ICTlogy

The 5th and 6th of September 2007 takes place the conference Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0, organized by the Information, Communication and Society Journal. The conference will be hold at the National Science Learning Centre, York, UK.

This event focuses on some significant developments in Internet culture that have emerged in the last few years. Although these developments have received widespread media coverage they have so far received little in the way of sustained investigation by the social sciences in the UK. This event is intended to work toward the development of a social science of what has come to be known as Web 2.0 – a much heralded transition in Web media characterised by social practices of ‘generating’ and ‘browsing’, ‘tagging’ and ‘feeds’, ‘commenting’ and ‘noting’,‘reviewing’ and ‘rating’, ‘blogging’, ‘mashing-up’ and making ‘friends’ .
[…]
The aim of the event will be to develop critical, theoretical and empirically informed accounts of Web 2.0 not just as a business model but as a complex, ambivalent and dynamic phenomena laden with tensions and of increasing social and cultural significance. The event is intended to provide opportunities for those working on a social science of Web 2.0 to discuss their ideas and to begin to work through the processes and possible consequences of its rhetoric of ‘social participation’, ‘communal intelligence’, and ‘collaborative cultures’.

I have been accepted a communication, so I’ll be there along with Francisco Lupiáñez and Enric Senabre, who have also had their communications accepted.

I here copy the abstract to my communication. Please, do feel free to comment or make any kind of suggestion.

The personal research portal: web 2.0 driven individual commitment with research diffusion

There is unchallenged evidence that both researchers’ and research funders’ needs usually collide with scientific publishers’. Even if there might be a common mission or interest in making research diffusion as broad as possible, while the former ones would promote diffusion at any cost, it is precisely cost – and sometimes profit – the main issue on the publisher’s side. The consequences are many, but to name a few: (a) loss of control (intellectual property rights) over his work by the author, (b) slow publishing processes, (c) underrepresentation in mainstream academic publishing systems of marginal academic subjects (i.e. related to or produced in developing countries), and (d) researcher invisibility. Efforts have been made to mitigate this situation, being open access to scholarly literature – open access journals, self-archiving in institutional repositories – an increasingly common and successful approach.

It is our opinion that focus has been put on institutional initiatives, but the concept and tools around the web 2.0 seem to bring clear opportunities so that researchers, acting as individuals, can also contribute, to build a broader personal presence on the Internet and a better diffusion for their work, interests and publications.

By using a mesh of social software applications, we here propose the concept of the Personal Research Portal as a means to create a digital identity for the researcher – tied to his digital public notebook and personal repository – and a virtual network of colleagues working in the same field. Complementary to formal publishing or taking part in congresses, the Personal Research Portal would be a knowledge management system that would enhance reading, storing and creating at both the private and public levels, helping to bridge the academic divide among those who publish and those who don’t.

It looks like ages since I ended my M.Phil.’s research project e-Learning for Development: a model. During last year (2006) I gave a conference about e-Learning and development based on open access and free software, and I also published a shortest Spanish version of the thesis in UPDATE – Dianova International e-magazine, again focusing on the “open” paradigm.

Even if the full digital version has been online for more than one year and a half, I’ve been having the uncomfortable sensation that — at least from my own point of view — my most important contribution in the paper has not had a lot of diffusion, exposure: provided there is really scarce literature on online volunteering, and most of it is from a practitioner’s approach, I thought my work on the taxonomy and typology of online volunteering provided some fresh air to the subject.

Now, it seems that the time for this issue to have an official coverage has come, and it will be, lucky me, in two ways at the same time.

First of all, my paper Online Volunteers: Knowledge Managers in Nonprofits has been accepted to be published in the first issue of the new Journal of Information Technology in Social Change, that is going to be presented at the 2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference by Michael Gilbert (along with the people at The Gilbert Center and NTEN, who have worked together to make it happen).

Second, a session devoted to the Journal will take place on Friday April 6th, 2007, at the conference, where some research gathered in this first issue will be presented to the attendants. As I cannot travel to Washington, DC, Michael Gilbert himself will be doing my speech for me using the material and notes I provided him with.

What is an online volunteer, what are the tasks that one would expect him to do, how are volunteering web portals treating the concept of online volunteering or how could this kind of contribution evolve in the future are questions that I try to answer in my paper and will be also shortly dealt with in the live presentation.

I really would like to sincerely thank Michael Gilbert, Katrin Verclas and Christine Dragonwyck for their help, patience and, over all, determination and drive to make things happen, even against all odds ;)

I’m proud to announce the launching of the new Master in e-Administration (link in Spanish) by the Open University of Catalonia [Barcelona, Spain], in which I am both author and teacher of the first part devoted to the technological ground of electronic Administration.

The structure of the master is as follows:

1. Technological grounds of the e-Administration
2. Juridical grounds of the e-Administration
3. Politic and organizational grounds of the e-Administration
4. e-Administration design, implementation and evaluation
5. ICT applications in the public framework
6. Analysis of the e-Administration

The master (actually, a one year post-degree) is directed by Dr. Agustí Cerrillo, expert in e-Administration and e-Governance, and begins in March 2007. There’s the option to follow two consecutive one-semester post-degrees too.

With the rise in popularity of ePortfolios many have asked; what happens to an ePortfolio after the student has left the institution? What happens to this content – where are learners supposed to store it? Can the student still access it?

This is the starting point of a seminar organized by The Bazaar, a community portal for people who want to use, exchange and share Open Source Software and resources to support learning.

There’s people attending from all over the world and all kinds of academic procedences. Of course, there’s people from Elgg and, besides me, Núria Ferran comes also from UOC.

We have been asked to write a two pages “position paper” just to have something to start the debate with. Here comes mine:

Flow vs. stock of digital information

Our physical (off-line) identity and property is, long since, perfectly defined and delimitated. You live in a concrete place (most of the times), go and take part in events, and your belongings can (most of the times too) be locked or kept into the place you live in. Everything we build or write (print) is stored in our garages or shelves. Hard and pen drives are good options too, and slightly more up-to-date.

But we keep on going on-line, doing more and more things digitally, from communicating to actually creating things: code (first thing that comes in mind) but also writings (ideas, thoughts, expressions of feelings, reflections, papers), photos, videos…

Where does this happen? Where this does should happen?

My opinion is that distinguishing among stock and flow makes the difference.

Stock is everything that lasts — or should last.

Flow is everything that is not intended to stay for long, just an exchange.

Digital Identity

Building one’s digital identity will become — if it is not already — a must for every citizen living in the Information Society. One’s digital identity will be created by adding up the “disclosures” of a digital persona (“I am…” “I do…” “I work…” “I live…”) and his digital works, related to him explicitly or implicitly (i.e. through metadata).

Having full ownership of these works is crucial, thus, for two reasons:

1. control one’s (implicit) digital identity
2. retain one’s works (trivial, but true)

My point of view is students, but also scholars and other people with a high level of digital output, should consider:

• publish / self-archive all their data and files under their own domain
• use FLOSS tools, either for their cost, availability of external support and openness to standards and data sharing with other applications (other applications for self use, same applications of other people)
• use clear and explicit intellectual property licenses. CC, GNU FDL or others the like a choice to be considered.

Web 2.0 proprietary remote applications should only be used as temporary exchange places where conversations can take place, and even collaborative work with productive output. Nevertheless, once the knowledge becomes (more or less) static, it should be migrated to one’s own site (meaning “one’s site” a person’s site or a collective, institutional, site. Sites such Wikipedia or Connexions are, under this definition, institutional sites. Writely or Blogger are not.).

How to

While now maintaining one’s own site – even setting it up – might seem difficult for many, it is far more difficult to build one’s house, and (almost) everyone got one. It’s just a matter of

1. digital literacy
2. the existence of a competitive ICT sector
3. founding

Digital literacy should not be an issue for forthcoming cohorts of students, all of them digital natives.

The existence of a competitive ICT sector is about to be accomplished in the developed countries (where, actually, this debate makes sense) and will be in lesser developed countries in short.

Founding is quite related with the existence of a competitive ICT sector: the more competitive, the less crucial the issue of founding will be. Grants, public subsidies… or public virtual spaces could be steps to be taken into account to foster digital personae.

In some ways, this could be called Web 2.0 and diffusion of research (part IV): the article. History goes as follows:

• I give a seminar on Web 2.0 issues applied to research and self-archiving
• Colleague César Córcoles joins to improve the seminar and impart it again, adding a deeper technological background and broader range of examples.
• A review of the seminar is published

Now, Carlos Casado, colleague of both César and me here at the University has joined the team and the result is the article The 2.0 Teacher: teaching and research from the web, recently published at UOC Papers review. I think (I hope) that the output has once again improved, as Carlos added his own part on blogging in the classroom, besides valuous contributions to the whole. Pity is that 5,500 words is not really plenty of space to deal with all the matters we wanted to, and the balance among a “diffusion paper” and an “academic paper” is quite a difficult thing to accomplish: you’re asked to be both, and each kind of reader thinks it’s not either.

Anyway, here goes the abstract:

The aim of the article is, first, to give a brief presentation of what the web 2.0 is from the teacher and researcher’s point of view, leading to a consideration of some of its proposed uses in the classroom and to conclude by considering how it has begun to affect, and will continue to affect, the world of research, especially in terms of publishing completed work and establishing a new framework for collaboration among researchers.

Consequently, we will be talking about a web 2.0, which, in terms of technology, offers a wide public a set of sophisticated content publication and management tools and, in social terms, makes it possible for a collective intelligence to appear, based on the aggregation of non-systematised or explicitly guided individual contributions. Both points come together in the teaching and research activity of teachers, affording them tools-such as blogs and wikis-and ways of doing things that they can use at different times during their activity to increase their communication and motivation capacity in the classroom, and to optimise the efforts devoted to searching for information, collaborative work and the communication of their results in the laboratory.

The article concludes that the confluence of new tools and attitudes should lead to an academic panorama with greater collaboration between peers and a natural evolution of the current meritocracy system.

• Full article (Spanish) (366 Kb)
• Bibliographic citation

As an output of the XIII Cumbre Judicial Iberoamericana [XIII Latin American Summit on Justice], some researchers produced a report on the state of e-Justice in the 22 countries members of the summit.

After a first draft, now the report has officially been released. The researchers taking part in the report team are Pere Fabra (who coordinated), Albert Batlle, Agustí Cerrillo, Antoni Galiano, Ismael Peña-López (myself ;) and Clèlia Colombo.

If you can read Spanish (you should ;) I strongly recommend its reading, not because I’m one of the authors but because it goes deep into what I think is still an unexplored issue of both the Information Society and the area of Justice administration, the e-Justice index on of its most interesting contributions.

• Report (4.69 Mb)
• Executive Summary (399 Kb)
• Bibliographic Citation
• More bibliography on e-Justice