ICTlogy

“We are working to expand the universe of CyberVolunteering by encouraging social service and other organizations to think beyond the traditional face-to-face volunteers who are today and probably always will be the backbone of most volunteer efforts. Face-to-face volunteering will always have a vital place in the delivery of social services. Our effort is not to replace these efforts, but to supplement them.”

A site with examples, experiences and opportunities. A little site, but well focussed.

Some terms I’ve run through and (maybe as note to self) I want to make clear:

Cybervolunteer: same as online volunteer. I’ve found places where cybervolunteers are thought to be ICT Volunteers, but I don’t agree with this sense.

e-Volunteer: same as online volunteer

ICT Volunteer: a person who is working to foster the implementation and use of Information and Communication Technologies. He can install hardware, software or carry on with ICT training programmes. There’s no need to be an online volunteer to be an ICT volunteer: installing hardware is a good example. And there’s no need to be an ICT volunteer to be an online volunteer: teaching a language through a virtual campus is not related with ICT fostering, at least in a direct way.

Online Volunteer: maybe the most standardized term, it deals with volunteers working from home or work or wherever but not in place. An internet connected device is the main communication tool and his main added value is knowledge. He can do things but, over all, he knows how to do things. Thus, he’s a good assistant, consultant, advisor, etc. And, of course, he can transfer his knowledge, so he can effectively work as trainer or teacher (e-trainer or e-teacher, of course).

Virtual Volunteer: same as online volunteer.

If you’ve found other terms related to these ones, please, let me know :)

[Via Octeto]

If you already know SourceForge.net, OpenCourse.org is easy to understand: “OpenCourse.org provides a collaboration engine, a portal for content developers and a hosting service (ASP) to provide customized Websites for individual collaborations […] to support “open course” collaborations of teachers, researchers and students developing learning objects in their discipline – particularly open, non-proprietary materials.”

I think this is great. There’re a good bunch of learning objects repositories but OpenCourse goes one step beyond and sets up a collaborative development environment for “open source” materials.

We’ve got open source LMSs.
We’ve got non-proprietary materials.
And we’ve got e-trainers online volunteers ;)

Making it at a bigger scale is a matter of time…

Here come my impressions on Expoelearning Europe 2004.

First I have to say is that I only attended Thursday F/OSS sessions. I was not there on Wednesday and there will not be any Congress at all today because of the terrorist attacks in Madrid.

With no order, nor preference:

• I was happy to meet there some people I found really interesting: Jordi Vila, Eneko Arriaga and Albert Calvet, all of them from cv&aconsulting. I hope we meet again: they had ideas I shared about free software, LSMs and free software based LMSs. Their expertise in Moodle is something I’d like them to share with me in other circumstances: more time, more face-to-face, etc.
• eLearning Workshops. I had included the site in my links, but I think it’s worth mentioning again. A good place about e-learning in general
• “e-learning: business is in the learning, not in the e” by Jordi Vila. I loved this one: couldn’t agree more
• MIT .LRN. I had not heard about this, had I? As it was released on April 23th, 2003, I guess I had not. But I’ll keep an eye on it from now on, bet on it! Btw: .LRN is MIT’s free software LMS. A good companion for OpenCourseWare
• F/OSS maintenance: “you don’t pay a lawyer for the Laws, but for his expert knowledge” by Carlos Moreno, Hispalinux Education Coordinator. Software as a service, not a product. Another concept I share.
• Claroline: I did not like it. Too simple. Easy to handle, easy to support, but yet too simple. Hope the Dokeos affaire gets clear [via Octeto]
• Moodle: I liked it. And I really loved its plannification and content manager and content/evaluation authoring tools. Simple, direct but powerful.
• By the way, I did not know that people behind Octeto where the Moodle translators to Spanish :)

Although I expected a little bit more from the Congress, I feel it was worth it being there.

“Penguin Day convenes stakeholders in the development and adoption of F/OSS for non-profits to frankly address the range of challenges in scaling capacity, as well as celebrate strengths and successes of open source in the nonprofit sector.”

It looks nice. A pity I’ll be 10.000 km away from Philadelphia that time…

Penguin Day, March 28, 2004

I promised myself I would not publish anything not related to ICT4D and all the things I say in about ICTlogy.

But this is much too much :( :@

As I said, yesterday I assisted Expoelearning Europe 2004 (full report in next post). This means I was in Madrid yesterday. Actually, I write from the hotel. It’s 5:50 at this moment and all televisions, radios, newspapers and websites are monothematic: the terrorist attacks to the trains, the 192 dead and the more than 1.430 wounded. This is much too much.

[Update, march, 18, 2004: 201 dead, 1.161 wounded]

And yes, the congress was held at IFEMA’s pavillion 9, close to pavillion 6, the improvised morgue where all deads, hundreds of relatives, volunteers, doctors, assistants, policemen, politicians, press… a hell of lotta people gathered.

Madrid yesterday was a sort of strange mix of surprise, surprise and more surprise, a little bit of hysteria, zillions of sadness and cries and a growing restrained anger and rage. I suppose something alike to what New York felt 30 months ago.

Amongst the mess of destruction, concrete, steel and flesh, cellular phones rang. Hundreds of them. Weird: technology will survive us. Later on communications collapsed. Too much love through the wires.

I want to make that clear: the only ones to blame are the terrorists, be them ETA, Al-Qaeda or whatever insane being that thought 12 dinamite explosions would be the right way to get whatever goal.

BUT

There’re political responsibilities and shame on the ones that will never recognise them.

Copy-paste: I want to make that clear: the only ones to blame are the terrorists, be them ETA, Al-Qaeda or whatever insane being that though 12 dinamite explosions would be the right way to get whatever goal.

BUT… but…

I do blame the president José María Aznar and his Government for not being able to ease things with terrorists but shift the conflict from the political field to the penal an the military fields. There is no solution but a political solution for the basque conflict.

I do blame the president José María Aznar and his Government for demonizing nationalism and bringing Spain to a critical state of confrontation amongst peripherical nationalisms (basque, catalan) and central nationalism (believe it or not, there is a spanish nationalism as there was a serbian nationalism that fought against bosnian or croatian nationalisms).

I do blame the president José María Aznar and his Government for paying iraki oil, and weapons, and reconstruction prebends with Madrid blood.

This is much too much. I’ve been feeling like crying for the past 20 hours and feeling like spitting in somebody’s face for the past four years, when the Partido Popular (PP), Aznar’s party, got absolute majority and dialog was swept off the country and arrogance and philofascist ways took its place. And I do blame them for this too.

Shame! Shame on José María Aznar, Javier Arenas, Mariano Rajoy, Federico Trillo, Eduardo Zaplana, Ángel Acebes, Francisco Álvarez Cascos. Shame on George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearle, Condolezza Rice, John Ashcroft. Shame on them for making me sick.