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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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