ICTlogy

I’ve been trying to do some installing during lunchtime, but I had some trouble with Alex’s style switcher, so I upgraded to v1.0.1, which is what everybody’s saying to do all around.

I’m quite sure the PHP error I get has nothing to do with my previous WP version, but I upgraded anyway.

16:02, quite late for lunch, even in Spain. Time to quickly pick something to eat and go to my arabic classes.

Man, what a day… :PP

Thanks to Laurent’s comment to Thursday’s post I’ve happened to know about Professional Education Organization International (PEOI).

Their mission states “provide on line course content for professional university level education”. Based mainly on e-volunteers, they build up higher education learning materials and translate it in several languages. Almost everything is free and just some of the services, such as tutorship or professional guidance, charge some fees I assume they only cover functioning costs.

I guess we have a lot in common, PEOI and the Campus for Peace, though we focus mainly on NGOs and their projects and PEOI focusses individuals and at another level.

I’m glad also that Laurent made his post as I’ve been receiving some entries from people linking from an intranet in what I now guess is his portal. Hélas I cannot log in to see how ICTlogy is linked there :)

UNV’s Online Volunteering Service has been relaunched and it is now found at www.onlinevolunteering.org.

Quoted from its site “NetAid continues to promote Online Volunteering as part of its mission to fight extreme poverty, and has launched an interactive educational module on volunteering. See the NetAid web site for more information”

I’ll update thus my bookmarks too…

Going back to e-volunteers tasks, I sometimes think that we tend to believe that e-volunteers are some kind of second-best volunteers: if you can’t get a “real” one, get yourself a virtual one: this is completely wrong.

Here at the Campus for Peace we’re planning to set up three virtual courses about Macromedia multimedia design applications: Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks. These courses will be given for free to the NGO working with us.

This will be done the following way:

• An e-volunteer, with a pedagogical profile, will coordinate the whole thing, including course programme, e-teachers, and content
• Three more e-volunteers, experts in the applications to be taught and with some expertise and/or training in e-learning, will teach each one of the courses
• Content and learning materials will be supplied for free by the University
• e-Learning platform and management will also be supplied for free by the University
• It is possible that we add two or three people as tutors or sort of technical backoffice supporting e-students in their way through the virtual campus, not a complex tool but neither that simple

The courses will be, a priori, followed by 60 to 100 people all around Spain and/or Latin America… at zero cost (in fact, near zero cost: personnel costs are paid by the University cooperation for development programme and e-volunteers will “pay” their own costs ;)

Thus: still think e-volunteers are a second best? Imagine how would you do this and where in Earth will you raise the required funding from.

Nice article in the site of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

Only in Spanish, but there goes the abstract in English:

The role of the tutor in e-learning
by Javier Martínez

Abstract:

The role of the motivator/tutor in the world of e-learning is the subject of permanent, heated debate. But what I find perhaps most surprising is that no one considers or questions the role of the teacher in face-to-face education. Far less is the role of the learner ever discussed. There are not even any doubts about what learning means, what intelligence and knowledge are, when in fact we know very little about the subject. It seems to me that the role of the online tutor is the same as that of the face-to-face teacher: to help learners learn and, in particular, to help people learn to think and decide for themselves and, ideally, foster in them the love of learning. As I will argue in the pages that follow, I believe that, particularly, the tutor has two key roles:

1. Providing feedback.
2. Managing and strengthening relationships between people.

I think the reason is obvious. Tutors are going to have to specialise in what they are better than computers at. Aspects such as relating to others, communicating effectively, functioning in today’s complex society and managing stress are crucial and involve a major human component. We can have computers searching for, storing, memorising and providing us with information while as people we can devote our time, effort and minds to thinking, dreaming and imagining. We need to let computers do the dirty work.

[originally published in catalan in Línia Vallès, #59. Mollet del Vallès (Spain): 01/16/2004]

In a corner of Barcelona, at the end of Enric Granados Street, a bench has been upholstered. It is one of these benches that have lately been installed in the squares and circuses of our cities, with metallic legs and wooden sit and back and that, quite often, they are arranged as a three-piece suite: a large bench and two individual ones. The main character of this tale is an individual one.

The upholstery has been performed by a non-amateur: tough cloth, printed with a yellow and orange squares pattern according to the buildings around and the surrounding trees; filled with foam cut the same size of the constituting boards; and stapled professionally and with the most care and technique required.

And I’m still amazed: someone has bothered to upholster a street bench! I explain it to my friend and one of them says “it must have been some of these urban artists, what a sort of crazy people they are”. I guess these craziness is quite productive: instead of break, burn or sign the urban furniture, someone is wasting his precious time in improving it in the name of art: the roles have gone upside down and patrons of the arts in the society are, now, the artists themselves.

Let’s put it clear: facing facts like these, we must absolutely forget calling the Administration and other benefactors for grants and subsidies for art and culture. Artists have all their needs covered and, more, they even have time and money to devote to public works. I wonder why they don’t just fix some routes, build nurseries or avoid the erosion of the coast. In the end, I think all of these are priority actions before the comfort of street benches.

By the way, the Administration should keep on with his policy of encouraging whatever freak that might come with the aim of modifying the physics or chemicals of whatever thing he might find, in the name of nationalism, football or his or her political confusions. We should avoid paying our taxes and, on top of that, paying the unemployment subsidies of these people that, against odds, try to get us off the beastie prose.