Category Archives: Thoughts

Thoughts

Volunteering…

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Another cross-post, this time from a moodle discussion on management of virtual communities. The Miguel I mention is Miguel Cornejo, leader of the Macuarium community.

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This is more a concern than anything else. I'm sorry about the fragmented writing, but I'm really writing out my ideas as they come.

After the call with Miguel, I was kinda shocked because of his volunteering stories. During the call, I was trying to keep in mind that, in his case, we are talking about not only computer users (passionate geeks), but MAC users (VERY passionate geeks).

So my concern has to do with volunteering and sustainability [of virtual communities]. If there is something I have learned in the public sector, is the fragility of programs and projects. What seems ok today, could be out of place tomorrow. And that, I think, creates a huge challenge for state-dependent communities.

During the call, we looked at each other like saying "That will never work with teachers!". I wonder why we can't picture our teachers volunteering... Maybe is because we have a hard time thinking about ourselves as volunteers? Maybe we are really aware of the crazy schedules and workloads of our teachers?

Or maybe we see volunteering as a foolish way to give away our (money)valuable time?

I've heard once and again a very truthful statement: "That's what our culture is like". Hm. Facing that, I think we have two options: Accept it, and even reinforce that kind of culture, or try and change it (am I too naive?).

The question is, how do we change that? Is it so difficult?

Talking with Isabel today, an interesting idea came up: Either we need to "seduce" people, or at least help them discover what are they really passionate about. A passionate person will be, likely, more open to volunteering some of her time (I think).

Why all this concern about volunteering? I think that might be the only way to guarantee sustainability for so many of the things we are trying to do. But, in order to achieve that, we need to realize that volunteering doesn't mean "do all that you do, but for free". Small one-hour contributions, coming from a lot of different people, can have a huge impact in the world. Maybe the trick is to discover how to distribute responsibility...

Anyway, I'm concerned about sustainability. I think is something worth discussing right now.



Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Education, Thoughts

New Year’s Message

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Although a little late (Christmas is over now) I'd like to wish, both to my readers and everyone that helped me to start and to make possible so many projects (both personal and professional), a wonderful 2008. May this be the beginning of new and fantastic opportunities in your lives.

A little "home made" message:


I hope to keep learning from you in the new year, the same way I have in this one.

Thank you everyone for making 2007 a memorable year!

P.S. I didn't get to put a "Play again" button, so if you couldn't see all the message, please reload the page. :|


Original post blogged on b2evolution.

e-Learning, Education, Education & Society, Thoughts, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Tools

Downes on Learning and Web 2.0

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I just found, via David Wilcox, a video presentation made by Stephen, in which he talks about how Web2.0 opportunities can help to develop your own learning process.

Three important things (among all the other interesting things said):

  1. You are at the center of your own personal learning network: Sounds obvious, but it has strong implications in our minds. When I htink about learning, I'm supposed to think about MY needs, MY interests, and not those suggested/imposed externally (curricula, undesirable work, etc.). This has all to do with studying, working and doing what is really important for me. It becomes a very transcendental issue, because in order to exploit my full potential as a learner, I have to be doing what makes sense to me. In the end, it's not about my teachers, my employers or even my family or friends. It's about ME. Very humanistic lesson... :D
  2. To gain from self-directed learning you must be self-directed: This is in line with the previous point. If someone/something else than myself is proposing my interests, I won't be able to exploit my own full potential as learner. Then again, it is REALLY complicated for many of us to behave in a self-directed way. And this kind of behavior has to do not only with learning, but with our role as citizens and part of a community. A self-directed individual will have a stronger voice and a stronger critical sense. Sadly, many of our formal education settings are structured to diminish that self-directed behavior.
  3. These principles should guide how we teach as well as how we learn: I keep thinking about how often we, as teachers, refer to our students as if they were "study subjects". "The students these days are like this", "The students these days are like that". And we identify a lot of characteristics of these students, but we forget to see that we are supposed to have those characteristics in order to be functional learners in this world. Only when we, as teachers, start to behave like real long life learners, it will be clear what are we supposed to do as teachers, in order to foster and cultivate our students' abilities.

Here´s the video:

Now I'm kind of curious about how Stephen made appear that video window... It's clear that it is on a Powerpoint presentation but, was that in real time, or edited? Hmmmm... :-/



Original post blogged on b2evolution.

e-Learning, Education, Education & Society, Thoughts

A few ideas

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After thinking about the talk I had with Stephen, and participating in a meeting to evaluate the videoconference service used in last week's seminar, I've ended up with some draft ideas about what could make sense in the use of ICT in Colombia (meaning, where could we go):

  1. To have a higher coverage: According to Nielsen, ITU, NIC, etc., (in a page compiled by ExitoExportador), the Internet users in Colombia are just the 7.8% of the population. This is a trend we have to work on, especially in the educational sector. What if we think about:
    • Finding strategies so each higher education (and basic?) teacher could have a computer (desktop or laptops, though some context situations would make desktop PCs more desirable) to develop not only her work, but other activities which help to strength her IT skills.
    • Get an active webcam for each and every teacher (the reason for this is in another post) in her workplace, and access to videoconference applications (like Access Grid or Isabel)
  2. Having a higher online presence: The web content available in Spanish is just a small fraction of that available in English. We really need to move from information consumers to information producers. What if we think about:
    • Having a higher web presence for our teachers, promoting the creation of local educational blogs, for example. The use of blogs as a tool to build electronic portfolios has been already documented, so this strategy could be used in the development of new faculty performance evaluation systems.
    • This last idea has an advantage: It would give our teachers a higher visibility (however, this depends on the publication language used) and concrete possibilities to participate on the online communities which already exists. In fact, the national initiatives we propose on the communities area should have a strong blogging component.
    • Having massive online presence (this has to do with another post), promoting the use of IM services (Skype, ICQ, MSN, you name it).
  3. Enhancing the available information and communication tools: One of the biggest problems with much of the information available on the web is we don't know where it is or how to get to it. What if we think about:
    • Developing light desktop information systems (sort of Stephen's Edu_RSS) and profiling tools, which help each and every teacher get in real time the information of her interest. Like Stephen suggested, tools like this could become plugins for the productivity tools available, so everyone could get online references to their interests while writing a report, and article, or a blog post.
    • Promoting the access to educational repositories, but having these contents delivered to each user's desktop.

However, there are some related conditions, which could decide the success or failure of ideas like those exposed:

  • We need a higher government participation in the funding of this work. The amount of resources that, for example, the European Union give higher education institutions to help them acquiring and integrating ICT is way higher than ours. That's an important issue for our congressmen and government organizations.
  • If the requests grow but the resources don't, this won't work. If we get to popularize the use of videoconference, for instance, our institutions will have growing bandwidth requirements, which are still very expensive. If there are not enough resources to support this requirements (and I don't know enough as to propose some way to achieve this, but I'm open to suggestions), the cost will be (possibly) transferred to the student, which would make even more expensive a higher education that is already expensive.

Just some draft ideas that I've been processing in the last days. Just a draft. :-)



Original post blogged on b2evolution.