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.

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

Placed on the axis comprised by Free Goods / Markets and Trust/ Scepticism,  profiles of the most famous Web and social network thinkers portray the main “thought schools” :the Founders in the middle, Panglossians and Web Tribals; Lisergics and Neo.com; Hackers and Cyber-Soviets and finally the Tecno-Retro and Post Virtuals.

The original map was posted in Il Manifesto on July 26th 2008.

The first week was devoted to the convention, lively diner outings with the webheads and my own presentation on Open and Participatory Media in Language Learning, at 7:30 am on Saturday, an ungodly hour to draw even the staunchest enthusiasts. Thank you Nina and Rita for being there.

From the presentations I attended, I would like to highlight two:

• Suresh Canagarajah’splenary opening keynote “Worlds of Practice: in search of a community , which Carla Arena has documented in pictures

and

• Randi Harlev’s paper presentation: Challenging Assumptions: Tools for Tesol Teacher Education.

I had come across some of Suresh’s work and referred to him in my work and workshop before realizing he was Tesol’s Quarterly Editor !

Through an engaging personal narrative, spiced with humorous and irreverent comments, Suresh introduced and illustrated Etienne Wenger’s concepts of participation vs reification, designed vs emergent, identification vs negotiability and local vs global. He also mentioned the duality and tensions inherent in boundary practice (“introducing elements from one practice to another”), the multi-faceted identity of multi-lingual teachers and the role of the broker, i.e., multi-membership and action in different communities. Tongue-in-cheek, he challenged a number of current centralized practices and non-questioned Tesol mores.

Randi linked back to some of the same concepts in her presentation and urged teachers to bear in mind the role of assumptions in guiding teaching and learning so as to better understand specific choices in the classroom and how they can conflict with new learning or provide possibilities for innovation. She encouraged teachers to explore and examine their own assumptions and connect them to acts of meaning. Some of the authors mentioned were Edgar Schein, Michael Halliday and Devon Woods

We had three memorable powows with the webheads among the many other get togethers at pubs and presentations or conversations at the conference.

The first, called up by Michael Coghlan (staying in New York with Jonathan Finkelstein, president of Learning Times) and booked by Rita Zeinstejer happened at an Irish pub on Tuesday. It was a small intimate meeting as many wias were still not in town or had just arrived. Bronwyn Stuckey, from CPsquare, stayed in NY after the AERA convention especially for this meet up. I had met and been generously hosted by Bron during my stay in Sydney earlier this year so it was a pleasure to see her again, chat and share the room.

Nina Liakos opened the Wia in NY wiki and organized the second diner at Thai Ponsgri. More than 24 wias were there and the evening rolled on in shared laughter and heated discussions.

On Thursday night, Carla booked at the Becco, whose waiters tried hard to accommodate the increasing number of arrivals and orders. Dennis Oliver’s roses were the high point of the diner, from which Moira, in her shiny black vampire coat, “led me astray” with the invitation to join Roger Drury and his partner David for the jazz show at the Blue Note and a late drink at the Slaughtered Lamb. I felt definitely bleary-eyed and washed-out the following morning…lol

I used Twitter to arrange a meeting with Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim f2f at the Satellite Academy, where they invited me to take part of their weekly Writing Project encounter. Vance Stevens decided to join us at the last minute and we also had the pleasure to meet Gina Moss and Ken Stein.

Paul had interviewed me online for Teachers Teaching Teachers, a weekly webcast on the EdTechTalk channel of the WorldBridges network. My 8th grade students also interacted with some of their classes during the Edubridges Elgg project in 2006. He and Susan are presently experimenting with Hypertextopia and how students’ writing changes in this online environment.

On Saturday, I visited João and Daniela, two ex-students of mine from the Lycée who got married, had a baby and are now installed in NY, working and doing their PhD. I had not seen them for at least 10 years, so it was nice to listen to their impressions and stories. I also spent a good many hours in Central Par that day, walking and photographing , enjoying the balmy spring weather, flowers and activities and, finally exhausted, sat down for lunch at the MET. Sunday was family meeting with my cousin who drove me around and took me for lunch to a typical immigrant Polish restaurant in Lower East Side.

Through Twitter, I also learnt George Siemens happened to be in NY (with his wife Karen) for a conference. We arranged to meet on Tuesday night for diner. Michael Coghlan, with whom I did most of the sightseeing tours on Monday and Tuesday, joined us as well at the French Toast uptown. After acknowledging men often employ war metaphors in their discourse, we embarked on a dense conversation on what it takes to make a revolution and how the wider access to information brought about by the Internet requires new approaches to how people interact with it and connect with each other. According to George, what is known is a function of how it’s connected/related to other known elements and the value of this is not inherent but contextual. Information becomes knowledge through our connection with others. This is nothing new, however, the revolutionary idea is that it is now open and extended to a larger number of citizens and not just an elite. This will lead to systemic changes which will affect how we view teaching, determine content and curriculum and how we accredit learning.

This was definitely an event jam-packed with activities, meetings and connections, which may spark new action patterns.

long gaps of time without writing make you feel guilty and now the gap has stretched so wide that it’s almost an ocean…

So eaasy to insert a gap!

My thoughts have been swimming, my mind going through some cognitive restructuring, checking and re-checking my assumptions and plans since that spring in September 2006 when I flew back from the FLNW event in New Zealand.

An unfreezing process started, the seeds were sown, the wheel was put to motion and the ideas started germinating. Uprooting the existing mindset takes time though, and it has been difficult to document the transition process, which is most of the time blurry, unfocused and messy – some threads take time to unravel.

The picture illustrates this well. Here I am, still tangled in my habit and ways of seeing the world, trying to rise and emerge, shed off the trappings of the traditional institutional values of learning and structure of employment and as Edgar Schein points out, suffering from learning and survival anxiety.

The first steps towards change have been taken – a meager retirement pension (still better than nothing), a sabbatical that can be extended for two years and some traveling around to talk to people and view different options.

Both Road Dahl’s and Stephanie Booth’s Going Solo have inspired me. The former, through the chronicles of his war experiences with lots of humour and sensitivity to others’ feelings, and the latter, a Swiss ex-middle school teacher gone tech, through the energetic and frenzied multilingual and multimedia narrative of her first steps in the free-lancing internet industry environment.

However, the Economist article about entrepreneurs in Brazil warns that in addition to risk-taking,

what determines good entrepreneurship in Brazil is the ability to navigate around the bureaucracy.

What will I accomplish or change by leaving one system to get into another which looks exactly the same? Is there any chance of survival and progress for highly connected, networked and enterprising people to work in education and technology here?

Time and experience will tell. Scary but exciting to envisage flying on your own

Teachers, students, researchers, scientists, artists, journalists, entrepreneurs and all those interested in the latest technological trends will attend the event to freely exchange content and share their digital experience.

I will be involved in a presentation about blogs and also helping out and participating in the Campus Barcamp.

There is a general livestream covering the event. I will try to keep you updated (in English) twittering, flickering and posting here.

I will be interacting from my desk here in Sao Paulo both with the live audience in Sydney and in-world through Second Life and Adobe Connect, which will be hosting a session for those who cannot make it in-world.

This has been an interesting process. Alex and I have been Skyping regularly and he suggested I invite some guests so I kept chewing over how to make the whole thing more interactive using the tools shown during the various workshops. After a very fruitful brainstorming session with Robyn, Alex, Donna Hensley and JoKay, we came up with the title and the idea of mirroring the meal at the live event in Second Life. What could be more convivial than receiving people for lunch/diner around a table?

I invited some guests so that I would not be the only voice dominating the space. Alan Levine (a.k.a. CD Barkley), who will be home after almost two weeks touring AU with his kit of 50 tools , will have more than 50 stories to tell about what he has seen happening there and how social tools help connect . Josie Fraser (a.k.a. Josie Oh) has been doing incredible work on digizen cyberbullying and recently made an interesting post on the limits of homophily. Dave Pollard might want to share how Second Life has stirred up his imagination, creativity and sense of connection and Nancy Whitewill link the threads and bring the event full circle – prepare yourself for a generous serving of virtual and real chocolate

JoKay has used her talent, a load of prims and some of my Flickr photos to build the reception area for people to mingle and talk in-world. It is set in a tropical environment with an incredible view of the sea. Congrats Jo!

For the keynote to be less formal and more interactive, I suggested a back channel through Twitter, with a panel projector on the virtual terrace so that the live audience can have the possibility to send their messages through their mobiles to the guests and people in-world.

We will also be posting some questions on to the various channels (Twitter, blogs, social networking sites and lists) throughout the week so all can throw in their two cents. It will be fun to bring together all the contributions – a collection of artifacts representing our emerging open educational partnership and collaboration culture.

Bon appetit!

Got the time wrong and missed it . Appeared there 24 hours later. Pathetic!

Sheryl has framed our mugshots inside a computer using the Time Magazine cover to illustrate how this social media has diminished the barriers to collaboration, skill-building and discovery and as a consequence challenges the power of those who formely owned and decided on how and to whom information was to be presented.

In education, this informality and the idea of user-generated content challenges not only traditional publishing companies but also formal institutions which became stuck in their bureaucracy, unable to reflect on their role and adapt by taking measures to encourage the innovation and creativity that emerge from this changing context.

The general theme is Communication, Collaboration and Connection and Sheryl has chosen to focus on the use of participatory media to network for professional development and to model with the students, a theme close to my heart. I expect to be moderating an online workshop again for the EVO 2008 session.

Lots of familiar names from the Anglo-Saxon ICT departments and blogosphere (mostly Americans) out there to connect and start building learning communities.