasure of a long talk with Paula Signorini,  her husband Carlos Hotta and their partner Atila Iamarino,  biologists who have just started up Lablogatorios, a portal dedicated to Sciences and Environment.

Update: Today there were fewer people than yesterday, which allowed us to form several small discussion circles instead of the big presentation type full room. At lunch time I talked to Marcelo and Lyanne Maestrelli, a couple from Florianópolis, who already own BlaBlablogs, a collective blog opened for those who have something to say but not often enough to maintain their own blog. The couple have Vida de Viajante, a traveler’s blog which reflects their lifestyle. They chart itineraries, raise awareness to sustainable tourism, interview people they met during their trips, review places to stay and give suggestions on what to see and visit. Marcelo also has a YouTube channel through which he shows his work. An interesting and pleasant business model.

I was pleasantly surprised by the modern, very organized and well-equipped premises, the number of young people attending (full auditorium) and what is more, helping out at the conference, the informal yet serious/respectful atmosphere and the constant presence of the deans and professors. It was refreshing to move away from my habitual Anglo-Saxon edtech oriented world/connections behind the computer screen to a f2f multicultural and transdisciplinary dip into the same new media themes with a different twist and a somewhat Italian flavour.

From Massimo di Felice I heard that in order to describe our relationship with the new territory (cyberspace) mediated by digital constructs , we need a new anthropology and a new ecology. While we explore new ways of inhabiting this world we feel again the tension of the apparent paradox between being and becoming, order and chaos, static and dynamic, staying and going, Hestia & Hermes.

According to Derrick de Kerchove from the Toronto School of Communication, media structure our minds, culture and the way we communicate with the others. In the Western world, the printing press promoted a culture of literacy, whose effect on our logic and reason resulted in a “visual-linear-specialist” way of perceiving what surrounds it. By exploring and reacting to this “outer space” mediated through the digital interface (which acts as our our skin), we simultaneously explore our inner space (our heart and assumptions).  Digital technology opens up new possibilities, as we internalize “outer space” into “inner constructs” and vice-versa.  (note:  Michael Wesch’s Anthropological Introduction to YouTube illustrates the phenomenon).

For the Eastern world (Taoism, Buddhism) and many oral cultures, for instance, phenomena are not perceived in a static or fragmented way, as they are in typographic culture.  Rather, they contain several possibilities as to meaning and form and the cosmological model of change relies on the how all phenomena inter-relate and inter-depend. For the highly mobile Australian Aboriginal populations, for instance, the land and nature sit at the core of traditional culture and spiritual life - Indigenous Aborigines had an intimate knowledge of the land, its creatures and plants an understood and cared for their different environments and adapted to them. Their song stories show the memory does not reside in their heads but is taken directly from signs on the territory. The Inca rulers controlled a vast network of roads and communicated through the Quipu, which recorded their knowledge.

Messages today are no longer tied to time and place and people do not necessarily share the same contexts or are in direct interaction. The challenge today is how institutions and citizens will communicate in the near future, how and if you can contextualize knowledge and how mobility and connectivity will redefine user experience.

Rejane Cantoni presentation of the work she does together with Leonardo Crescenti took me to the FILE ( Electronic Language International Festival) exhibition and revealed the combination of different technologies and techniques being used to try to capture/reproduce the senses and interact with human beings. I was particularly attracted to the web work of the late Austrian artist Zelko Wiener in partnership with Ursula Hentschlager: Panorama, Phantasma. The binary art site is fantastic.

Finally, Marcelo Godoy and Federico Casalegno showed us examples of the relationship between information, the environment and society and how pluridisciplinary and multicultural approaches are being used to design connections using mobile technologies : eLense (Catalunya), Ride Link, Living with NFC (Italy), Bus Stop and Pitti.Mobi

And now…off to the Blogcamp…which should have started by now

Dr Canas gave a quick background on the Institute of Human Cognition and explained its purpose: devise how to adapt technology to human interactions and needs. According to him it becomes easier to chart and understand how brains react to the different stimuli by capturing sensations and how these are transmitted and interpreted by the brain.

Through a series of examples (Feathers and Beaks/Moral Obstacles to Artificial Flight) , Dr Canas highlighted the importance of not being lured by the senses or lenses through which we understand the world but always have the theoretical framework in which such events happen so as not replicate
systems that are not effective (like for instance, use the web in a linear way as a book instead of taking advantage of its connected net structure). If fundamentals are understood, then technology can be adapted. Theory shows that conceptual maps facilitate the explicit expression of knowledge and help people to manage it - put in practice what they know.

According to David Ausubel and Joseph Novak, knowledge is organized in concepts (regularities/perceptions/patterns in objects and events) and each concept opens a number of other concepts that are related forming a collection of propositions - unities of meaning and statements (the boat is blue). These statements are not necessarily true or false as they are based on what I see/believe in/was exposed to. Each person builds their own concepts according to their exposure and experience of the world. Meaningful learning involves starting with key ideas which show what the learner already knows - by determining this one can move forward and teach what is missing.

Conceptual Maps make it easier to capture expert knowledge, track the relationship among different concepts and thus understand/represent more explicitly what people know. They are organized around concepts and statements which are more of a network than a hierarchy (keywords linked by connective words + verbs) As they are not linear, knowledge can be accessed at any point. Maps are also a way of better organizing the text/curriculum concept as they help teachers to see that it is not the fragmented topics from a curriculum that are important but facilitating and making learners find what they lack and what they know and how to bridge this gap.

According to Canas, maps should reflect the learning process and not abandoned once they have been used to illustrate a concept. Students should add to them whenever they learn something new or complementary so as to chart how their knowledge on the subject is built. The maps should reflect the continuous updates (like blogs) of learning process.

These maps can be uploaded to the institute’s server and are then converted into a web page, to which one can connect other data and information (photos, other maps). Knowledge should be co-constructed and not consumed only.

Professor José Armando Valente brought up the point that technology has individualized knowledge representation by allowing learners to represent it in their own way as opposed to the traditional linear representation. He questioned whether Cmaps would reduce the other possibilities of expression by imposing a new way of thinking. He also wondered whether such maps would force the “crepe generation” (multi-taskers with extensive but thin knowledge) to focus on concepts in more depth.

Although I like the web of connections and relationships we can see on the maps, I was somehow worried about the effect of representing the world around us through knowledge bricks (nouns that describe a static concept). I may be wrong, but Cmaps does not seem to focus on the verbs and the dynamics of social interaction. My fear, like Valente’s, is that because the university is being sponsored by such powerful firm and the bandwagon effect, most experiments turn this way. IMHO, one cannot resume learners’ experience to describing and classifying. Like Sasha Barab, I believe that a variety of tools should be used to analyze, make a synthesis and interpret the world from a variety of perspectives.

One should not forget that the map is not the territory.

“Maps are never value-free images; except in the narrowest Euclidean sense they are not in themselves either true or false. Both in the selectivity of their content and in their signs and styles of representation, maps are a way of conceiving, articulating and structuring the human world which is biased towards, promoted by, and exerts influence upon sets of social relations. By accepting such premises it becomes easier to see how appropriate they are to manipulation by the powerful in society.” Harley. J. B. “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” The Iconography of Landscape, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994.

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.