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 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?

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.

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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.

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.

Eggers speaks about 826 Valencia, a San Francisco-based writing and tutoring lab for young people, and urges more people to get involved with their local schools and share their stories through his website Once Upon a School. .

For him, “”empowering a child with writing is the essence of democracy”.

A young journalist, in search of news, expressed his astonishment when he asked me for an interview “What are you doing here? Do you have to be here?” When I dutifully explained, he couldn’t contain himself any longer and fired: “Do you think you are discriminated against?”, Jeez…I stared at him dumbly. “What do you mean?” He was in turn disconcerted…I mean…your age…you being a woman and a teacher…”

Hey! I did feel very educational dispelling the dualistic digital immigrant and digital native stereotype. Here is a pic of another interview (in Spanish) which shows me with the barcampers (notice the reference to age/gender/job here again: Barbara tiene 54 años,/los chicos de barcamp). Can’t a 54-year-old teacher feel like a “chica de barcamp”? They have so much to teach me!

UPDATE: An interview for Nova Escola which highlights key points.

and here is a mix, remix and re-use presentation on blogs…and communities of practice…

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