ICTlogy

It is beyond question that development and education are tightly bound one to each other. And if Information and Communication Technologies are quickly becoming an important vector for development too, having the three concepts under the same roof — Development, Education and ICTs — really does make a lot of sense.

This is what the Association for Learning Technology (you can call it ALT) is planning to do on September 2008 at the ALT-C 2008: Rethinking the digital divide International Conference.

The event is having eight dimensions:

• global or local;
• institutional or individual;
• pedagogy or technology;
• access or exclusion;
• open or proprietary;
• private or public;
• for the learner or by the learner;
• or other aspects of the digital divide.

On the other hand, I have been honored to be admitted in the Conference Committee. Among other things this means I’ll be in Birmingham next April 15th and 16th, 2008. Whoever interested in meeting there, or in London, around these dates, let me know.

More information

• Dates: 9 to 11 September 2008
• Venue: University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom.
• Call for papers deadline: 29 February 2008
• Conference Website
• Info on paper submission

Next January 30th and 31st takes place the Cooperación al Desarrollo 2.0: I Encuentro Internacional de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación para la Cooperación al Desarrollo [Cooperation for Development 2.0: I International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Cooperation for Development], in Gijón, Spain.

I have been invited to chair one of the four workgroups of the event, actually the one that is more focused on Cooperation for Development 2.0, the one called Networking Cooperation – towards the networked Cooperation.

I have also been asked to write an article, a position paper to start up the debate. It will be coming in the next days, but in the meanwhile, I’m working on the following concepts/keywords:

• Network: Everything will be networked or won’t be. Institutions will be nodes of a grid or isolated, disconnected, starving islands in their way towards disappearance.
• Gift economy: You’re in a network and what you give is what you get
• Open access (open source, open content): If you’re a nonprofit, it absolutely does not make (even less) sense to rediscover the wheel, not to disclose your capital
• Presence: Be on the Web or be not. Networks and networking, accountability, transparency, advocacy will be web based or, at least, begin on the Web.
• Citizen engagement: The rising importance of media (remember the “C” in ICT) shifts the focus from charity, direct cooperation to advocacy, and the power to mobilize the citizens to lobby internationally.
• Online Volunteering: For the most engaged ones, online volunteering makes possible distributed, high quality and highly granular engagement
• Long Tail: Nonprofits, volunteers, minority groups have the potential to find and be found more than ever.
• Networking + Long Tail + Online Volunteering: The evolution of aid big funders (international and national governmental agencies, big foundations) in the last days has shifted from ‘coffee for all’ to ‘big impact on concentrated clusters’. As in firms, I wonder if there is a trend towards big knowledge hubs where multinational nonprofits receive big funding, having the most operational tasks outsourced to smallest onsite nonprofits and online volunteers that gather around a project and dismantle once it is done.
• North-South vs. South-North: No more people traveling around: knowledge workers collaborate online, funders wire funds and target communities from cooperation work on an endogenous development basis.

Comments really welcome.

After some Skype sessions — and the invaluable help of a friend in common (thanks again, Edgar) — I’ve been invited to be a guest lecturer at the Open Seminar 2.0, coordinated by Cristóbal Cobo and John Moravec, organized by the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota, FLACSO-México, FLACSO-Ecuador, and FLACSO-Chile.

The syllabus of the seminar is terrific and one of the one’s you’d like to be taught, so I’m doubly thrilled in taking part in it. The format is also interesting: onsite sessions at both Mexico and the US, virtual asynchronous lectures by means of videos and presentations, and online synchronous sessions using VoIP and other devices and joining all the participants in the same virtual space, thus highly enriching the experience by gathering different perspectives from different countries.

Another asset is that all readings, lectures, materials, etc. will be published open on the site of the seminar.

On my side, I’ll focus on Web 2.0 and presence on the web, adapting some concepts from my article on the personal research portal, but broadening its scope to include the practitioner, the entrepreneur, the politician and shift it towards participation instead of knowledge sharing and management.

More info

• Official Website
• More information by John Moravec
• Cristóbal Cobo selected bibliography
• The personal research portal: web 2.0 driven individual commitment with open access for development

Third of my three seminars imparted at the he Rich-Media Webcasting Technologies for Science Dissemination Workshop, organized by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics Science Dissemination Unit.

Main aspects

Seminar fundamentally based on my article The personal research portal: web 2.0 driven individual commitment with open access for development, also presented at the Web2forDev Conference, and split in two parts:

• Part I: conceptual presentation of the Personal Research Portal
• Part II: practical workshop based on the building and managing of my own research portal, ICTlogy.net

Live recording of the session

• Part I: view, download ( 127.01 Mb)
• Part II: view, download ( 126.97 Mb)
• See, also, the rest of the workshop presentations

Slides

Click here to download, or watch them on Slideshare:

Second of my three seminars imparted at the he Rich-Media Webcasting Technologies for Science Dissemination Workshop, organized by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics Science Dissemination Unit.

Main aspects

Seminar fundamentally based on my notes on the Web2forDev Conference and split in two parts:

• Part I: showcase of different Web 2.0 — and related ICT4D — projects in developing countries
• Part II: open debate with the attendants based on random thoughts extracted from the said notes

Live recording of the session

• Part I (begins at aprox past the 2/3 of total running time): view, download ( 94.86 Mb)
• Part II: view, download ( 119.38 Mb)
• See, also, the rest of the workshop presentations

Slides

Click here to download, or watch them on Slideshare:

First of my three seminars imparted at the he Rich-Media Webcasting Technologies for Science Dissemination Workshop, organized by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics Science Dissemination Unit.

Main aspects

• Introduction to the Web 2.0, stressing the fact that the web is the platform, that putting up content to the web has been made quite easy — caveat: provided you have access to a computer and good bandwidth —, the power of RSS, the challenge of filtering and content quality.
• Conferences are one dimensional: content delivered at one time and one place
• Conferences should shift from information exchange to knowledge exchange
• Before conferences: data and information sharing through websites, blogs, social networks
• During conferences: knowledge sharing through instant messaging, browsing, blogging and nanoblogging, social bookmarking, shared list of resources/bibliographies, multimedia files, presentations, paper repositories, etc.
• During conferences: interaction fostered by wikis, blogging (comments)
• After conferences: strengthening the network using social software, blogrolls, keeping the track of conference “official” tags, feedreading, etc.
• Opennes, a must
• Going digital, or how to create huge (infinite?) economies of scale
• The web is the platform, the way to overcome space (and time) barriers
• Link, link, link, or how to contribute to reputation and filtering

Live recording of the session

Using the EyA System — thanks to Carlo Fonda for making it possible!

• Part I: view, download ( 165.78 Mb)
• Part II: view, download ( 60.03 Mb)
• See, also, the rest of the workshop presentations

Slides

Click here to download, or watch them on Slideshare: