I first met Barbara online around 2003, in the early years of edublogging and followed her journey from a distance, through her photographs  and thoughtful posts. Six years later, in the spring of 2009, she gracefully hosted me at her cosy home in the spectacular Green Mountain State.

She had just stopped teaching contemporary creative nonfiction at Middlebury College and was launching the Digital Exploration project, whereas I had gone back to teaching EFL at high school after a sabbatical year and was traveling in the US following my keynote “Beyond Bits, Bytes, Pixels and Sprites” for the 56^th NECTFL conference in New York.

In her garden, in the kitchen, at the table and around the fireplace, we exchanged our stories and perspectives. Her sense of gardening as a cultural endeavour is strongly revealed through the mission statement of her blog:

Growing food grounds us in the relationships between earth and nourishment; preparing food brings us into relationship with our culture and community; sharing meals brings us into close contact with those gathered at the table with us. What better way to build healthy inclusive communities than through growing locally and cooking globally?

Now, two years later, I see that Barbara successfully integrated her diverse interests:

I’ve discovered how to weave together the various strands of my interests and abilities as I grapple with the relationship between the local and global: through a new LLC, Open View Gardens, I’ll be combining writing, photography, storytelling,– and my two other creative passions: cooking adventures and gardening.

While Barbara and I share the same name, pursue many of the same interests, and have embarked on a similar quest, our cultural context, experience and past trajectories are very different. I have not yet been able either to bring together all these bits, bytes and sprites and connect the dots.  Her call, however, gave me the opportunity to focus, try my hand at some creative nonfiction, which I had been contemplating for some time, and reflect on the process.  The result is the brief essay and video “Back to the Roots”.

The text depicts a garden, a season, a perspective, an awareness, a soupçon of Brazilian culture and introduces the reader to a national staple food: cassava.

The “Back to the Roots” video, which I uploaded to YouTube, illustrates and complements the text with images and sound. It is an iMovie collage of my own still photographs taken before and after the frost,  displayed with slow zooming and panning effects (Ken Burns), and combined with a short video I shot of Clarice, our housekeeper, who dug, washed, peeled, cooked and fried the cassava you see in the film. I used the the Olinda Original Style  font for the titles of the cover and credit slides to evoke the idea of back to basics.

While I was searching on Jamendo for free music to go with it, I was very lucky to spot Tata Accioly, DJ and percussionist, also known as TataOgan. Coincidentally (and appropriately) the song I found is called “Exodo Urbano” (Urban Exodus), from her first solo project Da Raiz ao Chip (From Root to Chip). Tata’s sound experiments incorporate an eclectic mix of regional Brazilian folklore, Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous elements and ancestral drums combined with the synthetic beats and grooves of electronic music. [She reaches] the “electronic roots”, like a jam session of farmers using their shovels, axes, and knives as musical instruments, or even indigenous rituals harmonically programmed with computerized beats.

Here are some bits and bites of a Brazil so large and culturally diverse that an attempt to connect the dots and communicate its hybrid nature, landscape and people must necessarily come through juxtapositions and mash-ups.

Many thanks to Rudolf Ammann for his tips on language, layout and design.

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.

• 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.

Update (video)

Live Broadcasting by Ustream

I am also taking part of the II ABCiber Symposium (Brazilian Association of Cyberculture Researchers) at PUCSP, covering a variety of related themes, studies and propositions on how these new technologies are impacting our daily lives, uses, best practices and threats.

Though severe brainfry has set in after listening to so many people speaking, I am also having some difficulty in following the tempo of this generation C – (connected, creative and click).  So, I have forced myself to sit down this morning, set some time aside, concentrate and focus on some of the common traits I have noticed during these events:

• the possibility to join the debate, witness knowledge being constructed openly and being shared (from many and with many) through social tools and platforms like mobiles, Twitter (+ all mashups), Flickr, blogs, livestreaming, tagging;
• a tendency of academia and traditional journalists to monopolize the conversation, engage in a navel gazing monologue instead of encouraging and partaking a dialogic relation with the guest speaker and audience.
• a contradiction between innovative theoretical discourse and conventional institutional practice;
• a difficulty in bridging the gap between hope and happening, structure and agency, the material and the ideational;

As Jimbo mentioned at some point, the challenge does not really come from the technology itself, which is continuously being improved to facilitate connections, networking and working together. The real obstacles to an open culture of collaboration are deeply imbued economic/social/educational processes, practices and the need to control,  which hamper these conversations and the possibility of exchange and sharing.

Off to one more afternoon and evening at ABCiber and tomorrow a whole day with Práxis members at BIT (Bradesco Institute of Technology) in Campinas for a meeting and lunch with Mitchel Resnick, from  the MIT Media Lab,  with whom Bradesco partners.

The whole setup in the studio consists of a mobile unit : a laptop connected to the Internet, a mini DV video camera, a tripod, a photo camera. Live transmission is done through streaming using Mogulus (video), Cover it Live (multimídia chat), Flickr (photo storage), YouTube (video storage) and Twitter (live coverage). The crewman follows what happens to the guests and journalists from the moment they arrive until they leave.

Bel confided she was happy to have been given this opening and space for action. I accepted as I was eager to check not only the environment but also the efforts that are being made in this very traditional broadcasting mode to incorporate new technologies and make it interactive – the same challenge we are facing in education. Not all schools accept experimentation and going beyond the fixed walls of their “studios”.

The interviewee for this event was Jana Bennett, CEO of one of the largest media conglomerates in the world – the BBC. I read about her a bit before going to bed and, as I decided to tweet in English for an international audience, I sent word through the various lists and communities I belong to around the world.

A chauffeur came to fetch me, Lucia Freitas and Bel early this morning and off we went across town to Fundação Padre Anchieta, where TV Cultura is housed. On arrival, we met Aloisio Milani, our fellow twitterer ; the other journalists who were going to interview Jana: Lilian Witte Fibe, Carmen Amorim, Patricia Kogut, Eugenio Bucci, Lucia Araujo, Nelson Hoineff and Paulo Caruso, a live cartoonist. After a scrumptious breakfast in the best Brazilian style (orange juice, coffee, pao de queijo, sandwiches, fruit and cake), we were led to the make-up room (no shiny noses or disheveled look permitted) and then to the studio .

update - Lucia Freitas has just sent me the cartoon Paulo Caruso made of us

Lucia, Aloisio and I sat on the perch at the top, overlooking the scene.

It was fun but more like quick note-taking for me, as I had little audience – Vance connected but I missed him on the scrolling page and Dennis (from the Webheads) made a number of comments. I must confess I found it difficult to multi-task on so many levels: pay attention to new faces and context, what people were doing in the studio,  what journalists were asking/what Jana was answering, reporting/commenting and paying attention to what was streaming from outside and responding . I guess that like all in life,  it’s a matter of getting used to it and practicing. I would have definitely adopted another strategy had I had an audience watching the stream and asking questions or making comments, which is what happened in Portuguese. My own tweets (in English) can be found on a filtered Tweetscan (reverse chronological order), everyone else’s both on Twitter search (keyword rodaviva) and Twemes.

Good marketing for TV Cultura and Roda Viva program – an attempt to make a TV program interactive and showing all backstage live one week before the recorded program goes on air. Twittering also provides a written record of what went on from different perspectives – which finally converged in spite of the different languages. Some blogging will divulge the event and maybe bring on more people to watch it next Monday.

I found that many of the questions (fortunately with some good exceptions) were navel gazing, asking for advice or models for a cultural and societal context which is entirely different from the UK. Most did not really probe or unveil anything that you cannot already find on Google about Jana or the BBC annual reports.

Jana Bennett was very much herself and emphasized the importance the BBC gives to quality programs, international partnerships, catering for the different needs/ages/tastes and how new technology is being used to interact with the audience and integrate user-generated content whenever possible. Also important – the absence of political/commercial pressure when producing and broadcasting. According to Jana, quality depends on money (95% from license fees paid by viewers who trust and endorse quality), time alloted to production, independence and autonomy for program producers who (unlike in Brazil) are free from political, commercial (and economic) pressure. A Trust Committee, with different members chosen according to their expertise (not affiliation), regulates what goes on by reflecting and discussing the choice of controversial programs AFTER they are broadcast. Differently from the American or Brazilian TV, whose use by a younger generation is declining (for lack of quality content), Jana mentions that in the UK teens enjoy TV to cool off, relax and choose their programs according to their mood and time of the day as they are made relevant to them. She gave an example of an educational “reality show” which brought together teens interested in fashion – they were taken to different production areas both in England and India, exposed to quality work and sweatshops and asked to reflect upon this experience. The American PBS series follows a similar concept (Merchants of Cool).

It was interesting to participate in this – wondering now how we can mobilize our schools to follow a similar path, discarding the mouldy, senseless layers of bureaucracy which seem to have gripped the system and frozen it. How can we converge by giving value both to what is past and present quality and inviting young people to pave the future by contributing, innovating and creating new channels for expression and interaction . Although education and culture evolve in a slower tempo than art, fashion and commerce, once the infrastructure and governance are laid out, we should feel the change- slow but powerful. As an ancient proverb says “the journey of 1,000 miles starts with a single step”. Have you taken yours?

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?

While in the past big conferences were the only opportunity to meet people and share knowledge, they have now become a ripoff for independent teachers who are not funded by the institutions they work for, have a business or sell the wares of a publishing house.  Technology has facilitated access and you apparently can now “build on your social capital”  through the  web.   Increased cooperation on wiki farms with experts from different fields is a more efficient way of discussing “potential collaborative, learning, or creative applications of emerging technologies”. You can do all this from home – wonderful – saves on flights, lodging and food – and you contribute to the common good. “The primary costs are the investment of time required  for participation”.  Now,  I do not want to sound materialistic or utilitarian but haven’t you heard an expression somewhere that time is money?

During a  recent conference on digital citizenship,  there were debates on how information networks, digital communication in an increasingly mobile scenario alter political practices and challenge us to defend and expand citizen rights. Professors Quéralto and Andoni Alonso bring to attention that we live today in an eras of strong pragmatic rationality  and would like immediate results so as to change the world. However,  we are progressively being alienated by an increasing number of activities which take time. We are now not only our own marketeers but also our own bureaucrats and have even more work in shadow time which consumes our rest, family and pleasure and does not fill the supermarket trolley at the end of the month. Knowledgeable digital educators and ” visionaries” furnish complex and specialized work in a totally abstract system which apparently does not envisage survival.

Catherine Fitzpatrick in one of the Connectivism forum threads mentions  “One of the deep problems with Creative Commons is that it provides no easy way to say “use a copy of this if you pay me here: _”. Instead, it lays social pressure on people to make their content free and copyable for attribution only, with a vague notion that this will lead to…consulting or something. If no one can make a living from their content and the economy, if their intellectual property is always under pressure from “wanting to be free” for others to grab, they walk away. They stop making content. This has played out in Second Life with all the problems of IP and ripping of content there and people simply going out of business.”

So the nagging question at the back of the mind persists.  Is this the price of reinventing yourself permanently, sharing and trying to remain creative, free and independent?