The report has been released under a Creative Commons license and can be  downloaded as a pdf file from the NMC website or the Horizon wiki, which also shows openly (no need to login) the methodology and various phases of the research process.

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.

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.

I have just posted my introduction to the Moodle Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Course which is about to start. The course, which has already been nicknamed MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) because of the number of participants – about 1600), will be co-facilitated by Georges Siemens and Stephen Downes

Although open courses of this kind are not new and nor are the tools used (message boards, Moodle, blog, wiki , microblogging, syndication, social networking platforms, Second Life),  the innovation comes from the sheer number of participants involved from different parts of the world.

View Larger Map

What is fascinating, as Clay Shirky mentions in the book I have taken the title of this post from, is how the different people are meeting, moving and gathering online to make things happen, taking them from the global context to discuss them in their own communities. Although the course is in English, translations to Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, Italian have been taken up by volunteers and are linked from the course wiki.  Special interest groups are being created in different languages, physical and online locations.

As Shirky mentions, the tools for sharing and co-operating on a global scale have been placed in the hands of individual citizens and in the same way the printing press has amplified the individual mind and the telephone amplified two-way communication, all these tools amplify group communication.

The big challenge, in the next 12 weeks, will be to both read, reflect and post, converge and diverge, breathe in and breathe out, listen to the global and think local. An ambitious experiment in intercultural perspectives, scalability and how to evaluate the outcomes of such project. Looking forward to learning a lot from it.

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

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.