WikiMedia Holding

What I’m writing about can be found at the WikiMedia list of Projects page, but I feel like paying it a tribute here, as it is becoming the greatest repository of content on the Internet.

Projects actually held by the Wikimedia Foundation:


Wikipedia
Wikipedia, the free-content encyclopedia.

Wiktionary
Wiktionary, the multilingual dictionary in every language

Wikiquote
Wikiquote, the compendium of quotations.

Wikibooks
Wikibooks, a collection of open-content textbooks.
It includes the Wikiversity, the learning community with online courses.

Wikisource
Wikisource, the repository of source texts in any language which are either in the public domain, or are released under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Wikinews
Wikinews, the free-content news source

Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons, the central repository for free images, music, sound & video clips and, possibly, texts and spoken texts, used in pages of any Wikimedia project

Wikimedia Commons
Wikispecies, the open, free directory of species

Pretty bunch of content, isn’t it?
It might seem absurd to copy and paste this information here, but I guess some of us did not know about all the projects the WikiMedia Foundation is running untill we bumped into someone posting about them ;)

Share:

Online training for development

Why on-line learning in cooperation for development projects and organizations

The best way to understand how can online learning benefit nonprofits is looking at it from the point of view of the educational/training needs and the main reasons why these actions are not carried on: lack of time, lack of financial resources, geographical barriers or commuting difficulties to attend onsite training, impossibility to expatriate the trainer, etc.

Online learning allows, in most cases, overcome these barriers:

  • Making possible training: when other models have proved non-viable, plenty of times virtuallity is the only option
  • Training without boundaries of time or space (asynchrony and ubiquity). This also implies a huge increase in the accessibility of training (economies of scope), which might be of a special importance for rural communities or nonprofits with a big decentralized network of headquarters, offices and expatriates
  • Possibility to adapt and customize the educational action, incorporating south-south collaborations, more interculturallity, sensitivity towards local socioeconomical reality, etc.
  • Turn economies of scale possible, thus making training sustainable in the medium run or for a greater number of people, possibiliting the increase of these trainees with a lesser effort and easing the replicability of the educative action
  • Enhance the feedback and virtuous circles of the process: through training for trainers, the once trainees then become trainers, positively feedbacking the process by bringing local knowledge. Feedback, at the end of the project, becomes a powerful tool for the empowerment of the target community

What for on-line learning in cooperation for development projects and organizations

Training of the cooperation for development agents

NGO’s – and nonprofits in general – consist of people on staff, volunteers, expatriates, punctual collaborators… All of the need some training and specific skills to carry on with their responsibilities.

Courses about cooperation for development, humanitarian law, volunteering management, cooperation projects management, accountancy, ofimatics, foreign languages, etc. can be imparted and followed through the Internet, thus easing the training receivers to follow the courses comfortably and also enabling the organization to include as trainers those who are the real experts in the subject – not the ones just available –, besides the concerns about communing or assisting onsite sessions.

Advocacy

There’re some organizations whose aim or mission is just let people know about or report human rights violations, unequal wealth distribution situations, etc. It is then a key for success to reach the major number of people. The same effort invested in a determinate action can be focused to a virtual action where the potential target will be the whole world – or, at least, the ones with connectivity to the network and understanding the language of the action. Indeed, the learning materials and the exchange of experiences could be reused for future training editions or by people interested in one specific area of interest.

Capacitation for development

Once the technology has reached developing and underdeveloped countries – and this is becoming more and more feasible thanks to huge infrastructure programs to foster ICTs – it is easier to let their less favored communities get reached by knowledge, a transmission of knowledge that, until now, was only possible through expensive travel and mobilization of experts or people to be trained.
Energy resources management, setting up of water systems, microcredit, self entrepreneurship, cooperativism, digital literacy, infectious diseases prophylaxis and treatment, and a long etcetera of possibilities that, sometimes, they require presence, but that in many others can just be solved virtually or be extremely eased by virtualizing a part of the whole training project.

Share:

JustVolunteers.org

Update:
Please read the comments for some shades of meaning about the whole question.

JustVolunteers.org is a new volunteering matching site run by NY Corporation Baou, Inc.

It offers what they call “Virtual Opportunity”.
Would I recommend it? nope
Why? Go there and try if you can find anything of your interest.

Error #1: “virtual” is not a category, but a channel. I mean, my profile is not a choose amongst Politics, Environment or Virtual Opportunity. I might be interested in volunteering for the environment even if I wanted to do it virtually.

Thus, this category is a complete mess.

On the other way, error #2, we should start building a consensus on what we call online volunteering. I once draw four types of online volunteering. People usually stand on the first type (Advocacy) while I’d prefer 3rd or 4th (real online volunteering). So, we’ve got a problem here. No matching site will work until we solve, at least, these two big errors or, at least, we make up something to keep everybody within the same framework and discriminate different definitions.

My opinion, of course ;)

Share:

Drupal as Learning Management System

Harold Jarche links a presentation by Samantha Blackmon, David Blakesley and Charlie Lowe about the Drupal alternative to proprietary courseware.

Hope Harold forgives me for quoting just the same words…

Students & Educators Need:

  • Online platforms that better enable social constructionist principles of collaborative learning.
  • Students need an early opportunity to learn professional communication using real world software systems.
  • Better integration of current and cutting edge Internet communication technologies such as weblogs and RSS.
  • Increased flexibilty through more extensive customization and configuration options.
  • The choice of whether to make the class space private or public.

Institutions Need:

  • Web application platforms that can be used for a wider variety of purposes.
  • Increased opportunity to adapt the online course component to the institutions’ needs.
  • Reduced total cost of ownership would be nice.
  • No vendor lock-in.
  • Reallocation of funds from site licensing fees into learning opportunities for students.

In the case of nonprofits and e-learning for development programmes, cutting edge technologies might not be that important, but surely do all the issues related to costs and vendor lock-in.

More important, indeed, is personalization, but not only under the point of view of the student, but of the institution promoting the training: personalization of proprietary software is usually more expensive… if possible. And besides cost, there’s something dealing with local or endogenous development: with Free Software applications, customization can be made by local software developpers, thus strengthening the local economy, something you wouldn’t by buying proprietary software (except if you lived in Redmond, of course ;)

Share:

HashCash and some setup

Following my update to WP 1.5 I’ve decided to let aside Trencaspammers plugin and install HashCash instead to combat comment and trackback spam.

Share:

IT’s Social is Unsocial

The portal elearningeuropa.info has an article about the project IT’s Social.

As far as I can read, it seems that IT’s Social has done a very good job. But it’s only an impression, as I just cannot test it.

Ok, they say the title stands for “Introduction of the ICT in social sector organisations in Europe” but it’s very difficult, at a first view, what part of the digital divide they are hitting: infrastructure? capacitation? digital content? It looks like it is capacitation, but I sometimes guess it’s content. Or services, depending on how you catalogue e-learning.

On the other side, this following statement is something it really made me laugh/cry:

The improvement of the availability of training units for the disadvantaged was the main objective of the project work. This was to be attained by creating an IT-based information and training platform

What? so you need books and you buy… a building! There was Moodle and there was Claroline and there were many others back in 2002, where’s the need for a new e-learning platform? BTW, I can read that the platform “is free of charge and […] can freely be worked on” but I’m having a hard time finding the documentation and the downloadable files to install it wherever I want. Is it Free Software or is it Something Software the European Union paid for someone?

In fact, this is the point: the EU paying – with our taxes – some unnecessary “new” development – instead of improving an existing one – and some learning objects that only the partners of the project can use, because all of them are locked in in this free to use but kept under keylock learning platform.

I can understand that (virtual) classrooms are not places to have people messing around, but this does not exclude the possibility to give to the public commons the output of some public funded project.

Last, but not least, reading the conclusions I wonder if this project was ever treated in some pedagogycal way or ICTs (LMS, LOs and so) just fell over the people. I’d like to think there was a pedagogycal approach, but once again, I cannot see it anywhere.

So, what do I get from this whole thing? Nothing.
Is that fair, being me (and others) a direct funder through my taxes? Nope.

Who gets harmed all in all?

  • People in need, who can not benefit from the output of the project.
  • Taxpayers, who don’t know what happens with their money.
  • The partners of the project, who, presumably having done a good job, there’s no way to know it and we, evil minded, tend to think they could have done it better.

Share: