ICTlogy

Notes from the second Tech Talks series of lectures held at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), Barcelona (Spain), on February 22ndth, 2009.

Online strategies and New Business Models: the Wikimedia phenomenon
Kul Wadhwa, Managing Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Wikimedia

Wikimedia is about the community, about volunteering. Since the project kicked off in 2001, there have been created 13 million articles in 271 languagesw, 17 million pages, 325 million edits, 330 million visits monthly, 100,000 active contributors (edit 5 times a month at least), over 50 books published on the Wikimedia phenomena, etc. All coordinated by the 27 world chapters of the Wikimedia Foundation, though with only 35 employees.

If we look not at what’s in there, but what people is looking for (visits to the website), some Wikipedias may already be shifting from encyclopedic core to more topical and current events content. On the contrary, though, 1/3 of the hits of the Spanish Wikipedia deals with science and technology content.

Besides current events or news, local content is increasingly searched for. There is also an increase of geotagged content on Wikipedia, thus the interest in local content. As anecdote, it can be said that the second Wikipedia ever created was the Catalan Viquipèdia.

Management model

• Provide physical home (servers)
• Basic rules
• Leave the community work and grow on its own

Power shift to the citizen

• Technology: insfrastructure, tools, open source
• Cultural Movement: free culture (Linux, Apache), free knowledge
• License structure: GNU FDL, Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA)

All in all, the question was that anyone could contribute and the result would be open to everyone.

How do we take care of the community: transparency, trust, thankfulness, respect, responsiveness.

Business Model

Servant-leaders achieve results for their organizations by giving priority attention to the needs of their colleagues and those they serve. Collaboration, communication, culture.

Create a platform, let other people build (i.e. Mediawiki). It happens everywhere: Google, Apple, Amazon, FaceBook, etc. This also applies to Education, as everyone has something to bring on the table. You have to figure out how to make people that know be involved in the process.

Small “workforce” that can adapt to market changes very quickly, plus a virtual larger “workforce”, using the community as research and development.

You have to figure out what you’re good at, and forget about controlling the whole value change. Do not try and do everything. Networks form to address needs: you have to figure out where you fill into that.

Discussion

Ismael Peña-López: would your model be different were the Wikimedia Foundation be Wikimedia “for profit” Corporation? It depends on your project, as everyone is different and there is not a unique model, but leveraging the community might still apply. You definitely have to focus in your goal and where you can contribute best to achieve it. If you’re running a talent based project, you definitely have to share some of the wealth in it. Talent goes where it is appreciated most.

Q: Is it a must to have a professional core? A: It really depends on what you want to achieve. There is definitely not “a” model.

Silvia Bravo: where do we start from? A: Figure out what your goals are and find who’s your champion. Once the project is started, things become easier, but the difficult thing is to start up the project, and the role of the champion is crucial here. Then, you need to create something that people can build things on top of. Make sure you have a clear goal, find out what tools will you be needing and get a champion to promote the project.

Q: how do you deal with security hazards/attacks? A: It is very important to have a clear and shared framework (linked to your goals) that everybody can relate to. And the system works the same way.

Q: what’s the physical structure like? A: only 20 servers [guess I got that right], as most information is only text. But the challenge is how to keep up with changes and still being able to bring the relevant information, which increasingly comes in rich media (photo, sound, video, etc.). That’s why Wikimedia Foundation engages in partnerships with the corporate sector to be ahead of the future.

Llorenç Valverde: how do we engage the community, and invite everyone to add value? A: Culture is the biggest problem. The way collaboration and sharing ideas happens varies a lot depending on the culture, understanding culture not only at the country level, but also at the company level. E.g. if you’re a newcomer to a firm, you might have brilliant ideas but you might not be (self)legitimate to share them openly. Culture is doubtless the toughest part of all.

Llorenç Valverde: so the starting point is to share information within the organization? A: Certainly. Add everybody in the process.

Social Media consultant Marc Cortés has kindly invited me to join a 27 people document where to draft our Predictions for Social Media in 2010. Though most of the professionals featured in the document come from the communications and marketing field — and, hence, the final outcome is populated with advice and forecasts on related topics — there is also a little room for politics and governments.

My reflections, though not explicitly stated, are more targeted towards researchers and knowledgeable people — to whom the Web 2.0 has at last provided a voice on their own despite their affiliation — and to knowledge workers and knowledge intensive institutions in general.

I here below translate my part into English and reproduce the full document and the “headlines” of all other contributors.

Social media will channel activity towards what is relevant: the portfolio

In the coming years we will be closing the circle and be back to personal and institutional websites, though these will in any way look like the ones we visited in the dawn of the World Wide Web.

We have performed a necessary initiation journey taken by the hand of social media, so that we could be introduced to the new and growing possibilities of the Web. Blogs and wikis showed us what was possible in a bi-directional Web, where content and even services creation could be decentralized and exit institutions. Social networking sites added the human factor to the network we had recently created: bi-directionality became multi-directionality, multi-diffusion. Blogs created the bourgeoisie of the Internet, and social networking sites opened it up and democratized it for the rest of the society.

But it is as easy to use social media as it is difficult to manage them and make them work for out benefit. It is likely that whoever wants or has to have a reputation on the Internet just cannot keep having tentacles without a visible head. Social media must be funnels that lead to us: we neither can manage chaor eternally, nor can we expect that whoever looks for us finds us or reconstruct us amongst this total maze of confusion.

This does not mean that we are not present in the relevant channels: it is there where we will mainly interact. But the critical mass of our digital persona must be as near as possible to our self.

What we do, what we are must be centralized. It is the image of what we do and become the one that has to be decentralized, not the essence.

I plead for the construction of the portfolio, for a return to the personal or institutional website, using social media as a game of mirrors that reflects us where we should also be present.

Predictions for Social Media in 2010

Alfonso Alcantara: Consultor y coach en desarrollo profesional y empleo 2.0
“En 2010 las redes sociales definitivamente serán las autopistas de las ideas.”

Jacobo Álvarez: Director Negocio Grupo Intercom y Socio en Multiplica
“El 2010 el año en el que, al menos en el móvil, la suma de geolocalización y redes personales y profesionales nos liberen del exceso de información y nos ayude a acceder a información más relevante de nuestro entorno”

Jose Luis Antúnez: Fundador de YouAre y Coorganizador de Evento Blog España
“El real-time es la extrapolación de la vida real a la web. Y en la vida real se hace dinero vendiendo y pagando cosas”.

Enrique Burgos: Responsable de Marketing Relacional de Unidad Editorial
“Solo demostrando el valor que aporta a las marcas (económico & imagen) se lograra una mayor comprensión por las altas direcciones de las empresas”

Cesar Calderón: Socio Director en Autoritas Consulting
“2010 será el año en el que las administraciones públicas descubran los Social Media y comiencen a conversar con los ciudadanos”

Marc Cortés: Socio-Director RocaSalvatella y Profesor Marketing Electrónico (ESADE)
“Dejaremos de hablar de Social Media y empezaremos a hablar de Social Business”.

Adolfo Corujo y todo el equipo de Llorente & Cuenca: Director Senior Llorente&Cuenca
“Para el usuario, 2010 será el año de… La explosión de la búsqueda en Tiempo Real”

Roberto Carreras: Consultor de Comunicación y RRPP
“La web en tiempo real, que durante 2009 dio sus primeros pasos como fenómeno, vivirá en 2010 su consolidación.”

Fernando de la Rosa: Socio y fundador de Seis Grados
“2010 es un año de re-invenciones: el principio de nuevos mercados y la agonía de otros”.

Roger Domingo: Director Editorial Deusto / Gestión 2000/ Alienta / CEAC
“La incorporación del mundo de la empresa a las redes sociales conllevará también un incremento de la publicidad en las mismas, lo cual pondrá en peligro la tan deseada “conversación cluetrainiania””

Fernado Fegido: Director de Negocio Digital de Caja Navarra
“El año 2010 será otro año en el que deberemos de seguir evangelizando y capacitando a muchos responsables de Márketing y Comunicación”

Tristán Elósegui: Responsable de Marketing Digital de Canal+ y Organizador del The Monday Reading Club
“La crisis va a favorecer el crecimiento de los medios sociales”

Ricard Espelt: Regidor de Nuevas Tecnologías de Copons
“La ciudadanía, cada vez más consciente del poder de las redes sociales, va a provocar pequeñas “revoluciones” en el devenir de la política española”

Marek Fodor: Emprendedor y Business Angel del sector tecnológico
“Bajará notablemente el crecimiento de twitter, comparado con el año 2009”.

Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez: Responsable de Comunidad del BBVA
“Se dará el caso de comunidades enteras que renuncian a las redes sociales, que se bautizarán como “Amish digitales””

Albert García Pujadas: CEO Nikodemo
“El video se impondrá como formato de comunicación habitual y como soporte publicitario de primer orden”

Xavier Guell: Weyoose y Coorganizador de Cava&Twitts
“Adiós humo, hola servicio”

Javier Martín: Blogger y emprendedor
Es la hora de vender!

Jose Antonio del Moral: CEO de Alianzo
“Volveremos a hablar de Web 2.0 y no tanto de social media. En el fondo todo es social y no sólo los media”

Ícaro Moyano: Director Comunicación tuenti
“¿GRPs? Mejor recomendaciones”

Sebastian Muriel: Director de red.es
“Será el año en el que no se dejará de hablar del Social Media en los medios tradicionales”

José Luis Orihuela: Profesor de la Universidad de Navarra
“La red y sus aplicaciones se vivirán cada vez más como una experiencia móvil”

Alberto Ortiz de Zárate: Director de Atención Ciudadana en Gobierno Vasco
“Empezaremos a hacer un uso inteligente de las redes sociales. En ese camino, la relevancia se desplazará de las herramientas hacia las estrategias de comunicación”

Ismael Peña-López: Profesor Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
“Abogo por una construcción del portafolio, por una vuelta a la web personal o institucional, utilizando los social media como un juego de espejos que nos refleje allí donde debamos estar también presentes”

Genis Roca: Socio Director RocaSalvatella
“En resumen, las palabras clave para este 2010 serán: Indicadores, Gestión y Resultados”.

Esteban Trigos: Marketing Innovator Director – Double You
“las marcas empezarán a incorporar en sus mensajes un nuevo giro a la hora de comportarse: serán más sociales

Marc vidal: CEO de Cink
“Será el momento de los Net estrategy por encima de los Managers de comunidad”.

More information

• Predicciones para Social Media en 2010 (documento colaborativo), original post by Marc Cortés
• Social Media Predictions 2010, the document in Scribd
• Social Media Predictions 2010, the document for download (, 571 KB)
• Preddiciones sobre Social Media para 2009, the predictions for 2009, Scribd document

Notes from the first II Conferencia Internacional Brecha Digital e Inclusión Social (II International Conference on the Digital Divide and Social Inclusion held at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid will be hosting at their campus in Leganés (Spain) on October 28th to 30th, 2009.

Parallel session: Trends and advances before the digital divide: assessment systems and good practices
Moderator: Concepción Colomer Revuelta, Subdirector at the Oficina de Planificación Sanitaria and Director del Observatorio de Salud de la Mujer del Ministerio de Sanidad y Política Social

Digital and informational divides in a context of digital, cultural, cognitive and generational convergence
Marcelo D’Agostino, Consultant in Knowledge Management, Organización Panamericana de la Salud

Marcelo D’Agostino believes that the digital digital will shrink, necessarily, as the Internet won’t make steps backwards [he seems to forget that the digital divide is actually widening, especially if we take into account the quality of access, namely, broadband access, and what you can or cannot do with that different quality of access].

Advise to bridge the digital divide:

• Don’t be intimidated by technical jargon
• Don’t be afraid of technology
• Nobody is an expert in everything
• Trust first your capacity and then apply technologies
• Be careful where you look for information

Benefits of ICTs for Public Health: a better link between patients and professionals; better and life-long training.

Open access to health and medical information: a challenge before the digital divide
Helena Martín Rodero, Head of the Sección Bibliotecas Biosanitarias de la Universidad de Salamanca

Raghavendra Gadagkar: open-access more harm than good in developing world (published in Nature, comment by Peter Suber) stating the rich world patronising the poor world, in the sense that rich ones might be more interested in poor ones reading rather than publishing.

We are witnessing a crisis in the system of scientific diffusion, that has lead to the creation of the Open Access movement and several international declarations to foster scientific publishing in open access journals (gold access) or scientific self-archiving in open access repositories (green access).

Open access is compatible with peer-review, professional quality, prestige, preservation, intellectual property, profit, priced add-ons and print (originally in Open access to the scientific journal literature, by Peter Suber.

Access to knowledge will necessarily help to bridge the digital divide, and open access publications and repositories is a way to enable a better access to knowledge.

Web 2.0 and Medicine
Dídac Margaix Arnal, Librarian at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia

New generations (digital natives) have been born with new technologies and these are no strange to them. Have different skills towards technology and information, which they manage in different ways.

We might be in an age similar to the Renaissance, where technology feeds cultural and social change, and culture and society feed technological change.

Three kinds of Web 2.0 sites

• The web as the platform: use the web instead of the desktop (e.g. Zoho)
• Remix the web: use the web to mix different content (e.g. Google Maps)
• The social web: it is users what counts, not visits. Users add value to the site (e.g. YouTube)

Medicine 2.0: use of a set of web tools by health professionals applying the principles of open source, open access, etc. It is different from e-Medicine, that is applying ICTs in health issues. There has been an inflexion point that has put humans into technology, from just ICTs to the dimension of community. It is a matter not of technology but of participation.

Some factors:

• “Suppormediation”: support and mediation by non-professionals (in Spanish: Apomediación)
• Collaboration
• Transparency

There increasingly are websites that provide health information on the Internet. We should prescribe more information than pills (or, at least, as much information as pills).

Summing up: new agents, new tools, collaboration, personalization, training.

Internet and Health
David Novillo Ortiz, Agencia de Calidad del Sistema Nacional de Salud. Ministerio de Sanidad y Política social

Related to health, increasingly people get their information from the Internet and less from TV, and more from blogs. In general, e-mail, search engines and social networking sites have entered with strength into the information landscape.

Search for health information in the Internet has gone from 19% in 2003 to 54% in 2008 (Spain, % of total Internet users). There is a gender gap where women score 10 points higher than men, probably due to their role as the person at home that cares for the family members.

In April 2007, the same search terms in 4 different search engines produced only 0.6% of overlap (only 0.6% of all results were the same in the 4 search engines). We should be careful about that, as the information that search engines produce is, by any means, the same one ever.

Indeed, we trust more the people we know that the ones we don’t, that’s why Google Social Search might be adding a lot of value as it will bring personal context to people’s searches.

On the other hand, we can access certified/verified health websites whose information is backed by the reputation of the institutions that publish those websites. E.g. excelenciaclinica.net, a metasearch engine that crawls the best health websites in Spanish.

More information

• Gestión del Conocimiento y TIC en la salud – #5 II Conferencia Internacional Brecha Digital e Inclusión Social, by Francesc Gómez Morales
• Chan, Arunachalam, Kirsop (2009). Open access: a giant leap towards bridging health inequities, via @KevinDonovan
• A collection of literature on Open Access
• Reader on Open Access for Development

The possibility to tape a lecture — e.g. an academic lecture from a professor and belonging to an undergrad course — and upload it to a web server is not new. But as a lecture is not only a speech, but a lot more — questions and answers, teamwork, a blackboard or a beamer with complementary materials and/or further explanations, etc. — we have usually been seeing lecture recording like a by-product of master-classes in the best of scenarios.

But the fact that the web is increasingly (a) providing best connectivity, access, searchability/findability, ease of use and capabilities of storage, and (b) more social tools so that people can collaborate, has made the debate around video-lectures worth revisiting.

A simple search provides a good bunch of articles worth giving them a look:

• Abt & Barry (2007) The Quantitative Effect of Students Using Podcasts in a First Year Undergraduate Exercise Physiology Module
• Cascaval, Fogler, Abrams & Durham (2008) Evaluating the Benefits of Providing Archived Online Lectures to In-class Math Students
• Whatley & Ahmad (2008) Using Video to Record Summary Lectures to Aid Students’ Revision
• Chiu, Lee & Yang (2006) A Comparative Study of Post-class Lecture Video Viewing
• Cardall, Krupat & Ulrich (2008) Live Lecture Versus Video-Recorded Lecture: Are Students Voting With Their Feet?
• O’Donoghue, Hollis & Hoskin (2007) Lecture recording: Help or hinder in developing a stimulating learning environment?
• Flores & Savage (2007) Student Demand for
  Streaming Lecture Video: Empirical Evidence from Undergraduate Economics Classes

The results from the previous papers can be summarized as follows:

• If the recorded lecture is just a substitute for the live thing, it might not make a difference or, in other words, the impact might be null.
• But the recorded lecture can be more engaging than the live lecture, as it allows for stops and fast-forwards, pauses to check other information, etc.
• The video-lecture can also enable people to attend lectures they would or could not attend, and even make them more efficient in their attendance (see previous point)
• The taped lecture can also be a trigger for teamwork, collaboration and other social learning methodologies, methodologies that, indeed, are normally not used in live lectures because of their (a) unidirectionality (b) time constraints and (c) crowded classrooms — let alone shyness from some attendees that just cannot speak/interact in public
• If students are more engaged, comfortable and willing to collaborate, the impact of having recorded lectures either as supporting materials or as a substitute for the “real thing” can end up having a positive impact and increasing academic performance in relationship with students not using taped lectures but attending classes

Educator.com

With this in mind, I happened to meet online the founders of Educator.com and had the chance to have a guest access to the site — while they invited me too to write this little piece about Educator.com.

Educator.com is a collection of academic lectures [...] helping students that do not have ready access to great education because of geographic location or socioeconomic status. Educator’s instructors are all experienced college professors and guide students through an innovative two video interface that simulates a one-to-one learning environment. In other words, people at Educator.com have put together good professors in front of the camera and taped their lectures, including their slides, whiteboard notes, syllabuses, readings, etc.

At first glance — which sticks at second and further “glances” — the quality of the materials is impressive (see, for instance, what’s being prepared to learn chemistry or Calculus BC), treated with most taste and sensitivity: content is good and is meticulously presented. Most materials include a video of the professor plus his slides and/or whiteboard, while keeping navigation very easy along the syllabus which features subtitles and time codes. Videos add up some quick notes and the possibility to comment them.

That said, and going back to what we stated before about video lectures, Educator.com makes a very good companion to either reinforce or to (maybe) substitute traditional lectures, and I see a lot of potentials in models like Educator.com’s.

Cons of video-lectures?

In my opinion, the cons — necessarily — go in the same line as the “accompanying measures” that the afore mentioned researchers already stated in their papers: while content can constitute a core and a good one, it is context and enablers what will make of a video-lecture a (potential) success — besides the incontestable fact of being able to reach a content you wouldn’t otherwise if not being able to attend live lectures, of course.

A first aspect is exercises, so that oneself can test a specific level of knowledge acquisition. This is something that’s already planned (though not still implemented) in Educator.com and that just seldom is seen in other academic lectures’ repositories.

Related to this, possibility of feedback or guidance should naturally follow. Being myself a professor teaching online, once content is made available, our added value is, simply stated, (a) guidance through path setting and (b) provision of specific feedback.

Which leads me to the third aspect: in distance learning, syllabuses, learning paths, etc. are a must. Much is done in this sense at Educator.com and much more is likely to be found there would their project work, reach a critical mass and enable them to put as many courses as possible.

Of course, it is not only a matter of setting up a learning path, but also help in blueprinting one’s own curriculum. Being able to create one’s own “playlists” (something that other content — not lectures — repositories allow) or be able to go offline by feeding your mp4 player would be interesting add ons to the project and to the freedom of the student.

In the end, sites like Educator.com should enable the student to create their own e-portfolios or, to follow the actual trend, their own personal learning environments.

These personal learning environments would, of course, interact with other students so that a learning community can emerge, be it to share hints, materials, doubts or, in the best scenario, to build together their own learning.

Summing up: initiatives like Educator.com take the best of technology to capture live lectures and make them available to a very broad public. I don’t think just taped lectures are “education”, but:

• They can be complemented with more content, context, guidance, classmates, etc. so that the resulting mix is a real and richest learning experience
• They definitely stress the weaknesses of the traditional lecturing style, challenging the suitability of such methods, and asking them for an urgent update… maybe a blended model were lectures can be supplied by someone like Educator.com and leave live meetings for debates, seminars or something were face-to-face makes more sense and ads real value.

Live notes at the eResearch seminar by Tíscar Lara, Mariluz Congostoand José Luis Molina entitled Análisis de redes sociales: nuevas formas de visualización del conocimiento (Social network analysis: new forms of knowledge visualization). Citilab, Cornellà de Llobregat (Barcelona), Spain, June 17th, 2009.

See also e-research tag.

A collaborative experience to visualize social networks
Tíscar Lara, Mariluz Congosto

Blog analysis based on journalists that have a blog, as a middle ground between pro and personal. Of special interest how is the identity built: Identity building: domain name, about section, personal photography, affiliation, etc.

The network of blogs gets complicated with other Web 2.0 services. There’s a need to manage the increasing data with a model: Barriblog.

The model is based on two axes — content affinity and intensiveness of relationship — and measures links, conversations/comments and citations, adding them up in a relationship index.

Improvements on the model: time series, how have other web 2.0 applications (e.g. Twitter) impacted on blog usage and blog networking, etc.

How to visualize?

• Content
• Time
• Maps
• Relationships

Allí me reencontré con Edgar Gómez recién llegado de México y dispuesto a escribir su tesis

(see also: Gathering of visualization tools)

Visualizing Transnationality
José Luis Molina

How can we map transnationality? Focusing on flows; focusing on active contacts with people with the same origin; focusing in the geographical distribution of all active contacts.

For instance, a visualization of Chinese immigration in the Barcelona metropolitan area shows that there’s more relationship with the country of origin (China) or the US, than within immigrants; that immigrants mainly settle in Barcelona and have poor relationship with Catalan rural areas; and that within Barcelona, they move around relatively few places. Visualization allows immediate glance to these facts while raw data does not.

Many ethical issues arise in an ether that covers all, where everything we do is registered/tracked.

Use visualization to make better research questions, to get qualitative observations after quantitative data.

NOTE: difficult session where to take notes, as everything was so… visual.

On Friday May 15th, 2009, I took part in a round table about Educational Innovation in the framework of the ForumRed’09, a meeting about education, the Net and the collective web organized by the School of Communication, University of Seville (Spain).

The round table was cleverly chaired by Juan José Calderón and participated by Julen Iturbe, Tíscar Lara and I.

After a first exposition from each of the participants about the topic of the title, Juan José Calderón would drop his questions on the table and then they’d be more or less answered or commented by some or all of us. What follows are the notes I took during the event, unedited, uncut, as raw as they came. They are nor complete or comprehensive, so important data might be missing. My apologies to the other speakers for not make justice to their insights here — fortunately, the event was taped and will hopefully be soon released online.

Tíscar Lara

Should we be talking about teaching innovation or about student/learning innovation? Isn’t it the student the one that is innovating? Where are people socializing one to each other? Where is learning innovation happening? What’s the role of expanded education? Of informal learning? How do we integrate these phenomena?

Isn’t there a crisis in the segregation of roles between teachers and students? How do teachers learn? Aren’t teachers also learners, and learners that are learning on the Net?

Ismael Peña-López

We’ve been living in a world based on transaction costs: enterprises (the transaction costs of production and distribution), political parties (the transaction costs of direct democracy), schools and universities (the transaction costs of gathering all knowledge)… The Internet cuts down to almost zero most costs of transaction related to knowledge management. And, hence, the need of intermediaries: end of some industries? end of political parties? end of universities?

A new role for knowledge workers: to monitor knowledge, to hub it towards third parties, to enable these third parties and empower them in knowledge management terms.

Julen Iturbe

We’re living a shift from a lab that acts as a simulator for entrepreneurs towards real engagement in the economy and real entrepreneurship. The student is empowered with a more active role enabled by this crisis of intermediation and the fall of transaction costs.

• A change in the idea of student: responsible of their own learning processes. There are no handbooks, no syllabuses, etc.. It is the student who defines the syllabus and seeks their own learning resources.
• The teacher is no more a teacher but a tutor, and normally an entrepreneur themselves.
• The classroom has no more sense in this model, especially as a physical concept that increasingly implies constraints (of time and space). Students can design physical spaces themselves according to their own needs.
• What’s the sense of time? How do we measure the amount of hours required for a specific “subject”? How do we fit all the hours spent — offline and online — working on a project/subject?

No maps for these territories?

Juan José Calderón: there are new territories for which we have no maps [a statement which reminds me of William Gibson's No maps for these territories]. What should we do? Are we in a crisis?

Julen Iturbe: there are (new) generations that feel comfortable enough without maps. That even feel uneasy when the whole path is paved and would rather have more freedom to define their own ways.

Crisis? There’s increasing evidence that students know more than teachers or experts at large.

Ismael Peña-López: I see three “evolution” patterns (simplified):

• Darwin: species change as better phenotypes survive and worse phenotypes extinct
• Lamarck: species change by adapting themselves to the environment
• Meteorite: a meteorite directly kills species by overturning the landscape and some species survive and reign

We have to assume that a meteorite will fall on some “species” (e.g. paper journals, the distribution of CDs). And that some other “species” might just die out and leave no trace (one or two generations of “digital immigrants”). But we have to work the Lamarckian path so to minimize casualties: learn to learn, learn how to map territories or live in unmapped ones, teach competences that enable skills acquisition, bridge old an new… No revolution but evolution.

Tíscar Lara: think with a mobile phone logic: traditionally, switches have one and only one purpose (turn on the radio, switch on the lights, connect the washing machine). But mobile phones have keys with several purposes or functions. And trying to teach each and every function of a single key is useless. We have to teach the rationale behind the multifunction switch. There is no need to know the whole map of features, but learn how to take decisions with incomplete information, and learning in the process.

Put the focus on the purpose, and then discover the tools that can help me in achieving this purpose. And this is risky, and we are risk-averse, reluctant to change. But we have to learn to live with risk and failure. And we have to acknowledge that we are living in critical times, which will help in surviving this crisis.

Collaborative networking

Juan José Calderón: Are we ready for collaborative networking? Can we produce open content?

Julen Iturbe: content will increasingly be open, and this is an unstoppable trend. We should, nevertheless, put the stress on the difference between information and knowledge. In social networking sites the focus is in the “social”, and it is not about content, but networked people. And we learn not through content, but through people: content (publications and so) are but means to identify and reach people.

A problem with the actual system of acknowledgement of diffusion of science is that it is not related with the reality. The practitioner and the scholar do not share the same agoras where to exchange knowledge, and open publications seem to be bridging this chasm.

Ismael Peña-López: we are prepared to collaborate and teamwork and is has historically been this way. The problem is that we are assigning two different goals (diffusion and assessment) to the same tool: journals/papers/essays.

Open content has made diffusion quick and free, and creates tensions with the other goal: assessment. We should focus on assessment methodologies, which are dragging collaborative work as we do not know how to assess it (or are not able to).

Tíscar Lara: we have forgotten how to collaborate and teamwork. And we have to teach again how to, teach how to get over learning routines, already known and comfortable to be carried on.

On the other hand, scholarly journals have played havoc on knowledge diffusion in two ways: On the one hand, they are more focused towards assessment/accreditation than to diffusion. On the other hand, it does not catch knowledge that is produced outside of the system.

Indeed, we should acknowledge all the effort to produce and publish/diffuse knowledge made outside of the traditional/mainstream means, and use it to give credit.

Next steps?

Juan José Calderón: how to go on? next step? what is going to happen?

Julen Iturbe: use the judo philosophy: benefit from the energy and novelty that the student is bringing in, use the “difference” to approach the “different” (the new practices of the younger students).

Ismael Peña-López: we should try not to do the same things in different ways, but novelties should come with no disruptions. An option could also be radically innovative changes but in controlled and piloted projects, in just part of the subject, in just part of the traditional activities, in parallel lines (the revolution within).

Two key aspects for this approach to succeed:

• the sandbox: a place where to experiment without blowing up everything if it fails
• the wildcard: a person, or a team, whose only purpose is to be available to help others’ innovation, with relevant information on state of the art instructional technology and methodologies, being able to set up a “sandbox” in hours/days, etc.

Tíscar Lara: promote “full-contact”, because of the idea of contact, of hands-on. Try to bring back emotions and personal interests into the classroom. Try to avoid knowing our students once they’re given their marks… way too late for corrections. Build spaces where to just meet, as persons.

And the web 2.0 (blogs, social networking sites, etc.) do provide valuable tools to make this contact happen, to build affective links and emotional learning. And, by this, break the artificial rivalry between teachers and students, and amongst students and colleagues themselves.

See also:

Julen Iturbe: Innovación Educativa = Bronca.