The key motivator of Social Media and the core spirit of Web 2.0 is a mind switch called Sharism. Sharism suggests a re-orientation of personal values. [...] And it’s okay to seek financial rewards. But you will in every case get something just as substantial: Happiness.

This is Isaac Mao in the essay Sharism: A Mind Revolution that he wrote for Joi Ito’s book Freesouls. While I like the music — I actually hum it myself every now an then — I find the lyrics hard to sing.

Don’t get me wrong: there are almost 2,000 of pieces of work that I am already sharing in this website, ranging from the simplest blog post to the latest version of a learning material, and including slides for presentations, articles, book chapters and so. Everything is (at this very moment) under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license, which has not stopped third parties from asking for permission to create derivative works, which has always been granted too.

The reasons for behaving like that are the ones that Isaac Mao is depicting in his essay, and many more, including both my own philosophy regarding the nature of the outputs derived from public funding or the ethos of scientists and their role in society. But this behaviour, while fostered by ideologies, is actually been made possible because my time is already paid: partly by tax payers, partly by students enrolled in my (public) university (tax payers too, after all).

When I wake up in the morning, my mortgage is already being paid. With that in mind, I have plenty of room for putting ideologies into practice.

Isaac Mao speaks about the positive results of Sharism:

• You get comments and feedback in general that enrich your work.
• You get access to all the other stuff being shared.
• Anything you share can be forwarded, circulated and republished, which implies you get recognition and (namely) social status.
• What you do, if shared, has a meaning not only for you, but for the whole of society.
• But you will in every case get something just as substantial: Happiness.

This works 100% for me. As a scholar, a (mostly) publicly-funded scholar, this works 100%, especially the happiness part. I mean it. Since I began to blog in 2003, I only got benefits from sharing. Sometimes even in cash.

But.

I’ve done my homework (see below). I’ve read what I ought to. And still can’t I see how Sharism — or, closely related, a hacker ethic — can be applicable to the whole economy the way Mao’s portraying. Yes, we’ve got (some) examples in the free software community and (much less) examples in the open/free culture movement. But still, in a global economy where money comes from capturing the added value of an output (where “capturing” is a very broad term for a very complex set of practices, most of them related to restrained access to that output), Sharism will have hard times when it comes to paying a mortgage, which is paid in actual legal tender.

Web 2.0, the power of sharing

My university is inviting Isaac Mao to the V Meeting of associate institutions and businesses. The second part of the event is an open round table which I am chairing and that will be participated by Isaac Mao himself, Ricardo Galli, founder of the “Spanish Digg” (Menéame), and Alfons Sort, CEO of Adobe Systems Ibérica.

I will definitely bring all my questions on the table with the goal in mind to see whether we can shed some light on the many open topics that, in my opinion, Sharism still has to clarify.

Recommended readings

I previously said that I had done my homework. What follows is a brief collection of readings which I find very relevant for our discussion here. Enjoy.

Open Educational Resources: the reality of shared knowledge

Open.
Brian Lamb.

A shift has happened one we can attend an event and everyone has a camera with which they are taking their own pictures, besides the official photographer. Everyone becomes a creator.

on the other hand, the Internet brings any kind of content to our homes, so not only the idea of the creator becomes drastically changed, but also the idea of space becomes irrelevant.

Feedback is enabled between (creative) people anytime, anywhere. The sole condition: openness. There are plenty of technologies that enable feedback at a very low financial cost, low risk, low maintenance and low costs of organization.

Openness can be understood in many ways:

• Having access to the content.
• Having access to the code of the content (relevant when multimedia).
• Being able to change or contribute to the content.
• Having the possibility to take the content away and embed or syndicate it elsewhere.
• Not only about open content, but also about open structures.
• Having the ability to create new platforms or sites very quickly, with most flexibility, with low technological thresholds.
• Understanding the process how things are achieved, and not only accessing the final outcomes.
• Having access to the source, data of the content.

But it is not about how the Web is changing Education, but how Education is changing the Web.

And part of this “educating the Web” includes the debate around Net Neutrality, with which Education has a close relationship.

Repositories of Open Educational Content: cases and paradigms.
Ma Antònia Huertas.

Historically, the question has been how to get quality educational content that is available, reliable and that can be reused.

Nowadays availability might not be more an issue, maybe not the possibility of reusing, but reliability is still an unsolved matter.

Some of the “answers” to the question are:

• Distributed open repositories.
• Tools for the user to search, create, catalogue, publish.
• Services and interfaces for interaction.
• Open standards.

Case 1: MeRLí.

MeRLí is a catalogue of digital educational resources developed by the Education Department of the Generalitat de Catalunya [Catalan Government]. Its aim is to thel p the educational community in cataloguing, indexing and searching learning materials.

Search engines are a norm amongst repositories, and it does an intensive usage of metadata that describe the content of the educational resources.

The community — though quite a passive one — is also a core component of the repository.

Content belongs to an educational curriculum, features its life cycle (creation, validation, modification history).

Case 2: Edu3.cat

Edu3.cat is also a Catalan repository, but this time featuring only audiovisual content and with quite a restrictive source of content, mainly academic institutions.

The repository has over 7,000 learning objects integrated according to curricula, an own search engine and a certified process of acceptance of the learning content in the repository.

Case 3: Agrega

Unlike the previous two, Proyecto Agrega is a federation of institutional educational repositories around Spain, mainly belonging to regional governments. The good thing of Agrega is that it renders the individual repositories interoperable and integrable, so that searching or browsing becomes easier and more transparent for the end user.

The platform, notwithstanding, enables specific users to create and upload new content to the repository. The problem is that though the technology is a very advanced one, the community of active users (i.e. creators) is so small that the repository is almost empty — that is, besides what is syndicated from third parties’ repositories.

The critical elements of repositories are the users, not the technology. The weak links of the chain are the submitters, the managers, the curators and the end-users.

Open Educational Practices and Resources. Revisiting the OLCOS Roadmap 2012
César Córcoles.

The roadmap made (2007) several recommendations so that educational institutions could open their resources and apply them to their mainstream activities. What has happened with the recommendations of the OLCOS Roadmap for 2012?

Promote open education partnerships: there have been advances, but arguably not enough. Still closeness is the norm. Same with open educational resources.

Support the development and use of state-of-the art open access resources has quite often been translated on investing on lots of technology and little on training and usage. A bias towards sexy technology.

Public-private partnerships: still very difficult to achieve, especially because the public sector (e.g. Universities) are not in line with the pace of times. This has also been a barrier to switching away from teacher-centred knowledge transfer.

Sharing and reusing has also not been accomplished. Maybe because, most times, people rather create their own content instead of looking what is out of their own institution walls.

Of course, intellectual property and copyright have, definitely, been a huge barrier for the adoption of open educational resources and practices. Indeed the topic has neither been seriously or constructively addressed nor has the industry made any approach or move towards understanding.

Teachers are having hard times using open educational practices to help learners acquire competences for the knowledge society, partly because these competences are rapidly changing, and thus it is difficult to tell which content applies to what (changing) competences.

A key factor is the shift from the “know how” to the “know who”, and open educational practices should be able to support collaborative learning processes and learning communities. This should certainly be a very important reason for institutions to support openness.

From the students’ point of view, openness should be translated into ePortfolios, accessible to third parties.

César here presents the making of Curriculum de estándares web Opera, the Spanish (and Catalan) version of the Opera Web Standards Curriculum, which was published with an open license and, thus, enabled its translation and reusage for educational purposes. The content has proven successful not only for educational purposes, but for a broad community of people interested in the field of Web Standards and that has found in the new version a resource for their own purposes.

Open Education for Secondary Education
Aníbal de la Torre.

The part of the “Preacher 2.0″: it’s not about technology, but methodology; open knowledge, the power of networks and the versatility of blogs, etc.

We are witnessing the convergence of our personnae and our environment, in part through mobility, augmented reality, etc.

The starting point, before exiting or circumventing institutions, is to operate a switch and make people (teachers, students) to work not in the framework of the textbook, but in the framework of tasks, of projects.

The profile of the (Aníbal’s) students is secondary education students that need studying from home: elite sportsmen, housewifes, etc. Thus, lots of new content has been created to adapt them to the new methodologies deployed to meet the needs of these students (circa 30,000). The repository will feature circa 2,000 learning objects by the end of the course 2010-2011.

An important realization is that, when the student is put in the centre of the educational methodology, the learning material becomes not irrelevant but an accessory: by no means the educational material is an important part of the equation. Indeed, the material is frequently updated and complemented with other materials and educational resources: the learning material is no more the central monolith around which the educational process goes around.

If the content is not the centre — though still important, of course — it is because the new centre is the student and working based on tasks and projects.

Taking 30,000 students as the base, it has been calculated that the average cost per student of providing them with all the open educational content they need is 1.50 €.

Some issues/problems:

• Openness requires team-working. Individualism is not an option. And team-working requires hard work and commitment.
• Assessment is extremely slow. While people have feedback of their actions almost immediately in their daily (digital) lives, the educational system provides them with feedback once a year at the end of the course. This has to be addressed.
• Copyright still a hard barrier to overcome.
• Openness has to be an institutional decision.
• Public funding should absolutely imply openness.
• Educational environments should have their own open licenses or legal frameworks to ease openness, authorship recognition, etc.
• We should measure how users are doing, not how products are doing. Assessment of people, not products.
• We have to explore how to assess learning performance with the same tools that learning takes place. E.g. we cannot teach with Internet in the classroom and make exams without it.
• Encourage group- or team-work.
• Learning by doing enables changing tasks, contents, syllabuses, etc. extremely easy.

More Information

• Una de recursos educativos abiertos: revisitando OLCOS…, by César Córcoles.
• Brianb Lamb’s presentation: Abierto.
• The un-education of the technologist, by Jim Groom & Brian Lamb.
• Open Educational Practices and Resources. OLCOS Roadmap 2012.
• Educa con TIC.

One of the things they’re presenting is PliegOS, which is like a Twitter for books.

To make a demonstration of PliegOS, Enric is taking the first three out of my four-post series for Drumbeat, that is:

• Deinstitutionalizing education.
• From non-formal learning to casual learning.
• New learning contents and platforms.
• Learning assessment and accreditation in the Information Society.

and turnging them into a pliego.

The result is surprising to say the least. You can download the pliego in the following link:

Deinstitutionalizaing Education.
A Pliego for the Drumbeat Festival Printing Lab

And you can also watch how a pliego is built and used in the following video:

Communications: Transparency & Governance

European Citizens’ Initiative
Alexander Balthasar

Even if petition initiatives are interesting, there still is a very tiny minority that participate in any kind of petitioning, be it online or offline. Indeed, people do have the right to write letters to their governments or their representatives and actually nobody does.

[the speaker assumed that everyone at the audience had read his paper, included in the book of proceedings that was delivered yesterday, and based his speech upon that assumption — I wonder how many people could easily follow his reflections and without the help of visual support...]

Communication without borders
Evgeniya Boklage

The political blogosphere is about political blogs dealing with political issues, from a professional or non-professional point of view.

Public sphere: open communication system, based on exchange of opinions, free type of participation, and that includes three functions: transparency (input), validation (throughput) and orientation (output).

Transparency requires openness. But transparency is not about journalism transparency, as transparent journalism can be embedded in a non-transparent (political) system.

Is the blogosphere a significant asset to the public sphere or is it information overload? Is the blogosphere citizen empowerment or is it merely a symbolic tool?

How can blogosphere enhance transparency?

• Media-watchdogs
• Shed light to obscure topics
• Observation of mass media, the political system and the society
• Navigation, creation of an embedding context, providing additional materials, raise awareness on immediate and noticeable impact
• Access to the public discourse
• A tribune for NGOs, advocacy groups and politically driven citizens

Throwing the Sheep’s Long Tail: Open Access
Noella Edelmann and Peter Parycek

New Journal of eDemocracy (JeDEM), which will be an open access journal.

We can find a close relationship between open access publishing and e-democracy and transparency.

We can now publish all the information we can without anyone’s permission.

We have to force a policy change where openness is the default, and closeness the option you might choose.

Other reactions on this session

• EDem10 – Day 2 – #2
• Towards European Citizenship?
• Political Blogs and Transparency
• Open Access to Scholarly Information

Open Access to Research: Changing researcher behaviour through university and funder mandates
Stevan Harnad, Université du Quebec à Montréal & University of Southampton

The common point between open access and democracy has a good example in Wikipedia’s outcome: though the mechanism of meritocracy is not that good. In Wikipedia, the criterion is not truth but notability. If everyone says that cows fly, this is what the Wikipedia will say, even if it is not true. We need some sort of mechanism, of metrics, to measure feedback. And open access can be a good base to that.

Open access means free, immediate, online access to the 2.5 million annual research articles that are published in all 25,000 peer-reviewed journals in all scholarly scientific disciplines. It is not about removing peer-review but, on the contrary, to bring access to scientific outcomes validated, legitimated, credited, certified by this peer-review system.

It is important to note that none of the authors of the 2.5 million articles wants money for their articles: it is attention and feedback they’re asking for. this is a radical difference from other authors that make a living from writing. And that is why open access focuses on scientific publications.

Other knowledge outputs as books, textbooks, magazine articles, newspaper articles, music, video, software, other “knowledge”, data, unrefereed preprints are just not a priority, because they are not peer-reviewed and because these are not all author give-aways, written only for usage and impact, or because the author’s choice to self-archive can only be encouraged, not required in all cases (the cases of data and preprints).

Two ways to provide open access.

• Green OA: once the article is accepted, the pre-print referee-accepted version is made open.
• Gold OA: open the published version, desirably the journal itself.

Reasons for open access: To maximise the uptake, usage, applications of a publication. Research open on the web has 25-50% more impact, and the better the article, the higher the impact of making that article open.

Surprisingly, despite the benefits still only a tiny fraction of researchers provide green access to their papers, and the only successful way so far has been mandates, mandates to provide green access enforced by funders and/or universities. Indeed, most researchers are for open access, but they just claim lack of time to do so, which means they would not oppose a mandate provided it came with the necessary resources to put it into practice.

Sample of candidate OA-era metrics: citations, CiteRank (like PageRank), co-citations, downloads, citations and downloads correlations, hub/authority index, chronometrics (latency, longevity), book index, endogamy/exogamy, links, tags, commentaries, journal impact factor, h-index (and variants), co-authorships, publication counts, number of publishing years, semiometrics (latent semantic indexing, text overlap, etc.), research funding, students, prizes, etc.

Discussion

Q: what is then the future of journal publishing? A: for the time being, even in the areas where OA is higher, there has been no journal cancellations. Once everything is open access, many journals will have to change their business models, and only peer-review will remain: no archiving, no paper publishing, no online publishing, etc. And they will only need a small fraction of the money to be sustainable, and they’ll get if from funders, governments, universities, authors or whatever.

More information

Brody et al. (2007) Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web: Publication-, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics. CTWatch Quarterly, 3(3).

EDEM10 – Five Questions – Stevan Harnad from digitalgovernment:

Other reactions on this session

• EDem10 – Day 2 – #1
• Open Access as Enabler for e-Democracy

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

Now this book has been translated into Spanish by the Universidad de los Andes within the framework of their Acceso Abierto al Conocimiento en Latinoamérica [Open Access to Knowledge in Latin America] initiative.

Of course, my chapter has also been translated and is now entitled Web 2.0 y el Acceso Abierto al conocimiento, which I have to admit is a clearer title.

I want to sincerely thank — thank you, thank you very much — the team at the Universidad de los Andes in Venezuela for considering the suitability of the book and translating it, and Enrique Canessa and Marco Zennaro for the original idea and editing work.

More information

• Difusión científica y las iniciativas de Acceso Abierto, official website
• Download the book ( 4.5 MB)

Open Social Learning in Spain. Clarifying Concepts
Dolors Reig

Dolors Reig. Photo by Carlos Albaladejo

Traditional e-Learning: everything preset, all paths settled. The evolution has then been, from the web to the social web, and from the social web to the personal web (Nova Spivack).

New ideas that shape the social web:

• Intercreativity
• Collective intelligence
• Smart mobs
• Wisdom of the crowds
• Architecture of participation
• Sharism

Open Social Learning

• Digital natives: It’s problable, though, that the so-called digital natives they actually are “hanging out” online (danah boyd). Thus, the digital knowledge might not be that high within digital natives as we should expect.
• Connectivism: the Internet is so shaped to learning because it works as we do, we learn as networks, learning happens when connections are created, the ability to learn is more important than knowing, etc.
• Social learning: if markets are conversations (Cluetrain Manifesto), education and learning are also conversations, the prosumers and active students being the main characters of this era and peer-to-peer being the best way to acquire information and knowledge. From the “I think therefore I am” to the “we participate, therefore we are” (Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0).
• Informal Learning: Jay Cross states that 70-90% of corporate learning is informal. We have to enable this informal learning so that it can happen.
• e-Learning 2.0
• Generative Learning
• Communities of Learning
• Constructivism
• Edupunk

Creativity: We should be focusing in what motivates people (à la Maslow): that’s why social networking sites are so successful.

Autonomous learning: what really drives knowledge is the process, not the output.

Universal, free and democratic learning (Soumitra Dutta).

Minimally invasive education, taking the example of Sugata Mitra.

Lifelong learning, immersive learning, non-stop learning, ubiquitous learning.

An active role that is required to remix. At its turn, remixing asks for multiliteracies.

Metaverses: Augmented reality, lifelogging, etc.

Changes of roles: the student is not passive, but a participant. The teacher is a facilitator, a curator. And the information becomes a perpetual beta.

Technology becomes too a very important part of the equation: open APIs or all technologies that enable sindication (XML/RSS, Atom, etc.) are true drivers of this change.

Main conclusions

• A web simple to use
• People, collectives, interests, tags, twines, groups
• Real time web
• “If we know the exact cost, the exact agenda of a project, it is probable that it is based on an obsolete technology” (Joseph Gavin, Jr.)

In all this landscape, the e-Portfolio is very relevant, as it perfectly fits with and represents the digital persona. And, complementing to this, e-competences are the necessary tools to get on with digital life.

Q&A

Begoña Gros: We have to make an effort to link the newest technologies and applications with learning or education, and not separating them as if they belonged to different spheres. A: Agreed. Indeed, as we increasingly happen to know more and more uses of the Internet, people shift from “bad” practices (online gambling, porn, etc.) towards “good” practices (learning, communicating with peers, etc.).

Jesús Martínez: Teachers need to learn so that they keep being up-to-date and can keep on teaching. We should accelerate the process of change, of adaptation, or re-learning. A: One of the direst problems is not only that people don’t know, but that people (e.g. teachers) do not know that they do not know.

Open Social Learning en España: Diagnosis and Perspective
Rubén Díaz

Rubén Díaz. Photo by Carlos Albaladejo

Expanded education: Search for new ways of education that embed and adapt social and communicational processes that the Internet made possible.

Education can take place at every moment, in every place. Inside and outside the walls of the academic institution.

We can virtually access all the information that the whole World generates (and has generated), but: Will we have the need for that much information? (Nam June Paik, 1977). And we need to take control over the technologies that make possible the access to all that information and apply them to, for instance, Education (Noam Chomsky, 1998). Education is not, is being (Paulo Freire). Nobody knows it all, everyone knows something, all the knowledge lays on the whole humankind (Pierre Lévy). Today, the voice you speak with could not be your own voice (DJ Spooky).

Margaret Meads (Culture and Compromise) stresses the fact of the non-linearity of knowledge and how we are stuck to the books. Jesús Martín Barbero states the importance of oral and visual culture nowadays (i.e. cyberculture) in opposition with the traditional written culture of education during the last centuries.

Knowledge is delocalized. Everyone’s interested in education, and everyone’s capable of learning.

Learning takes place when solving problems by going through them using creativity. But how and why are people creative? And how can the environment negatively affect the learning environment? Is the actual educational system a learning environment that fosters creativity?

The learning environment is the source of knowledge. Active and collaborative learning environments enable learning by doing. We need to disclose communication channels so that motivation happens. We need to develop a pedagogy of the question. We are used to a pedagogy of the answer, where the teacher answers questions that the students never put (Paulo Freire).

We have to move towards the educommunication, avoiding the education of silence. Oriented self-education, expanded education. Expanded education is the communicative link between memory and remix to build the self from the world we speak from.

An adult assimilates:

• 20% of information heard
• 30% of observed
• 50% of observed and listened
• 70% of expressed by oneself
• 90% of elaborated by oneself

Experience: Platoniq‘s Bank of Common Knowledge in the 3000 viviendas de Sevilla.

Q&A

Enric Senabre: What about expanded assessment? A: The problem is not only assessment, but the whole system. And we should begin with youngsters and schools, and later on with the University.

Q: what about beyond formal education? A: At Zemos98 we schedule a yearly Festival, where different people can meet different kinds of knowledge.

Silvia Bravo: If all these approaches and technologies are so evidently good, why aren’t they more pervasive? Where are we failing? A: The blame is maybe on the moral majority of the mainstream, the socioeconomic system where education is business. A second aspect is contextualization: how to use technology to work locally.

Open Social Learning?
Marc Alier

Open Learning: We use to define problems so that some structured learning outcomes happen, but problems do not usually have unique solutions, as life. If we open education, we have to be aware that problems and solutions have to be open too.

Social Learning: If we do not do nothing as a society, we do not learn as a group. The interesting thing is to participate and be engaged within the community. Social Learning is learning as a group. But it is also about learning how to be social, is about education training people to socialize and, at the same time, to define the society as is: education shapes society.

Learn in Community: Moodle as the flagship of community learning. Related with hacker ethics: passion for what you do; freedom; value and social recognition; information and knowledge accessibility; activism; social commitment.

Marc Alier. Photo by Enric Senabre Hidalgo

Open, social and hacker ethics lead us to Learning in community by doing and sharing openly.

When students are given control begin to feel confident on what they do. And things happen. People self-organize; new “solutions” or “answers” to pre-established problems/questions arise; and new knowledge emerges.

Some examples:

• Work on specific subjects but without constraints, being the output a collaborative text on a wiki + a presentation. Students take divergent directions from what one would expect, but with high quality output and high engagement.
• Collaborative (massive: circa 30 students) project management subject where the whole classroom defines a single project. Rules? Only traceability of work. Students would use all kind of web 2.0 applications to distribute roles and tasks, to schedule milestones, to distribute workload, etc. The teacher then becomes a mentor whose “sole” work is to monitor and guide the autonomous work of the students.

To be able to perform such a monitoring activity, the software needs to be prepared to do that monitoring. Tracing is a must and interoperability between applications another need so that different tools can be integrated and used during the learning (and teaching) process.

Q&A

Ismael Peña-López: what competences need teachers to become “open social learning monitors or mentors”? A: First step is accepting that the outcomes of open collaborative work is an open and unexpected outcome. And this is not a competence but an attitude. Once the teacher gives control away, they will bring in technology: the teacher does not need the technology to give it to the students, but to follow (and catch up with) them. The attitude is the key: what outcomes are you renouncing to in exchange of implication and satisfaction?

Dolors Reig: How to monitor? How to evaluate? How to make quantify performance? A: The important thing in technology is how you are going to evaluate, and then design the software. If the evaluation model is clear, technology should not be an issue… provided it is free software and you can edit its code and add new features.

Ismael Peña-López: Can we really always renounce to part of our syllabus, of our planned content? A: Are exams a real way to assess learning? Or are we teaching students to pass exams? If we want to transform the society we don’t need knowledge, we need abilities and competences. We need not to teach knowledge but to teach how to acquire new knowledge and to have a critical attitude towards the knowledge we reach.

Jesús Martínez: How do we cope with competition (in education and in society at large)? With inertias? A: The educational system is at stake, so inertias can be broken down in pieces if this is the general will or the general trend.

The next 5th Internet, Law and Political Science Congress has been scheduled for 6th and 7th July 2009. Organized by the School of Law and Political Science at the Open University of Catalonia (Barcelona, Spain), the event has evolved into an interesting forum where it is highlighted what’s happening nowadays in the fields of law and cyberlaw, intellectual property rights, privacy, data protection, freedom, political engagement, politics 2.0, empowerment, etc.

Aimed to both researchers and practitioners, during the four editions that we’ve been running the congress, we’ve had here people the like of Jonathan Zittrain, John Palfrey, Eben Moglen, Helen Margetts, Lillian Edwards, Yves Poullet, Erick Iriarte, Stephano Rodota or Benjamin Barber, among others.

The main topic this year is social networking sites (SNSs, in a broad sense). We want to have sessions were at least two speakers present opposite points of view (pros and cons). The programme (almost closed, though some changes might apply) is as follows:

• Keynote speech with James Grimmelmann, providing an analysis of the law and policy of privacy on social network sites, and an evaluation of some possible policy interventions.
• Session 1: Social Networking Sites and Individual rights, privacy, intellectual property rights, image rights, intimacy…,
  chaired by Raquel Xalabarder and featuring Jane Ginsburg, Antoni Roig and Alain Strowel.
• Session 2: Data protection and SNSs,
  chaired by Mònica Vilasau and featuring Franck Dumortier, Esther Mitjans and Maya Nieto
• Session 3: Access to public information and SNS
  chaired by Ismael Peña-López and featuring José Manuel Alonso, Jordi Graells, and one/two more speaker(s) TBC.
• Session 4: Policies for a secure Internet,
  chaired by Agustí Cerrillo and featuring Salvador Soriano Maldonado and Nacho Alamillo.
• Session 5: Public participation and SNSs,
  chaired by Ana Sofía Cardenal and featuring Rachel Gibson (TBC), José Antonio Donaire and Ricard Espelt.

Daithí Mac Sithigh will be the official reporter of the event, providing, at the end of each day, a summary of the main subjects dealt in that day’s sessions.

More information

• Official website: http://www.uoc.edu/symposia/idp2009/engl/index.html
• Dates: 6th and 7th July 2009
• Venue: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Rambla de Catalunya, 6, Barcelona, Spain
• The event is free.
• Official tags: idp2009 and idp
• Liveblogging at: Lexferenda and ICTlogy
• Event in Facebook (Spanish)
• Event in Facebook (English)
• Notes and videos from the 4th Internet, Law and Political Science Congress (2008)
• Notes from the 3rd Internet, Law and Political Science Congress (2007)

See also e-research tag.

Open Science and expanded authority
Antonio Lafuente

Open Science

What is open science? Can science not be open? Are we the product of the scientific revolution or is it the scientific revolution a product of the modern era?

The scientific revolution during the XVII and XVIII centuries was not about a dire change in methodology, but opening the process and results of science, making them public and transparent, opening knowledge to many. And it does seem now that we’re revisiting that era again, threatened by the menace of a closure of science.

During these centuries, a new character appears in science: the fact. And, with it, quantification and measurement of phenomena. But then the possibility appears too to register and appropriate knowledge through intellectual property rights. This leads to a process of privatization of knowledge (and universities…).

Threatening knowledge

We live in a Damoclesian era (Moran), scared masses are easier to lead/manage.

On the one hand, there are increasingly powerful lobbying activities that include positioning “experts” in supposedly independent scientific committees, with manifest conflict of interests. Neutrality, thus, is at stake.

Second, secrecy is a growing practice of which there’s evidence to be dragging the efficiency of the practice of science.

The crisis of peer review, affecting the “market” of scientific reputation, which, at its turn, affects tenures, prizes, grants… and indeed most policy-making and decision-taking depends on expertise and reputation.

Endogamy of citation procedures creates a resonance where most articles state the same discoveries but rely, aggregately, in just a few of them. Thus, there is few practice and experimentation and most (vague) citation and repetition of preceding literature, reinforcing — instead of testing or refuting — ungrounded (or poorly grounded) discoveries.

The speed of times also plays havoc on the slow path that science needs.

Uncertainty — or risk, according to Ulrich Beck — also requires more open and collaborative science, as the complex is too difficult to handle by few scientist working together.

Examples of Open Science

Innocentive: a community “to broadcast problems”. Innocentive has put into practice disperse and multidisciplinary talent.

Scott Page: The Difference, with examples of “why 1+1 is not 2″, or how to join efforts in solving problems.

The US Patent System: Not only the system has to grant patents, but research the prior art of the submitted patent application. But the prior art is so huge, that it just cannot be tracked. To solve this, a peer-to-patent project has been created: when a patent is submitted, it is published and whoever is affected by it (i.e. has some prior rights to what the patent claims) can object to that new patent application.

Electrosensibilidad: 13,000,000 Europeans state being electrosensible, meaning that electrostatic waves disable people to work and even live comfortably. But this “disease” is not acknowledged as so. A citizen platform has been created continent wide to share knowledge in order to define the symptoms, the consequences and force governments to acknowledge this disease.

Open Access: is a claim from scientist to recover an image of people working for the common good. The idea is that all knowledge publicly funded should be made public — and not transferred to private hands by giving away intellectual property rights e.g. to publishers. Besides moral issues, open access pays back both economically and scientifically (in citations, publishing impact, etc.).

How can eResearch contribute to enhance Research?
Ismael Peña-López

Please see How can eResearch contribute to enhance Research?

Q & A

Adolfo Estalella: It is an acknowledged truth that most collaborative projects (e.g. Wikipedia, Linux) are run by minorities, though there might be a huge community around them. Is it a problem of values? or what? Antonio Lafuente: Yes, it is a matter of values. Another issue is that authority cannot be automatized and requires curation. In an open review system, there’ll be more transparency and less probability to trick. And technology can enable this. On the other hand, there are several evidences where multitudes can produce quality.

Adolfo Estallella: but, will everyone review everything they read? how can we engage readers of open content to review, without explicit incentives, e.g. the papers they read? Antonio Lafuente: Maybe we should acknowledge and accredit comments and reviews, so that there is an incentive making them.

The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (Contemporaneous Culture Center of Barcelona) is organizing the Research and innovation in the cultural sphere conference (I+C+i in its abbreviation in Catalan) during the whole year 2009.

On March 31, 2009, there is a session belonging to the conference entitled I+C+i. Liberty, equality and P2P, chaired by Olivier Schulbaum and I, and imparted by Michel Bauwens.

I have been invited to provide a very brief framework about the subject, so that Bauwens can go straight to the core of the issue and deal with the revolutions that P2P can bring to the creation of culture, political and civic engagement and participation or the producing economy.

So, in 10 minutes I will present the main lines of the following statements:

• Digital tools have reduced marginal costs of transactions nearly to zero, making necessary a redefinition of concepts such as firm, group, distance, original & copy, send, time, etc.
• The most important commodity in the Information Society is information. It acts as input, output and capital at the same time and it is not scarce, but abundant. Value is not embedded in itself (as, say, food) but in being able to convert it into knowledge.
• P2P is free circulation of information, based on two assumptions: information is abundant (valueless) and transactions are costless.
• There is a huge potential in P2P to foster many advancements in society — way beyond file sharing — like government and politics (goverati, citizen mashups), education (casual and distributed education, deschooled society), science (open science, eScience, eResearch, grids) or production (design & fabs, networking), just to name a few.

Follow and participate

• March 31, 2009. CCCB (El Mirador), Montalegre, 5 – 08001 Barcelona.
• Live in streaming in Open Server
• Official hashtag: #leP2P
• Michel Bauwens @ Twitter: @mbauwens
• Platoniq @ Twitter: @platoniq
• Ismael Peña-López @ Twitter: @ictlogist
• I+C+i. Liberty, equality and P2P (part II)

More information

• The Political Economy of Peer Production, by Michel Bauwens
• La economía política de la Producción entre iguales, de Michel Bauwens
• P2P Foundation
• P2P Foundation (en Español)
• Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm, by Yochai Benkler

Thanks go to Oliver Schulbaum for always counting on me.

I’m really proud to have been invited to take part of these sessions side by side with some people whose opinion I most value. I am very likely to be speaking about the Personal Research Portal and see whether this practice can be mainstreamed or not.

Sessions

From eScience to e-Research: challenges and opportunities for social sciences, with Eduard Aibar and Adolfo Estalella

Research in the Internet: new ethical challenges for social research, with Elisenda Ardèvol and Agnès Vayreda.

Visual methodologies: knowledge production and ways to represent it, with Roger Canals and Juan Ignacio Robles.

Open Science: redefining the boundaries of the academy, with Antonio Lafuente, Ismael Peña-López and Juan Julián Merelo.

Social networks analysis: new ways of visualization, José Luís Molina, Tíscar Lara and Mariluz Congosto.

More information

Official page of the seminars, with complete schedule, how to get there and related information.

This book chapter is the last one of a series of writings and speeches around the concept of the Personal Research Portal that began its journey in 2006. As the (so far) last from the series, I think it is the most accurate one, benefiting from the reviewers observations (thank you). I am grateful to the editors for having given me the opportunity to think over some concepts and polish them up. On the other hand, the book is full of very interesting chapters by authors that are actually paving the path of digital skills, online communities, etc.

Abstract and editors’ notes

We here propose the concept of the Personal Research Portal (PRP) – a mesh of social software applications to manage knowledge acquisition and diffusion – as a means to create a digital identity for the researcher – tied to their digital public notebook and personal repository – and a virtual network of colleagues working in the same field. Complementary to formal publishing or taking part in congresses, and based on the concept of the e-portfolio, the PRP is a knowledge management system that enhances reading, storing and creating at both the private and public levels. Relying heavily on Web 2.0 applications – easy to use, freely available – the PRP automatically implies a public exposure and a digital presence that enables conversations and network weaving without time and space boundaries.

[...]

Peña-López proposes the concept of the Personal Research Portal (PRP) – a mesh of social software applications to manage knowledge acquisition and diffusion. This is premised on the belief that there is a place for individual initiatives to try and bridge the biases and unbalances in the weight that researchers and research topics have in the international arena. The chapter highlights the main perceived benefits of a PRP that include building a digital identity, information sharing, the creation of an effective e-portfolio, and the sharing of personal and professional networks. He concludes that the main challenges that need to be addressed include access to technology and developing appropriate skills, problems that are recognised as stemming from the digital divide.

Citation and preprint download

Related information

• The Personal Research Portal, a collection of related writings and speeches
• Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies, official site of the book