ICTlogy

[via info-commons.org]

“Volunteers from all over the world are helping organizations that serve communities in developing countries — but without leaving their own communities. These online volunteers translate documents, write articles, research data, build web sites, mentor young people, design logos, and engage in many other projects to benefit organizations serving people in the developing world.”

And I would add all the issues related to e-Learning

• Pedagogical design
• Pedagogical coordination
• Content authorship
• Tutorship
• Teaching
• Academic management
• Etc.

and everything related to technical backofficing.

All in all, e-volunteering will always, in my opinion, be related to knowledge management and knowledge-related tasks.

So, the contest is over and the Alex goes to… ;)

Thanks everyone for taking part into it and, as Alex says, “the real winners here are the WordPress users who now have 38 new styles from this contest (45 total) they can use with the default WordPress template.”

In fact this is just to bring some colour to this dull blog of mine, part II ;)
(I thought some snapshots would be welcome in this full-of-text page)

These

are some of the e-volunteers working at cooperation for development projects here at the Campus for Peace. We had a dinner with the Rector of the University last January.

There are

• pedagogues
• ICT experts
• ICT teachers
• training for e-trainers teachers
• virtual communities dinamizers
• etc

I’m also there: go find me! :)

Nice article at Wired.com about e-fundrising: “To not have a Web presence in today’s world is ridiculous,” said CEO Russell Robinson. “Our website has helped us reach 57,000 new donors over the past two or three years. We had no idea who these people were until then.”

Nevertheless, I guess we should be able to know whether this is actual rising of number of donors or just web shifting of old ones. I’m sure both statements are true but, in what amout?

On the other hand, I was told by Medecins Sans Frontieres in Spain that most of these donors were, in fact, no donors but members paying on-line. Yes, I know it’s quite the same, but donorship means you hit the right people the right place and each one of them is something you can count individually each time it comes back to you. Instead, membership is something once you got you shouldn’t count it twice. The money you get is the same, but not the return of the investment you made in building up your web strategy in individual impacts.

We’ll wait and see how numbers speak.

[Thanks to my colleagues and friends C

In fact this is just to bring some colour to this dull blog of mine ;)

These:

are some of the teachers taking part in the project of the Campus for Peace and Foundation IWith called AbSoo.

The aim of the project is bringing university education to teachers at rural communities in Guatemala, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, using the e-learning platform of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia), its e-learning materials and higly qualified volunteers previously trained by the University.

We’re very proud of the project as we’re running it at zero cost, as infrastructure is provided by the University or the Foundation and staff are mainly volunteers and regular staff from the University at the cooperation for development programme, the Campus for Peace.

Nice post at Edublog Insights dealing with the ups & downs of weblogs in education.

I guess there’s an important point left to say and it deals with learning by teaching: it’s surely a very good way to learn and know what you learnt (or what you just did not) to test it by trying to explain it to others. It’s no doubt the most interactive and the most proactive way of learning.

And I find this specially relevant in communities where educators are scarce and students have to learn quickly and take the role of the trainer to share his knowledge and help the community develop.

Like Nancy, I neither believe blogging will save the world, but sharing is a good way to start. And a blog, over anything else, is a sharing tool, no doubt of it.